Schindler's List Books

This is one of the best books I've ever read on any subject. It was compelling reading--I, too, couldn't put it down.
I love its honesty. Nothing was left out of this book. And yet it is not sensational or graphic. It's an honest, humane, and brave book about a terrifying time.
I'm so grateful to the author for writing it.

This book is great! I have always been interested in this subject and i don't normaly read books! I'm a junior in high school and i enjoyed this book ALOT!!! Great character plot and great ending!! I don't want to return it to the library!! Also i share the same last name!

The book I will Plant You A Lilac Tree by Laura Hillman is an excellent book. I would most likely recommend it to girls though. I would recommend it to girls because the book talks about Hannelore getting sexually assaulted and other things like her falling in love with Bernard (Dick) Hillman. I would also recommend this book because it talks about true fact that happened during the Holocaust. This book has been the best book I've ever read. One reason it is would be because she expresses her feelings about the people she loved and lost, but also how she hated what was happening to the Jewish religion. All in all if you're looking for a good read I think you should read the book I will Plant You A Lilac Tree.

This is the first-person account of Hannelore Wolff, a survivor of Nazi death camps and a Jew on Schindler's List. The story chronicles Hannelore's time when she leaves safety to accompany her mother and brothers to first a Jewish ghetto and then to a concentration camp in an effort to keep the family together. Hannelore then spends the next three years living day to day as she survives the disease, death, and horrors of the Holocaust. Her story is by turns one of luck, faith, and perseverance as she ultimately finds herself on Oskar Schindler's famous list and thus brought to the relative safety of his factory. Along the way Hannelore meets and falls in love with her future husband, Dick. Mrs. Hillman gives us a chilling account of a desperate time and helps us all to remember those who should not be forgotten. A tremendous story that will touch you deeply. Highly recommended.

One day I had nothing to read and I decided to get this book because I heard was great. It kept me on the edge of my seat through the whole book! I finished in less than two days and have read it five more times since.

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I'm stressing this to all, that this book is one of the greatest books I've ever read. It's very intense and real. Because of the way these Holocaust survivors explain their experiences at the concentration camps, it makes you feel as if you could've been there. The way that these survivors have achieved great goals in there lives after the Holocaust, is amazing. I recommend this book for everyone to read to get a better understanding of the Holocaust. This book is truely amazing.

Oskar Schindler, one remarkable man who outwitted Adolf Hitler and the Nazis to save more Jews from the gas chambers than most of the heroic rescuers during WWII.

Oskar Schindler was one of only a handful who surfaced from the chaos, and generations will remember him for what he did ...

When asked, Schindler told that his metamorphosis during the war was sparked by the shocking immensity of the Final Solution. In his own words: "I hated the brutality, the sadism, and the insanity of Nazism. I just couldn't stand by and see people destroyed. I did what I could, what I had to do, what my conscience told me I must do. That's all there is to it. Really, nothing more."

Oskar Schindler died in Frankfurt on the 9th of October, 1974, at an age of 66. From 1939 to the day he died he was such in love with his Jewish people, that he wanted to be buried in Jerusalem. His friend, a Schindler-Jew, Poldek Pfefferberg asked him shortly before he died, why he wanted to be buried here. He answered :"My children are here ....."

One of the most popular films of 1993 was Steven Spielburgýs Schindlerýs List, the story of
one manýs fight against the Nazi killing machine that we know today as the Holocaust. As the
film closed, the audience saw many of the survivors and their families as they gathered at
Oskar Schindlerýs grave to pay homage to this ýRighteous Gentile.ý

Like many others in the audience, I wondered what had happened to those men and women
after the war and the experiences that had not made the movie. Now I know. In Schindlerýs
Legacy, Elinor Brecher has shared the fascinatingýand horribleýstories of over 40 of those
who eventually came to live in America.

They tell, for example, of the almost random nature of their survival. Several tell of times
when the German guards lined up their work detail and shot every fifth person. Many were
away from home on some kind of errand when the Gestapo came and took away the rest of
their family. We read of Celena Karp who was selected by the notorious Josef Menegle for the
line heading to the gas chambers. For some reason, he decided to remove some from the
doomed line. When Celena reached him the second time, she begged him, ýLet me go,ý and
for some inexplicable reason, he did!

In these accounts, we learn again of the horror of the concentration camps. Remember the boy
who survived several searches by hiding in the filth of the latrine? This was no product of the
writerýs imagination; Roman Ferber tells his own story in his own words. Others relate the
beatings they survived, the rides in unheated and unventilated cattle cars, of the friends they
carried to the ovens. That they survived is nothing less than a miracle.

