It’s Oscars season so we’re off to the movies. Welcome to the first in a new mini-series where we explore Booker Prize novels whose silver-screen adaptations went on to experience Academy Awards glory. We’re starting with Schindler’s Ark, the Booker Prize 1982 winner, which also happens to be the first Booker-winning novel to become a film, Schindler’s List, that won a Best Picture Oscar. Listen in as we dive into the book and its film counterpart, and try to work out which is best.

• Share a brief biography of Thomas Keneally
• Revisit the origin story of Schindler’s Ark
• Consider whether ‘non-fiction novels’ are really novels
• Summarise the plot of the book, and discuss their thoughts on it
• Explore the character of Oskar Schindler
• Delve into Steven Spielberg’s adaptation, Schindler’s List, and the differences between book and film

Erasure by Percival Everett

The Daughters of Mars by Thomas Keneally

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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Oskar:
I could have got more out. I could have got more and more if I just… I could have got more-
Speaker 2:
Oskar, there are 1,100 people who are alive because of you. Look at them.
James Walton:
Hello and welcome to The Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton.
Jo Hamya:
Me, Jo Hamya. And today we launch a new miniseries called the Booker at the Oscars cunningly time to run between the recently announced Oscar nominations for this year and the Oscar ceremony. We’ll be looking at three Booker novels and the films made out of them that went on to Oscar Glory, or in one case, The Remains of the Day. Very nearly did, given that it was nominated for eight awards in 1994, but didn’t actually win any mainly because of the Booker novel that dominated the Academy Awards that year and is our subject this week.
James Walton:
And people who like Booker quizzes and let’s face it, who doesn’t, will also know that this was the first ever Booker winning novel to become a movie that won the best picture Oscar, and it won several more besides because it’s altogether quizzes. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List as adapted from Thomas Keneally Schindler’s Ark, and for a bonus point for those quizzes, this was Spielberg’s second adaptation of a book, a novel after Empire of the Sun that was the hot favourite in 1984.
Lost out to Hotel Du Lac by Anita Brookner. But just before we get onto that, I can’t resist proudly noting in passing that there’s a book, a link to the Oscars this year too. Although maybe a slightly more tenuous one. American fiction nominated in five categories, including best picture is based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, a favourite book of Jo’s as regular listeners will know, and Everett was shortlisted in 2022 for The Trees. That counts as a Booker connection, doesn’t it, Jo?
Jo Hamya:
Yes, it does. I’m more concerned with the fact that it just prompts everyone to read Erasure. Everyone should read Erasure. Anyway, let’s get onto where Spielberg’s triumph all began. Schindler’s Ark, the novel with Schindler’s List, the film to follow in part two of today’s podcast. So James, what can you tell me about Schindler’s Ark author Thomas Keneally?
James Walton:
I can tell you that he was born in 1935 to two Irish Australians, grew up in Kempsey, a small town in New South Wales, and then Homebush, a suburb of Sydney. And then other importantly in his life, age 17, he went off to a seminary to become a Catholic priest, which he almost did, staying in the seminary for six years and leaving only just before he was due to be ordained.
Apparently, he had a loss of faith, fairly solid reason for leaving, I suppose, caused by the sheer unkindness of the church leaders that he was surrounded with. This resulted in something of a breakdown, and he entered the 1960s feeling pretty lost. He moved back in with his parents, did some teaching, some a part-time law course, but then, Jo, came two big breaks.
First, he had a novel accepted for publication, A Place of Whitton, based on his seminary experiences. Second, his mum gave it to her night nurse to read, and the nurse loved it, asked to meet the author and married him a year later. And Keneally and Judy herself, a former nun, have been married ever since. Meanwhile, the books have kept coming at [inaudible 00:03:10] speed now written more than 40 novels, more than 20 works of nonfiction mainly on Australian history, five plays and three screening plays.
As for his book of four, which obviously we’re obsessed by on this podcast, he was shortlisted three times for The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Gossip from the Forest, and Confederates before winning with Schindler’s Ark in 1982, published in America as Schindler’s List. Hence, the name of the film. Incidentally, the ever-modest Keneally thinks that An Ice-Cream War by William Boyd should have won that year as in fact did the chair of judges, Professor John Carey.
