Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List

by David M. Crowe, Steve Catalano (Editor)

Spy, businessman, bon vivant, Nazi Party member, Righteous Gentile. This was Oskar Schindler, the controversial man who saved eleven hundred Jews during the Holocaust but struggled afterwards to rebuild his life and gain international recognition for his wartime deeds. David Crowe examines every phase of Schindler's life in this landmark biography, presenting a savior of mythic proportions who was also an opportunist and spy who helped Nazi Germany conquer Poland. Schindler is best known for saving over a thousand Jews by putting them on the famed "Schindler's List" and then transferring them to his factory in today's Czech Republic. In reality, Schindler played only a minor role in the creation of the list through no fault of his own. Plagued by local efforts to stop the movement of Jewish workers from his factory in Kraków to his new one in Brünnlitz, and his arrest by the SS who were investigating corruption charges against the infamous Amon Göth, Schindler had little say or control over his famous "List." The tale of how the "List" was really prepared is one of the most intriguing parts of the Schindler story that Crowe tells here for the first time. Forced into exile after the war, success continually eluded Schindler and he died in very poor health in 1974. He remained a controversial figure, even in death, particularly after Emilie Schindler, his wife of forty-six years, began to criticize her husband after the appearance of Steven Spielberg's film in 1993. In Oskar Schindler, Crowe steps beyondthe mythology that has grown up around the story of Oskar Schindler and looks at the life and work of this man whom one prominent Schindler Jew described as "an extraordinary man in extraordinary times."

Genres: Biography, History, Holocaust, Nonfiction, World War II, War, Autobiography

766 pages, Hardcover

First published October 26, 2004

Reviews

[Pete daPixie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Could be the mother of all biographies! A huge text study and with extensive Notes, in depth Bibliography and Index, this monster extends to over seven hundred and sixty pages. It may not be everyone's cup of tea, but to quote a review on the rear cover, "I have no doubt that Crowe knows more about Schindler than Schindler knew about himself and his own activities." I think that sums up this detailed study of Oskar Schindler's life very succinctly. David M. Crowe is a historian who specialises in the Holocaust and Eastern European studies and from the many Schindler books and films that have become available over the years, this 2004 publication has to be the definitive account.
Crowe's research is impeccable, his observations balanced and his coverage of both Oskar and Emilie Schindler's lives before, during and after WWII are fully comprehensive. For those readers familiar with Thomas Keneally's fictional books that inspired Steven Spielberg's movie, here is the real deal. I find it petty to pick fault with such a monumental piece of work.
I am at this time just days away from a visit to Krakow and Auschwitz and have found the in depth detail of evocative events and locations surrounding Schindler and the 'Schindlerjuden' which I have followed and traced on maps of the city and which I am sure will enhance my visit.

Addendum:-In 2016 I visited Krakow, which I can recommend. Close by is the hauntingly evocative concentration camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In Krakow itself Schindler's factory remains to visit along with parts of the Jewish ghetto area.

[Ozymandias · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oskar Schindler was an impressive man and a fascinating contradiction who is highly worthy of a good biography. This is, unfortunately, not that book since it’s very poorly written, both from the context of readability and historical analysis.

In terms of readability, the main issue is that the book is horribly unfocused and prone to tangents. There is little editorial control of the material. Rather than provide a clear and selective narrative based on the primary sources, Crowe summarizes the sources themselves. And not in brief statements but long digressions. Thus we get, for example, page after page of an interrogation conducted by Czech officials. An important source, yes, but it’s easy to get bewildered by the mass of details, most of which are unimportant and will never be mentioned again. This distracts from the topic at hand. The book consistently fails to distinguish between what’s important and what’s merely background information. And the constant shifting of chronology and digressions makes it very hard to follow even simple accounts.

Names are dropped constantly, with no indication of whether they will be important later. I often found myself looking in the index for one name or another since I had not realized it wasn’t just one of the endless string of random people populating the narrative. This is still better than when the book does actually go out of the way to introduce important people. Then we get a potted multi-page summary of their whole lives, including actions that occur later in the narrative. I don’t know why the book does this, but it disorients an already disoriented reader who’s already trying to keep up with a timeline filled with potted summaries of institutions, countries, and random events.