These arenýt just the stories of the camps, however. We learn more about the people and the
lives they lived before the warýthe young couple who married only days before their arrest,
the woman who had to give her new-born son to a Catholic family in order to survive herself,
and the men and women who watched in horror as their parents and their brothers and sister
were dragged away or shot before their eyes.

After these experiences, what kinds of people did they turn out to be? Some have never
forgiven the German people for what happened, while others have miraculously put the past
behind them. And some are so traumatized that they have never been able to watch the film
based on their experiences.

This is a book that needs to be read!

I was really moved by this. It was almost as riveting as another book I read recently called Hitler's Silent Victims. I recomend this book highly.

I was just speechless when I went over just the main theme song from this movie. I also bought the cd and I can say that John Williams truly out did himself with these works.

John Williams is one of the most gifted people that music has allowed us to be affected by. The process he takes to make his music is far from random. It is all carefully planed, and all built masterly to fit the mood of the film he's composing for. While nearly all of his music is masterfully beautiful and touching, Schindler crosses the line. How Williams knows so much about Jewish music is beyond me, but the way he incorporates it into the score is amazingly touching. While I don't want to go too far, it could be said that the theme from Schindler's List covers all the hardships the country of Israel has had to go through until today. For a while just hearing the soundtrack was enough for me. But soon, I came to the conclusion that I had to learn how to play it, how to make it happen under my own power. And that's when I found this book. For anyone who wants to feel emotions that they haven't felt since they were in 4th grade learning about the Shoah, here it is. Sieze it.

hilarious, witty insider views of the best places in ny. i love it.

We have all seen "Schindler's List," and many of us have cried during the film's tear-jerking finale. Few of us, however, know what happened to Schindler after the credits rolled, during the last thirty years of his life. Richard A. Lord -- author of "Culture Shock! Germany" and "Insider's Frankfurt" -- is one of the few who know, and this entertaining story will fill in the gaps while offering some of the author's personal opinions about an elusive personage in German history.

You will learn about Schindler's trip to Argentina, his time spent in Israel, and the years spent in a small apartment in Frankfurt's red light district. Most importantly, you'll be given an answer to the question: Was this German "good"?

Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning, fictionalized biography of Oskar Schindler memorializes a member of the Nazi party who endangered his own life for four years, working privately to save Jews from the death camps. A playboy who loved fine wines and foods, he was also a smooth-talking manipulator (and briber) of Nazi officials, as well as a clever entrepreneur, already on his way to stunning financial success by the early days of World War II. Nowhere in Schindler's background are there any hints that he would one day become the savior of eleven hundred Jewish men and women.

While the excellent film of this novel concentrates on the dangers Schindler and "his Jews" faced daily throughout the war, Keneally, well known for his depictions of characters acting under stress, concentrates on the character of Oskar Schindler himself, beginning with his childhood and teen years. As he explores Schindler's transformation from war profiteer and "passive" Nazi to a man willing to use his fortune to ensure the salvation of his factory workers, Keneally reveals a man of enormous courage and derring-do, a man who thrives by living on the edge.

Presenting episodes from the lives of some of the "Schindlerjuden," Keneally highlights their humanity, creating moments of high drama. Characters such as Leopold Pfefferberg and factory manager Itzhak Stern move in and out of the narrative, illustrating graphically the extent to which their lives depend upon Oskar Schindler, while the constant intrusion of sadistic SS commandant Amon Goeth in Schindler's life shows the fragility of their security. Other stories, of people who just missed being saved by Schindler, highlight the arbitrariness of fate--chance--in their (and our) lives.

Throughout the novel, Keneally stresses the importance of bearing witness and testifying to the atrocities. In one of the novel's most moving passages, Schindler and his lover ride horses to a ridge where they can view the expulsion of the Jews from the Krakow ghetto, watching, horrified, as old or crippled laggards are murdered in front of Jewish children. "They permitted witnesses because they believed the witnesses, all, would perish, too." Later, Schindler works with a Zionist rescue organization, secretly going to Budapest to testify about the hidden death camps.

Schindler's heroism, his goodness within a country committed to the extermination of other humans, his recognition that witnesses are essential, and his ability to use the system in order to hasten its end bring this story of one man's fight against the Holocaust to life. But it is Keneally's incorporation of Schindler's faults and excesses which gives texture and depth to this portrait and make Schindler a character with whom the reader can identify. Keneally's meticulous research and his portrait of Schindler after the war, beloved by Jews but at loose ends personally and professionally, make this novel an unforgettable study of character and time. Mary Whipple

Perhaps unfortunately, many of the essays in this fine collection would have to fall under the category of univocal Spielberg-bashing. The director is berated by a chorus of academics for his documentary-style authoritarianism in his approach to representing the story of Oskar Schindler and the Schindler Jews. What merits the movie does have are, by and large, swept under the carpet in the interest of pointing out its glaring faults and moments of irresponsible over-reaching. This robs the debate of a good measure of balance, but the wealth of different critical perspectives brought to bear on the discussion more than makes up for any lack of diplomacy.

