Schindler's Ark, book review. (Thomas Keneally)

It's when fiction is fact that you get books like this.

During World War II, in the city of Krakow, Poland, not more than a few hours from the Concentration Camp, Auschwitz Birkenau, Oscar Schindler set up a ceramics factory - which also made munitions for the war effort - and enslaved hundreds of Jews in the process, but by enslaving them (he was an undeniable capitalist) he offered them a rare means of hope in a period of history that is now viewed by most, as humanity's (and I don't use that word lightly) darkest.

Beginning with a brief history of both Schindler and Goth - the soon to become tyrant who liquidated the Krakow ghetto and was appointed the commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, the man who randomly executed people (Jewish of course) for no other reason than they weren't running fast enough or had somehow been disrespectful - the reader soon finds themselves enveloped in a world they can't, and hopefully never will have to, understand; a world where people aren't people anymore, where they are not only treated worse than animals, they are believed to be worse than animals.

A world where you have six hundred calories a day to survive on, where the roof over your head is shared with rats, the dead and the dying, where the thin scratchy garments you're given to wear wouldn't keep out the cold in Spring, let alone a Polish winter.

Having witnessed the Aktion taken by the SS (Schutzstaffel - meaning protection squadron) to clear the Krakow ghetto, Oscar and a few associates begin to make plans, realising that unless they offered their workers protection, they too would be shipped off to Auschwitz and never be seen again; and so, a list is created.

Schindler was arrested several times during the war (for bribery) but being the player that he was, and having grateful friends in high places, he remained free, which enabled him to continued his work to the end of hostilities.

Written in the early 1980s and after extensive research and interviews with many who lived through the holocaust, this book will leave you emotionally scarred, no question about that, but just like Laurence Rees's book, Nazis, A Warning From History, says, 'One must heed such warnings and never forget what happened the day humanity collapsed so spectacularly,' and we really must.

Last year (20/08/18) I blogged about Max Hastings's rather superb book about World War II, All Hell Let Loose, and summed that up with the staggering statistic that, fifty-six million people perished as a result of World War II, and what we mustn't forget but sometimes do, is that out of those fifty-six million, many millions were civilians, non-combatants – with six million of them being Jewish and killed for no other reason than their bloodline.

Read this book I beg you, for although it is horrific beyond imagination and will tear at your heart, it is a must-read if you ever want to understand just a snippet of what it must have been like to live in such conditions, and yes, if you've seen the film, both the girl in the red dress and the boy (albeit he was a teenager at the time) who hid in the cesspit, were both real, but only one of them survived.
To put a star rating on a book like this seems a bit crass but in the hope that it might get others to pick up a copy and read it, I will give it five.