With regards to historical analysis, the book has a frustrating tendency to criticize Schindler’s List (the movie) as it would a historical source. So we are told, for example, that Schindler’s apartment in the film was inaccurate since he probably didn’t move into it until a few months after he arrived in Kraków. To which my reaction was more wow, they actually filmed it in the real location than oh what a serious anachronism. Most of the other criticisms seem similarly petty. Is it a huge mistake that Spielberg shows the Schindlerjuden getting off the train at Zwittau-Brinnlitz rather than just Brinnlitz (he actually spends a whole page arguing that this was too far to walk)? Or that Schindler probably didn’t watch the liquidation of the ghetto from Lasota Hill (two pages of argument)? Or that the Girl in Red is probably fictitious (seven pages)? I understand that that any biography describing a subject made famous through an important movie needs to confront areas where the film has taken licenses, but I didn’t expect long digressions on the making of the film or descriptions of film scenes.

The analysis of Schindler’s List (the novel) is even more confusing to me. For reasons I can’t explain, this book is treated as a genuine historical document. I get that the book was composed after careful consultation with several Schindlerjuden (some of whom died before he could interview them), but it’s still a work of fiction and, as he repeatedly points out, it gets many facts wrong. The second most cited biography is an unpublished MA dissertation, which also unsurprisingly gets many facts wrong. Meanwhile the more shocking Czech biographies calling Schindler an evil war criminal receive hardly any discussion at all. I thus found the historiography of this book highly incomplete.

I found these problems very frustrating because Schindler’s life, even in this highly flawed work, is utterly fascinating. As the first part of the book makes clear, Schindler was even more of a scoundrel than he appears in the film. He was a drunken lout who mistreated his wife and had no real goal beyond getting fantastically rich, by any means. His ties with the Nazis began even before he was a German citizen (he was born in Sudetenland Czechoslovakia) and the Czech claim that he was a war criminal is essentially correct. He played an important role in the Abwehr efforts to get detailed information on Czech and Polish railroads in preparation for the invasion, and he may even have provided the Polish army uniforms used by the SA to stage the “Polish invasion” used to justify the war. Yet his role in helping the Jews was more extreme as well. By 1943 he had contact with the Jewish Agency for Palestine and helped smuggle information out of Płaszów and money in. That’s an insane risk to take at the height of the Holocaust!

To Crowe’s credit he does lay out these contradictions in Schindler’s personality in a way that makes them sound less bizarre. For example, Schindler’s close connections to the Abwehr are plausibly treated as a partial explanation for his turn. Abwehr leaders also fell out of love with Hitler (they were dissolved in 1944 for anti-Nazi activities) and Schindler’s trajectory can be seen as a more extreme version of their disillusionment. But those looking for a more complicated depiction of his shifting allegiances may find themselves disappointed. While his major actions are documented when they appear you have to wait until the epilogue to get a psychological take of his character. And that’s just to say that he was always essentially a decent, if self-serving, man who grew disillusioned with the Nazis. While the author clearly has his own views as to how Schindler thought and behaved he’s not very good at explaining them.

The book is about a very interesting individual who is not documented anywhere in such detail in English. It is also the result of much research, including now irreplaceable interviews with surviving Schindlerjuden. But unfortunately none of this can alter the fact that the book is disorganized and unfocused. The confusion engendered by this lack of planning and editing makes the book less useful than it should be. Honestly, it could probably be reduced to about half this length without losing anything of value. The central question remains why a man as greedy and self-serving as Oskar Schindler should give up his fortune to help a group of Jews at great risk to his life. And I don’t think the book ever answers that. I would recommend this book solely because of the inherent interest of its subject.

[Themistocles · Rating 3 out of 5]

For anyone interested in the historical Oskar Schindler, this is an exhaustively researched account of the life and death of the man,focused around his WWII-related activities.

While the subject matter is of huge interest it is (at least up to now - first 150 pages) quite tiresome. The author goes into tremendous detail in everything that touches Schindler, directly or indirectly, and there are chapters where Oskar is not even mentioned! It would make a much more interesting, easy and focused reading if he didn't explain the whole Sudetan history and politics, for instance: sure, it is of historical interest, and sure, Oskar came from that background, but so much detail is simply off topic...

The problem is that the author felt compelled to include, in the book, all the research that he did, along with extensive introductions about diverse matters - like state policy against mentally ill people etc. All this halts the narrative and really destroys any sense of continuity.

What's more, for some reason the author has obviously set out to destroy the 'myth of Oskar Schindler". While, of course, the movie was not 100% historically accurate I really see no reason for the author to feel like 'debunking it'. The title of one chapter, "The beginning of the Schindler Myth" really got to my nerves.

All in all, a lost opportunity...

