Schindler's List

Schindler's List is a historical novel by the Australian writer Thomas Keneally, published in 1982.

The book is a work of fiction built on a true story. Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist and a war profiteer, a man with no particular record of virtue, and when he was confronted with the reality of the extermination camps he gambled both his life and his fortune on saving the Jewish people who worked for him, keeping thirteen hundred of them out of the gas chambers. Keneally wrote the novel using the actual testimony of the people Schindler saved, and he presents his central character as a mixture of hedonism and decency rather than as a straightforward hero, a flawed man who in the presence of unutterable evil goes beyond the limits of his own character. The novel is set in Poland during the German occupation, and its subject matter includes the ghettos and the camps alongside the industrial work Schindler used as cover.

Keneally writes historical fiction and non-fiction, and this book is the one for which he is best known.