Anyway, on a happier note, one of the Keneally’s later books that I particularly commend to our listeners is a book called The Daughters of Mars from 2012, unbelievably powerful novel about two Australian nurses in the First World War, which also tackles the great Australian founding myth of Gallipoli. And so all in all, it’s no wonder that Keneally was made a national living treasure in Australia. Well, that’s an official thing. Appointments made by the Australian National Trust, other national living treasures. Some of them are dead now. But anyway, they were national living treasures when they weren’t include Russell Crowe, Cathy Freeman, Nicole Kidman, and of course Kylie Minogue. And we both interviewed Thomas Keneally, haven’t we in our time?
Jo Hamya:
Yeah.
James Walton:
The world’s most genial man. Do you think?
Jo Hamya:
Yeah. Wait, was your interview in person?
James Walton:
Yeah.
Jo Hamya:
See, you’ve got one up on me because all of my communication with him was either over Zoom or email.
James Walton:
Yes, in post COVID days. No, I met him, he’s the only author I’ve ever interviewed. He showed me the pictures of his grandchildren and he was also talking about how basically he wanted to be a writer to impress the poems he kept saying, so he said at one point, “If I could have scored 150 before Tea Lords, that would’ve been better, but you do what you can.” Was he just as junior over Zoom?
Jo Hamya:
He was so lovely. We emailed for just under a year and had a handful of Zoom calls ‘cause I interviewed him for the Booker Prize. You can find the interview on our YouTube channel and on the Booker Prize website. I’m sure I’m meant to say that somewhere in here.
James Walton:
Well, don’t joke.
Jo Hamya:
But yeah, no, he’s so generous with his conversation, but you can pretty much talk to him about anything, and he’ll go on at length, but not in a boring way at all. But I think one of the best kind of conversations I remember with him, and something that he talks about a lot I’m not special by any means, is just his feelings about the Australian Aboriginal community.
And I think he describes himself as a kind of Euro Australian or empire adjacent Australian, and he’s very, very firm in his anti-empire, anti-colonialist stance. And it’s just really fascinating to hear him. It’s never that he talks to you with a particularly moral stance, it’s just he’s so clear in himself where he stands, and he opens himself out to you for you to respond to that. I found that really beautiful in him and quite pertinent for the book that we’re discussing today.
James Walton:
Yeah. No, I think it was a leader of the still is probably of the Republican movement in basically getting rid of her, his majesty. Can you believe in Australia? And there’s a traditional fault line isn’t there in Australian society between Irish, descendants of the Irish who essentially descendants of convicts and descendants of English, essentially descendants of warders.
And he’s very much on the Irish side of that. And of course, one of the stories that he is invited to tell in every interview, and I think we both probably did do it as well, is the origin story of his most famous book Schindler’s Ark. So let’s hear him telling it to you, I believe, Jo. Just to set it up, he’s flying back to Australia and changes planes in LA. His briefcase breaks and he happens to go into a shop to get it replaced. Here we go.
Thomas Keneally:
I went to buy a briefcase as I looked in a bag shop called the Handbag Studio. A burly man of middle age emerged, and he said, “So it’s 105 degrees out here and you won’t come in to my air-conditioned store. Are you scared of me?” This man turned out to be a survivor amongst the Schindlerjuden. I entered and the owner of the store, Leopold Pfefferberg, said, “What are you doing in Beverly Hills?” I told him I was staying around the corner that I’d been to a film festival doing a bit of book promotion. He began to tell me then soon after that he was a Holocaust survivor. He first asked me; did I know certain people in Sydney? So I didn’t know his Jewish friends. And he said they and I were rescued by a Nazi, but although he was a Nazi, he saved us. So to me, he’s Jesus Christ. But a saint he wasn’t. And then the story began.
Jo Hamya:
At that point in the interview, I can remember Tom telling me that Pol, that could taken him to a finding cabinet that was essentially full of World War II, I don’t know if memorabilia is the right word ‘cause it was full of SS cables and [inaudible 00:08:41]-
James Walton:
All relating to Schindler [inaudible 00:08:42].
Jo Hamya:
Yeah, all relating to Schindler. And then most famously, the List itself, Oskar Schindler’s List of Jews to be saved.