The book's greatest stengths are just this sort of breadth--there are essays here by film experts, historians, literary theorists and other academic luminaries, most notably Geoffrey Hartmann and Omer Bartov. Another virtue of Loshitzky's collection is that the reader comes away with a much better grasp of the larger debate over representing the Holocaust. Essays point repeatedly to Claude Lanzmann's interview-style documentary as an ideal form, but the more careful essays admit that this is not the version most viewers would sit through, as it's too long, too slow, etc.

There are some shocking revelations, too, like things Spielberg has said in interviews that should curdle the blood of even his most vociferous supporters. He compares his trials of being rich and famous and recognizable with the suffering of victims of the Holocaust, and one wonders what on earth he could possibly have been thinking.

Those tidbits aside, though, the most useful, convincing and durable essay here is, in my opinion, the balanced assessment by Bartov, a Holocaust historian, who candidly admits that Spielberg's triumphalism and hero-narrative are terribly misplaced in this corner of history. Unlike the other essayists here, though, Bartov challenges critics to focus more on the positive accomplishments of the film, and especially the fact that it has raised overall awareness of the tragedy in extraordinary fashion. This must not be forgotten in a judgment of the film, he argues, since it is likely (and he writes this, of course, before the breakout success of Benigni's "Life is Beautiful") the only Holocaust film most people--and certainly most Americans--will ever care to see.

While certain of the pieces cater more obviously to an academic crowd well versed in the ongoing debate and most current scholarship on the topic of the Holocaust, the book in general is quite accessible to more mainstream audiences who wish to see Spielberg's version of the Shoah challenged in an often very productive way. I highly recommend this book.

After seeing the film of SCHINDLER'S LIST, I had the feeling that it covered so much, included and recreated so much that it wasn't necessary to read the book.

Last month, I visited Jerusalem and toured the Holocaust Museum (a profoundly disturbing experience I would recommend to everyone). I also found Oskar Schindler's grave just outside the Old City walls and saw the small stones atop the gravemarker. (There's a sidewalk next to it now where the survivors filed past in the grass at the end of the film).

Now I wanted to read the book and I realized how wrong I'd been to ignore it. I finished it last night and can tell everyone: there is so much more to the story!

You will be even more blown away by Herr Direktor's wily recklessness in saving his Jews. As played in the film, Schindler makes the gradual realization of the horrors around him, breaking down at the end when the scale of the inferno hits him. In the book, Schindler knows what's happening to the Jews and he despises the SS Officers from the very beginning. Schindler constantly questions his workers about everything going on. He knew. And he did everything he could to save as many as he could from the very start of the madness.

Actually, SCHINDLER'S LIST should've been a mini-series like BAND OF BROTHERS. There was certainly enough material and you'll find that material in the book. As written, it's also very easy to see in visual terms.

Definitely read this. Like the film, I was brought to tears in the final chapters. An astonishing true story.

This book is both enjoyable and enlightening. It details how a German industrialist Oskar Schindler managed to save the lives of 1,200 Schindlerjudens (Schindler's Jews) during the Holocaust by sheltering them first in his enamelware factory in Zablocie, Cracow and later in his (supposedly) anti-tank shell factory in Brinnlitz, Monrovia.

I watched the movie before I read the book. While the movie succeeds beautifully in portraying the human suffering and the thin ray of hope Oskar managed to instill in his prisoners/workers, the book includes a lot more little details that readers could appreciate. For example, while this is definitely a depressing book, I find the little dark comedies of life and witticisms quite enjoyable. For example, after the war, when there was disbelief surrounding the story of Oskar's improbable rescue of the Jews, he was challenged by some journalists and was confronted with the fact that he personally knew many of the high-ranking SS officials in the Cracow region and beyond. Oskar's coolly replied: "At that stage in history, it was rather difficult to discuss the fate of Jews with the Chief Rabbi or Jerusalem."

I you enjoyed the movie, the book won't disappoint. If you haven't seen the movie or read the book, I suggest you do both.

The book is amazing for its wealth of information and doggedness to tell the story of not only Oskar Schindler but of what life was like for the people interned in the factories and death camps. In the author's note, Keneally tells that he chose to write the story as a novel but used documentary evidence and extensive interviews for most of the exchanges and conversations and all of the events detailed in the book and made reasonable constructs of conversations where only the briefest record exists. As a novel, the storytelling is lacking--it doesn't flow well or have a strong narrative--but as a record of a truth, it is astounding.

