ABSTRACT
Critical controversy over Thomas Keneally’s novel Schindler’s List centres on two issues. The first is to do with its genre and attendant debates over accuracy (if it is primarily fact) and adeptness (if it is fiction). The second concerns the book’s choice of Oskar Schindler, Holocaust rescuer, as its subject. On the representativeness of such stories of rescue, the historian Raul Hilberg says: There is nothing to be taken from the Holocaust that imbues anyone with hope or any thought of redemption. But the need for heroes is so strong we’ll manufacture them’—meaning that Schindler was hardly a hero.1 Omer Bartov also sees its atypical nature as the story’s weakness: ‘The fact that this “actually” happened is, of course, wholly beside the point, since in most cases it did not’:2 accuracy must, apparently, include all details of a particular event including its context. In this chapter I will consider whether Schindler’s List can be described as a Holocaust text, and how its concentration on rescue by an individual, on public rather than personal memory, and a ‘happy ending’, can be reconciled with such a description.