James Walton:
The story has been a little bit embellished over the years because one thing he told me when he told me that story, which I did like, is that Pfefferberg making conversation and said to him, “What do you do?” And he says, “I’m a novelist.” And he says, “Oh, I’ve got a story for you.” At which point Thomas Keneally’s heart completely sinks ‘cause that’s what people always say. And then Pfefferberg tells him all about Schindler and he realises he’s got the plot for his, by far, his greatest book.
Yeah. Opinion seems to be divided as where the actually Schindler’s List was in that safe, though, he did tell me it was. What’s quite interesting is it’s on Wikipedia and it’s got footnote and I thought, “Oh, that’s interesting. So maybe it was there after all.” Look at the footnote and it says an interview with James Bolton. Certainly, that’s the basics. He gets all the documentation, all the evidence, and the perfect plot that he needs this guy who was not Saint Lee, but who did save all these people.
Jo Hamya:
Well, I think this intermingling of fact and potential embellishment is perfect for the book we’re about to discuss. It was of course a massive point of contention whether Schindler’s Ark the novel was actually a novel at all, whether it qualified for the Booker Prize, although I think that there’s really no question about it, but still this idea of embellishing upon fact central to the book.
James Walton:
Just in case there’s anybody there maybe just knows the film and that they’re massively different in some ways. And just give us a quick summary of the book.
Jo Hamya:
Well, the book partially revolves around this character of Oskar Schindler, who is many ways to describe him, actually an entrepreneur, a womaniser, a bon vivant, but crucially a member of the German Nazi Party by 1939 who instals himself in Kraków and sees the rise of the Nazi regime as an opportunity to make money. In Kraków he decides to take over bankrupt enamelware factory, and to exploit essentially newly enforced slave labour whilst all the Jews are ghettoised within their own community.
I suppose the emotional heart of the story is this gradual… Well, this is the point of contention with me and you James, but to me, this gradual overcoming of Schindler’s entrepreneurial and capitalist instincts into making his factory into a haven for what became known as the Schindler Jews. Because by about the middle or three quarters of the book, the options for these Jews are essentially either go to a concentration camp and very likely die or go to Schindler’s enamelware factory where you will be fed, you won’t be beaten, you will still essentially be a slave, but your life is secure.
The other thing about the book, I suppose, is that it does function at the same time as a history book or a documentary in the sense there are lots of cutaways to individual characters or polish families within the novel who suffered under Hitler’s regime. I should probably say from the top that these characters are so numerous, and their stories are so nuanced and multifaceted that we probably likely will not have time to go into them in very great detail. We may pull out one or two, but the book is essentially a almost documentary style account of the Second World War in Poland and of the Holocaust in Kraków centrally told partially through the eyes of Oskar Schindler.
James Walton:
Yeah, no, it says on page one of this book, “I’ve attempted to avoid all fiction since fiction would debase the record.” It was around in 1982, and that was a book of controversy, like most book of controversy, even more than most actually this one manufactured, I thought, but the question was, “Was this actually a nonfiction book? And if so, should it have won the best novel of the year?” You’re right. It feels like a novel, doesn’t it? It’s got the text [inaudible 00:13:08].
Jo Hamya:
It does. I think there are certain things that really give it away as a novel, although in the afterward in my edition, Keneally does write that he decided from the top that the tone of the novel would be adjacent to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. So I suppose-
James Walton:
That’s interesting, which was described as a nonfiction novel, isn’t it?
Jo Hamya:
Yes. So I suppose your feelings about In Cold Blood would dictate your feelings about whether or not Schindler’s Ark is a novel?
James Walton:
And also, who cares basically, I think we should factor in. But let’s get into this bone of contention between a stands. Let’s not mess about. I would maintain that in the film Schindler’s List, which we’ll be doing in part two, there is your actual Hollywood narrative arc. Schindler goes on a journey, his eyes are slowly open to what’s happening to the Jews, and he turns from a villainous entrepreneur into saviour, really?
Jo Hamya:
Yes.
James Walton:
I think in the book that’s less true; I suppose. So we first meet him, actually, unlike the film, it starts halfway through before we flash back. So it started in August 1943 when he’s hobnobbing with various Nazi, but we already know he is not like them for a start. He’s nice to the Jewish servant goes being badly mistreated by the commandant. Amon Goeth is a double-dyed villain.