I was surprised by how similar the book was to the movie; there was a little extra detail, but not on any major points. I thought it was reasonably easy to read, and it whetted my appetite for a factual biography of Schindler which I will soon start to read.

Because of the movie's fame, I avoided the book - thinking the movie had already provided the majority of the story. Not so.

Mixing fact with some fiction, this book recites most of the major historical events which are now covered by great and encyclodepic non-fictional accounts of the Holocaust, as well as by museums which mushroomed throughout Europe and the United States. This is a great historical perspective of the 20th century's darkest hour. Throughout the fact is a fictional story so closely tied to truth that the reader cannot tell what is not the truth.

Keneally's depiction of the oh-so-human Schindler whose great protection of a few thousand people can only be described as oh-so-saintly. Best described by his estranged but not embittered wife: "Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper thoughts."

Nazi German historians must ask the nagging question of German efficiency having gone array in order to carry out the Holocaust. At one time in the book, Keneally asks why they wasted men, ammunition, materials and more in order to proceed to the execution of laborers with expertise. Why not use their services in servitude - like Schindler - in order to make shells, armaments and more for the cause? Free labor for the soldiers was what Schindler saw, and he made a good deal of money from this situation. But, when the Germans transformed the edict from suppression to extermination, commencing with inhumanity at the labor camp, Schindler left his capitalist instinct for his Judeo-Christian ethic and lived what can only be described as a remarkable tale.

At the war's end, he managed to have hundreds of women removed from Auschwitz for his factory. This feat unfortunately is perhaps his most unique event. "There never had been, and would not be, any other Auschwitz rescue like this one."

Excellent details to Schindler's three imprisonments, careful detail to historical events which affected the issues of Schindler and his people, as well as great story telling, make this an incredibly good book. Because the weaving of truth with fiction is totally unobservable to the eye, this is a great read.

If you expect information about the "technical making" of this movie, you won't get much. If you search for true stories, heartwarming stories sometimes told by real characters behind the scene, you'll get more than you expect. At some points, it was hard for me to go forward without tears. For those who watched the movie, it does add much.

I just finished reading this in less than a week! I loved this book. As a collector of books on this movie it is by far the best one I have found. I especially loved the color photo inset. I will watch the movie again this weekend to see the author playing a German clerk in the railway siding luggage scene where he asks everone to "clearly label your luggage and it will follow you." I never knew who played this part and how many "takes" it took to get the scene correct. I also never knew Spielberg was referred to as "the master" by his cast and crew. This book gives one many interesting little details about the making of the movie. Ones that really enjoys the movie MUST read this book. It's a must!

This book is an incredibly detailed biography of Oskar Schindler. Because it is so detailed, sometimes it is not easy to read. On the other hand, Crowe certainly presents a far more complete picture of Schindler than does Thomas Kenneally's novel.

Crowe's discussion of Schindler's prewar career is especially interesting. The novel Schindler's List seemed (at least to me) to imply that Schindler was a successful businessman before World War II.

But Crowe suggests that Schindler was essentially a drunken ne'er-do-well until about 1935, when Schindler began to get a steady income by spying for the German Abwehr (military intelligence). Schindler helped recruit German agents in order to aid Germany's conquest of Czechoslovakia, and was so heavily involved with Abwehr that the Czech government imprisoned him for spying in 1938 and investigated him for war crimes after World War II. When war broke out, Schindler moved east with the German army, believing that there was easy money to be made.

Paradoxically, Schindler's involvement with Abwehr made his wartime heroics possible- not just by placing him in Eastern Europe, but also because his Abwehr connections helped him avoid being harassed by the Gestapo. In addition, the Abwehr bureaucracy was generally hostile to the SS (which had its own spies and was thus a bureaucratic rival), so perhaps Schindler's Abwehr associations helped to turn him against Nazism.

This book also tries to answer the question: why did Schindler work so hard to protect his Jewish workers? Crowe concludes that by the end of the war, Schindler was probably motivated primarily by moral considerations. But at the beginning of the war, Schindler had economic motives for protecting Jews as well: because Jews were essentially slaves, they were far cheaper to employ than Christian Poles. While Schindler paid Poles up to $10 per hour, he could rent Jews for less than $2 a day from the SS. Schindler's involvement with Jews was a gradual process:as late as 1942, his workforce was overwhelmingly Christian, and he had only a few Jewish employees. But even in the war's early days, one of Schindler's Jewish employees, Abraham Bankier, was indispensable because of his skills in making black market profits for Schindler. But an employer solely interested in money would have abandoned his Jewish employees once the SS began to insist on liquidating them.