[Nathan Albright · Rating 5 out of 5]

For readers whose only familiarity with the life and times of Oskar Schindler is through their familiarity the Spielberg movie or Keneally's novel that inspired it, this book provides a vastly more complicated look at Schindler's life.  For one, the author makes the judgment that Schindler was not a complex man, by which he appears to mean that Schindler was not a person who was philosophical or reflective but was rather someone who acted on impulse or intuition, something which is definitely in evidence throughout this book.  The author writes not as a novelist but instead as a scholar, and this book is full of a great deal of research into some aspects of Schindler's life and career that are particularly murky, including his Abwehr career, his shared inability with his estranged wife Emilie to handle money well, and the conflict over his (and his wife's) efforts to be named as righteous among the Gentiles.  Overall, this book makes for a powerful read, but one that assumes the author has read a lot of other books about Schindler and the Schindler Jews, and it has a deeply sad story to tell about Schindler's postwar life and reputation.

At more than 600 pages of scholarly writing, this book is by no means a quick or simple read, although it goes in generally chronological fashion.  The author begins with a discussion of Schindler's early life (before 1938), including his identity as a Sudeten German and his initial contacts with Abwehr (1).  After that the author examines Schindler's service as a German spy involved in the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Poland (2).  Schindler's efforts to acquire the Emalia factory led him to be charged with theft and brutality (3) and the author examines his hesitant and limited initial use of Jewish workers in Krakow (4).  The author discusses the origins of the Schindler myth (5) during the period of the closing of the Krakow ghetto as well as the relationship between Oskar, the sadistic Amon Goth, and the Jews of the area (6).  The author then moves on to discuss the establishment of Schindler's sub-camp and his ties to the Jewish Agency (7) along with the investigations of Goth and Schindler by the SS and the closing of the concentration camp and the fate of the Jews of Emalia (8).  The author spends a whole chapter looking at the myth and reality of the creation of Schindler's list by Marcel Goldberg (9) as well as the struggle for survival in Brünnlitz (10).  The rest of the book looks at the postwar period, including Schindler's immediate postwar experience as a Sudeten German refugee (11), his time in Argentina, return to Germany, and the controversy over his status as a righteous gentile (12), the evening of his life and his struggle with fame and the initial efforts to make a movie about his life (13), and finally a look at his death and the long evening of Emilie's life and her own struggle with the Schindler legacy (14) and some afterthoughts.

Ultimately, the author comes to the sensible and reasonable conclusion that Oskar Schindler was a man who combined some human flaws, including an inability to handle financial details, alcoholism, and womanizing, along with a fundamental sense of human decency that allowed him to overcome the limitations of being a German in World War II Poland and save the lives of a great many Jews who would otherwise have perished in the death camps.  The author engages in some complex moral calculus that demonstrates how he was able to have some enemies among the Jewish population (namely those who had financial axes to grind against him) but was viewed as a savior type figure by those whose lives he saved over and over again during the darkest days of the war.  The author provides some examinations of areas that have not been well-explored by many other writers and also points out that Schindler's humanity cut both ways, and presents him as a somewhat tragic but also worthwhile figure.  And anyone reading this book who takes the time to read it all the way through will be similarly both saddened as well as inspired by the straightforward humanity shown by Schindler and his own need to be liked and appreciated by others, something his deeds well deserved.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

This isn't the best biography I've ever read. The author repeats himself too much and breaks up the flow of text constantly with endless German terms and translations that could just have easily have been left out. He also inserts himself into the narrative too much - 'I did this', 'I met such and such', 'I think that Oskar...'. But the subject matter speaks for itself. The research that went into this book is exhaustive, and it really does illuminate so much of Schindler's life than just the years during the war. Schindler was a drunk, a womanizer, a pretty wretched husband, an opportunist, terrible with money - but he was also a hero, a saviour, and a remarkable man. This book tries to explain the moral transformation that saw Schindler emerge from the wreckage of WW2 and the Holocaust as such a legendary figure. Whether it succeeds or not is debatable, but it's worth the read anyway.

[Anita Heveron · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book has everything you didn't want or need to know about Schindler. It will destroy any good feelings you had about the man. Honestly, save yourself the time and heartache and skip to the last 5 pages. The author sums up his book perfectly there. It is truly a wonderfully researched EXHAUSTIVE bio on an amazing man in history. But, omg.....I put this book down so many times because it was just so hard to read.

[Rosalind · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting biography and a must in order to know what really is going on in the movie. However, it is written in textbook form and probably is used in the classroom. Large amount of details and not written as a story. The information is interesting and so is the Man, Oskar Schindler, but is a slow read.

[John Easton · Rating 4 out of 5]

The truth is more complex than films and fables and this book was a revealing look into the evolution of a flawed man who risked his life doing what most of us feel is right but few would have the courage to carry out.

