For the Jewish prisoners who came in contact with him, Oskar Schindler was a fulfilment of the Messianic mythology. He gave them hope when despair seemed common sense.

For the thing about a myth is not whether it is true or not, not whether it should be true, but that it is somehow truer than truth itself … Oskar had become a minor god of deliverance, double-faced in the Greek manner as any small god, endowed with all the human vices, manyhanded, subtly powerful, capable of bringing gratuitous but secure salvation.

The power of such a mythology is the focus of Keneally’s history-novel, and the interest lies more in the believers than in their object of belief. Keneally writes as a believer. A belief that in this manic and pious murderousness, goodness will somehow absurdly pre­vail. What fascinates him is ‘the almost religious supposition among many prisoners of Plaszow and the entire population of Emalia that Oskar was a provider of outrageous salvation’. ‘She kept saying, “You’ll see, it will all come out. We’ll end up somewhere warm with Schindler’s soup in us”.’ For a lucky few, Schindler provided a ‘Lebenskarte a card of life’.

In the drizzling dusk, Olek Rosner, only child, newly six years old, walked out of the ghetto under the cape of Richard the chef’s girlfriend. Had some policeman bothered to lift the cape, both Richard and the girl could have been shot for their friendly subterfuge, Olek would vanish too. In the childless corner of their room, the Rosners hoped they had been wise.

But Keneally’s narrative makes it clear that these survivors made their own luck the hard way. This is the story of much courage and occasional cowardice. Schindler could only help these people because they had as their motto ‘an hour of life is still life’. Keneally shows great skill in letting the stories tell themselves.

In a world of systematised and sanctified murder, Keneally moves us without sliding into the easy grossness of sentimentality.

At the rear, dawdling, was a toddler, boy or girl, dressed in a small scarlet cloak and cap. It compelled Schindler’s interest because it made a statement, the way the argumentative shift-worker in Wegierska had. The statement had to do, of course, with a passion for red … His eyes slewed up Krakusa Street to the scarlet child.

They were doing it within half a block of her: they hadn’t waited for her column to turn out of sight into Josefinska. Schindler could not have explained at first how that com­pounded the murders on the pavement. Yet somehow it proved, in a way no one could ignore, their serious intent. While the scarlet child stopped in her column and turned to watch, they shot the woman beneath the windowsill in the neck, and one of them, when the boy slid down the wall whimpering, jammed a boot down on his head as if to hold it still and put the barrel at the back of the neck the recommended SS target and fired.

This incident suggests both the real strengths and weaknesses of this book. The account is both calm and passionate. This is true of much of Keneally’s narrative. He gives a powerful, moving and unsentimental account of mothers who are about to leave Auschwitz for the haven of Schindler’s factory seeing their husbands and sons returned to Auschwitz and the promise of death. In these events, Keneally lives with a confident imagination. But this confidence is spasmodic, and too often Keneally becomes the diffident historian or the overburdened chronicler.

‘We do not know in what condition of soul Oskar Schindler spent March 13th, the ghetto’s last and worst day.’ We do not know and we feel that we ought to know. Keneally’s nerve and imagination as a novelist fail him at crucial points. He is confident about the energy of evil and confident about the faith of the survivors. But he quakes a little at the task of imagining Schindler in his fullness and emptiness. ‘But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.’ He runs the risk only spasmodically. ‘The best thing, therefore, may be to begin with a tentative instance of Herr Schindler’s strange virtue and of the places and associates to which it brought him.’ The tentativeness characterises the novel; at the end we know a lot about Schindler, and very little. Keneally does not take many risks with Schindler, but stands at a hagiographic distance. We know what the man did but we do not understand it.

It can be said for a start that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system, and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not be overwhelmed. But none of this, jotted down, added up, explains the doggedness with which, in the autumn of 1944, he prepared a final haven for the graduates of Emalia’

Nothing explains. Not even the author of the ‘novel’, ‘record’ ‘chronicle’, ‘history’. Keneally is clearly aware of the paradoxes in Schindler’s life. He is almost uncomfortable in confessing that the man was a womaniser and a boozer.

Victoria Klonowska, a Polish secretary, was the beauty of Oskar’s front office, and he immediately began a long affair with her. Ingrid, his German mistress, must have known, as surely as Emilie Schindler knew about Ingrid. For Oskar would never be a surreptitious lover. He had a childlike sexual frankness. It wasn’t that he boasted. It was that he never saw any need to lie, to creep into hotels by the back door, to knock furtively on any girl’s door in the small hours. Since Oskar would not seriously try to tell his women lies, their options were reduced; traditional lovers’ arguments were not possible.

This is mouth open, stepping-backwards admiration. It does not tell us anything that doesn’t come under the category of mythology: Oskar was holy enough to be as self-indulgent as he liked. The first thirty pages of the novel, the prologue, contain almost as much dialogue as the remaining four hundred. Not only does Keneally not invent much in the way of situations, speech, or thoughts, he scarcely invents a persona for Schindler. After the war, this man, who had achieved so much, drifted, trailing his former glory, drinking and dining out on it but seemingly now bereft of energy or purpose. Keneally accepts without venturing on understanding.

Whatever his motives for running with Henlein, it seems that as soon as the divisions entered Moravia he suffered an instant disillusionment with National Socialism, as thorough and as quick as the disillusionment that had set in after marriage. He seems to have expected …

The seemingness of it all is frustrating in a book that invents on the periphery but loses its nerve at the centre. Keneally’s admiration for ‘the just Goy’ is clearly presented and justified, but the man somehow evades the writer.

And Oskar? Did Oskar cut his rations to the same level as those of his prisoners? The answer is indulgent laughter. ‘Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor. Who were we to argue with his meals?’ And then a frown, in case you think this attitude too serflike. ‘You don’t understand. We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be.’

Keneally writes from the point of view of the survivors, and he is unquestioning and indulgent towards Schindler. But he does show what it was like to survive in an unforgettable way. Sometimes the book seems cluttered as if Keneally felt a debt to record everything that he had been told. But the clutter is a powerful one and I kept turning back to the Author’s Note to see of the people involved in a particular mc1dent survived what must have seemed impossible to survive.

‘There was nowhere else to be.’ Keneally certainly convinces us of this and his book helps us understand the subsequent history of Israel. And maybe the book also shows us that evil is easier to understand and believe in than goodness. Keneally is certainly more assured and deft in his portrait of Amon Goeth, the homicidal lunatic who ran the concentration camp in Cracow and for whom Hitler came as a Messiah. Keneally gives us a chillingly imaginative portrait of this man.

And there, on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn’t seem fatter or thinner of slower or faster than anyone else.

It is one small fragment of justice that Goeth did not survive, but Schindler and the Schindlerjuden did. Most of them. This book is a moving tribute to their courage, their willpower, their inventiveness, and their hope.