Amazing, fascinating, horrifying and sad is the story of Oscar Schindler, Emilie and others, as written in David M Crowe's well researched and easily readable biography. Oscar evolved into a deeply good good man, with great skill, courage and sharp wit, who flaws were also in many ways his strong points it seems to me in achieving what he did, and was an immensely admirable person. And it is sad that brilliant nice people don't usually get what they deserve, as loss of health and tragic failures after the war were the last things he deserved.
There are a lot of horrible events and people described in this book, but also acts of humanity, kindness and braveness by many in the Oscar Schindler story, those three traits in particular summing up Oscar. There are more than a few instances of the Nazi hypocracies and madness, being used against them as they are outwitted in this story. An amazing and moving story.
It's true that there's a lot of detail in this book and it can be hard going to keep up with it all, but i found the subject matter of Schindler enough to more than motivate me to keep turning the pages. One of the best sections of the book was Oscar's meeting in budapest i think it was, with aid organisation representatives for jews in occupied europe. Here you get a chance to discover what Oscar's thoughts were in relation to the war, holocaust and where he was at in action amongst it all. There is a lot of other detail in the book, not so involving, but the holocaust was a huge bureaucratic operation and apart from that, there weren't too many people with the liberty to document or concentrate on individual coming and goings, in the new cut throat order of the glorious third reich. So a lot of the superfluous information not directly relating to Oscars' daily life, is both understandably from a research point of view and also is relevant because this is precisely the world that Oscar was operating in.
I think the author has done a great job on bringing us a biography on a man whos life and good deeds, never really got the reward they deserved(which is why life is as it is!) and because Oscar remained relatively obscure, much of his life details just wern't important enough for anyone to record for prosperities sake. Mr Crowe is more critical of Oscar than i feel he should be, for example, he disaproves when Oscar tell's the afore mentioned agents in Budapest that they must admit, in the intellectual realm the jew is really a dangerous competitor for the nazis. Is that such a bad and unaccurate thing to say, in light of the situation?
I feel Schindler's own intelligence and strength of character is not given enough credit in the book; due to the fact that he was out to exploit the situation for personal monetary gain intially(i.e. he was a opportunistic business man cashing in on the war and occupation), and because he lost his health and failed after the war finished, it is easy to put his success down to war time craziness and the skill of the men running his factories. He was not a moral man in the conventional sense, he liked women, drinking and living in the moment but i think it was his free-spiritedness, that when given the power, compelled him to use it in a humanitarian way rather than worry about his own security, which is the accepted way to do things. Ultimately Oscar Schindler lived from his heart, he understood this, u get this from the book, and why the book is a great effort in bringing us his life story, to me the author's judgement on Oscar is not as good as it should be, due in part i suppose to the clinical unromantic objectivity that is expected of a researcher.

The historical Oskar Schindler is much more complex than the charming rogue portrayed in the "Schindler's List" of film and novel. In this definative new biography, Mr. Crowe has done impressive research in uncovering new archives and interviews to depict the Nazi spy/businessman who became a "righteous gentile" in saving Jews from certain death during World War II. Mr. Crowe is a Holocaust historian who has documented other Nazi atrocities in his 1996 work, "A History of the Gypies in Eastern Europe and Russia."

The reader will be surprised to learn that Oskar Schindler had nothing to do with the creation of the life-giving lists that gave the title to the film by Steven Spielberg and the book by Thomas Keneally. Schnidler was in prison briefly when the lists were created by other persons. This does not diminished the other heroic acts that Schindler and his wife performed to save the Jews they came in contact with during the final two years of the World War II. He spent his war-profiteering fortune on bribes and supplies for those Jews in his care.

It is sad that in the the madness of the Holocaust Oskar Schindler found the only success of his life. After the war, it was all downhill for the alcoholic womanizer who died in poverty in 1974. The book is very well-written and will interest those readers who desire to know what was the reality behind Schindler's List.

What horrible writing. Never (well almost never) have I read a biography with such a facinating subject, with such in-depth research, more boringly presented.

The writing is terrible. The subject, a man of many layers living in arguably the most morally testing time of the 20th century, just lays there on the page, fact after fact, and never comes alive. Getting through this book was some chore, and that's from someone who really WANTED to read this book. I have to agree with the professional reviewer who used the word, "maddening" to describe the writing here. Really, the author's editor should be taken off the job, but the author is certainly no great shakes as a writer and deserves his lumps also. Not recommended, except to those who really want to plow through a pile of chaff to get to the wheat.