[Amy Kline · Rating 2 out of 5]

most boring book ever... I was all excited to read it and it went into so much detail to insignificant events, I had to keep backtracking...

[Laura Valenziano · Rating 5 out of 5]

An in depth look at the life of Oskar Schindler and the Jewish people he saved during WWII. It's a long book, deeply researched, and well worth reading if you were as enthralled by the movie "Schindler's List" as I was. The man was flawed, as we all are, but also deeply committed to helping Jews survive the Holocaust. I found it interesting and refreshing to read a full biography of a man heralded as a "saint" by many and a "degenerate" by some. If you like long history books this is one to read!

[Jim Swike · Rating 5 out of 5]

As the author states Oskar Schindler had flaws but still saved 1,200 + Jews from certain death in the Holocaust. A great read. If you have read and / or seen Schindler's List, this is a great complement to separate fact from myth. Enjoy!

[Steph · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very interesting but tough read. I learned a lot about Schindler that I didn't know including who the real person was behind the Schindler's List.

[Stan Polonski · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good that it is detailed, but too much side bars that go off subject. Could have been half as long and not missed a thing.

[Svenja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sehr interessant und genau recherchiert, teilweise aber viel zu weitfassend.

[Barb Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

My overall find was that I felt that Osksar Swindler was a scoundrel. He used the Jews as a refuse to get out of being in the war, and he was a drunkard and a womanizer.
Towards the end of the war he began to get a sense of what was right and what was wrong. He totally turned around his views of the Jews and had empathy towards them.
However, the Jews were there to rescue him because his failed business attempts, but he was just plain lazy.

[Govaert · Rating 3 out of 5]

David Crowe schetst op basis van gedegen onderzoek een bijzonder gedetailleerd portret van Oskar Schindler. De beschrijving start reeds ruimschoots voor WOII met Schindlers' rol binnen de Duitse Abwehr en zijn spionageactiviteiten. Gedreven door opportunisme en een onstuitbare drang naar geldgewin, zien we hoe Schindler Emalia "confisceert" en fortuin begint te maken. De redding van Joden staat op dat ogenblik verre van centraal. Maar geleidelijk aan keert hij zich af de gruwel van de entlösung en stijgen zijn inspanningen voor het redden van zijn Joden. Zijn inspanningen bereiken hun climax met de verhuis van zijn fabrieken en de arbeiders van Krakau naar Brünnlitz. In het licht van de oorlogseconomie totaal zinloos maar wel de redding voor de zowat 1100 Joodse mannen en vrouwen die er een veilige haven vonden.
Na de oorlog sukkelt Oskar Schindler van de ene mislukking naar de andere, zowel financieel als menselijk. Zware gezondheidsproblemen tengevolge zijn overmatig drankgebruik tekenen zijn levenseinde.
De auteur gaat uitgebreid in op de controverse die de figuur Schindler na de oorlog en ook na zijn dood bleef uitlokken. Enerzijds op handen gedragen door het grote contingent Schindlerjoden, anderzijds steeds bekritiseerd omwille van zijn dubieuze rol voor en tijdens de oorlog als Sudeten-Duitser en nazi-sympathisant.
Emilie Schindler krijgt in het boek de aandacht die ze verdient. Haar rol als echtgenote blijft in andere boeken of Spielbergs' film al te zeer onderbelicht.
De auteur doorprikt heel wat mythes rond de figuur Schindler en schets een bij wijlen gênant beeld van de schaamteloze afhankelijkheid die Oskar kenmerkte na de oorlog.
Interessante lectuur maar niet meteen de vlotste biografie. Daarvoor valt de auteur iets te vaak in herhaling en is het naoorlogse deel nodeloos lang uitgesponnen.

[Klaus Metzger · Rating 5 out of 5]

Der amerikanische Autor David M. Crowe nähert sich dem Phänomen Oskar Schindler mit der Genauigkeit des versierten Historikers und fördert Ereignisse zu Tage, die dem Image des weltbekannten Judenretters nicht immer förderlich sind. Als Hobby-Historiker befasse ich mich seit über 10 Jahren mit den Leben und Wirken Oskar Schindlers in meiner Heimatstadt Hildesheim. Deshalb ist das Kapitel 14 eine wichtige Quelle.
Wer sich bis ins Detail mit Oskar Schindler beschäftigen will, dem wird dieses detaillierte Buch empfohlen.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pełna biografia Oskara Schindlera - Niemca, który uratował około 1100 Żydów pracujących w jego fabryce naczyń emaliowanych w Krakowie.