We then flash back to his early childhood in Czechoslovakia in German-speaking part of Czechoslovakia where he’s friends with Jewish children. He then meets Itzhak Stern is going to help him buy the factory and run the factory. He’s an accountant who is involved in the old factory, I think, and straight away Stern senses, what he calls a just “goy” obviously Jewish word for Gentile. And he’s right. We censor just goy too.
Again, and again Keneally keeps saying that he’s an incredibly ambiguous figure and morally ambiguous. Let me just give you a couple of examples. So one of the flaws he gives him is that he’s womanising, but then he says, “But there’s this to be said for him that to all his women, he was a well-mannered and generous lover.” And then he talks about his drinking like few others he was capable of staying Keneally when drinking. He never got hangovers, he chain-smokes, but it was a composed chain-smoking. There was never a tension in his hand. He was stylish right from the start. And both Keneally and us think on the whole, “What a guy.” Or if you want it to be hilarious, “What a goy.” And I think in the film that ark you’re talking about is much clearer than in the book where he’s basically a decent and not all that ambiguous figure all the way through.
Jo Hamya:
Actually, I think that’s not the right equivocation in a way. I think definitely in the film, and we’ll come onto that in part two, that there is way more of an ark of-
James Walton:
A journey.
Jo Hamya:
… a journey that essentially begins after Schindler witnesses’ massacre on the streets of Kraków that leads to the installation of the Płaszów camp. And from that point in the film, you see these hesitant steps forward to him thinking, “Should I save this person? Should I not? We’ll come onto that.” In the book I think by page 150, we are quite clear that it’s Oskar’s explicit intent to save as many people as he can. And whereas that is not clear in the film, but I think the thing that makes him so ambiguous in the novel is the means by which he’s able to save these people. There is a line when Amon Goeth is introduced.
James Walton:
He’s the commandant. Yeah.
Jo Hamya:
Yes, he is the person who runs the Płaszów camp. There is a line from Keneally that Amon is essentially Oskar’s dark brother, that they have a similar upbringing and similar appetites. They’ve got appetites for money, appetites for women, appetites for a certain kind of power over people. The difference is how they choose to exercise those appetites. But I think the ambiguity in Schindler’s character is in the fact that he is still reaching into these darker parts of himself in order to con a system. And the word “con”… I don’t think he’s ever explicitly referred to as a conman, but the idea of him conning people is constantly referred to, of course we think of this in a very good way because he’s conning Nazis out of killing Jews, but there’s a coldness to him and a emotional remove that he needs to access in order to achieve that.
And I think for me, it’s so clear in several passages that he’s doing this for good reasons, this justification because he wants to save people. But the justification is just so cruel. It’s the fact that he speaks Goeth’s language, or in this case a SS officer called Toffel. He’s trying to prevent Nazi intervention in his enamelware factory. And this exchange goes as a result of such conversations, Oskar became an advocate of the principle that a factory owner should have unimpeded access to his own workers, that these workers should have access to the plant, that they should not be detained or terrorised on their way to and from the factory.
It was in Oskar’s eyes, a moral axiom as much as an industrial one. In the end, he would apply it to its limit at Deutsche enamel fabric. So this idea that he has to have this kind of moral sense of him himself working at the same time as the capitalist, industrialist sense to me makes him… He’s very obviously a person working on the side of the good, but a person who is exercising certain base instincts in order to work on the side of the good, and actually the part of the book that I loved the most, it’s such a small, small detail that enables him to do this is for a lot of the book, he has an affair with his secretary, Victoria Klonowska. And there’s a point where he buys his three lovers, his wife and two other women. He buys Klonowska a dog, which is a far more extravagant gift than the ones he gets for his wife or his other lover.
James Walton:
A bit love actually.
Jo Hamya:
So he buys Klonowska this poodle, and he’s been betting her, and she likes him very much. But then at a certain point on one of his birthdays, he gets arrested, I think at that point for kissing a Jewish girl on the factory floor. So he gets put in jail and at that point, treated fairly well by SS officers, although subsequent arrests are a bit shakier. But he says to Klonowska, “You’ll have to cancel search appointments of mine.” And he gives her a list of names to reach out to get him out of prison. And she does. And this is her first truly big tasks to get Oskar Schindler out of jail without any kind of suspicion that he may be saving Jews. When he comes out of jail, he gets into a car where Klonowska is waiting for him, and poodle is right next to her.
