Schindler's Ark

Schindler's Ark is a historical novel by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally, published in 1982. It won the Booker Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and in the United States it appeared under the title Schindler's List.

The book is a fictionalised account of a real man, Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party who became an unlikely rescuer. It follows the documented people and events of his story, including the twelve hundred Jewish workers whose lives he is credited with saving, and adds fictional dialogue and invented scenes where the record does not settle the details.

Keneally came to the material through Poldek Pfefferberg, a survivor he met in 1980. Pfefferberg produced the files he had kept on Schindler and persuaded the novelist to write the book, which is why it is told as a novel rather than as a history, and why a survivor's files sit behind its reconstruction of events. After Steven Spielberg's film adaptation in 1993 it became Keneally's best-known work.