Book Club Guide

Schindler's Ark

by Thomas Keneally · 1982 · Biography & Memoir

Key themes

The unlikely hero — neither saint nor hero in conventional terms
The moral mathematics of saving 1,200 lives at the cost of complicity
What Nazi Germany required of those who operated within it to do any good

About this book

The documented story of Oskar Schindler — a German industrialist, bon vivant and opportunist who used his Kraków factory to save over 1,200 Polish Jews from extermination, spending his entire wartime fortune bribing SS officers. Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel-as-biography draws on interviews with Schindler's Jews and presents an unlikely hero who was also flawed, unfaithful and self-serving.

Published in 1982, Schindler's Ark won the Booker Prize and was the basis for Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). Keneally researched it after meeting a Schindler survivor in a Los Angeles luggage shop.

Discussion questions

Keneally uses novelistic techniques to tell a documented true story. How does this formal choice work — and what does fiction give him that strict biography could not?
Schindler was a Nazi Party member, a womaniser and a black marketeer. How does Keneally develop his character — as a hero, as an opportunist, or as something genuinely harder to categorise?
The moral question the book raises is whether partial complicity with a murderous regime is ever justified by the lives saved. How does Keneally handle this — does he resolve it?
The Schindlerjuden — Schindler's Jews — have very different views of Schindler. How does Keneally use these multiple perspectives?
Keneally won the Booker Prize but the book occupies an unusual genre: it is not quite fiction, not quite biography. Does this matter — and does it affect how you read the moral questions it raises?