And to me, this poodle is such a great image because you think for all the… I’m sure very wonderful sex that they might’ve been having, that she’s not in love with him. The reason that she has been so happy to work for him, as with many of German agents in the book, is because he can provide this kind of largesse, this poodle, these cigarettes, that silk shirt, that enamelware. I don’t doubt that he’s a man working for a good cause. What’s ambiguous to me is the extent to which his own personal morality is what drives that versus his love of money and ability to run a business.
James Walton:
But in the end, he gives up basically spins.
Jo Hamya:
Yeah, he goes bankrupt.
James Walton:
Yeah, he goes bankrupt saving Jews.
Jo Hamya:
Yeah.
James Walton:
There’s an ambiguity to his methods.
Jo Hamya:
I think the listener can make up their minds.
James Walton:
They really can. Now, Jo, I’ve nicknamed in my literary pretentious way, the Oliver Twist problem with Schindler’s Ark or the possible Oliver Twist problem-
Jo Hamya:
You are going to have to tell me what that means.
James Walton:
I will tell you what that means. So Oliver Twist sets up, shows the unbelievable systematic institutional injustice of the workhouse system and treatment of boys like Oliver. And then basically it’s all right in the end because one guy is nice to Oliver. It turns out to be middle class, so it’s okay after all, but leaving that last point to aside, so one person is saved and that means the book has a happy ending. Now obviously you’ve got this problem with Schindler’s Ark and in Schindler’s List, and I think both Keneally and-
Jo Hamya:
Spielberg.
James Walton:
… Spielberg face up to it and discuss it, but it’s there all the same, isn’t it? One of the phrases that runs through the book is from the Talmud, which Stern says to Schindler, “He who saves one man saves the entire world.” Now A, that’s clearly not true. I don’t want to be harsh, but B-
Jo Hamya:
argue with Talmud at first almost podcast James will get cancelled.
James Walton:
… no, but B, the whole of the book demonstrates that that’s not true ‘cause it doesn’t save the world. There’s all those scenes, for example, where he wants to get one of his guys off the train-
Jo Hamya:
Well, in the book it’s like 12 people.
James Walton:
Yeah, okay. Every now and then, but there’s one where he wants to get in the film, it’s Stern in the book, it’s bank here, his office manager. So he realises he’s been put on one of the trains going to Auschwitz and he goes running along and he gets him off the train. Then the train pulls off with thousands of people going to their deaths. This is acknowledged by Keneally.
He says, “It was fortunate for Abraham, that’s Bankier.” The Oskar did not ask himself, “Why it was Bankier’s name he called?” That he did not pause and consider that Bankiers had only equal value to all the other names loaded aboard the rolling stock. An ex-existentialist might’ve been defeated by the numbers, stunned by the equal appeal of all names and voices. Her Schindler was a philosophic innocent. He knew the people he knew.
Jo Hamya:
There were I think two, maybe three bits in the novel that were deeply, deeply interesting to me that I think feed into your so-called Oliver Twist problem, where Oskar is essentially… He has need of comfort from people who are in much more dire situations than he is. So my favourite one, because it’s probably as close to comedy as this book comes, is a moment just after halfway in when the assassination attempt on Hitler’s life has occurred and everyone is waiting by the radio to see whether he’s alive, to see whether the Führer will make any speech that will prove he’s alive.
And Oskar whips himself up into a frenzy believing that Hitler must be dead. It’s been hours since we’ve heard any kind of confirmation that he’s alive. They must be attempting to conceal the fact that he was successfully murdered. And in the end, of course, Hitler’s voice does come on the radio, and there’s this really, really interesting passage as he’s doing this with a man called Adam Garde who is a Schindler Jew, but Oskar had been believing in the death with a feverish conviction for hours now, and when it turned out to be an illusion, it was young Garde who found himself cast as the comforter.
While Oskar spoke with an almost operatic grief, “All our vision of deliverance is futile.” He said he poured another glass of cognac, each then pushed the bottle across the desk opening his cigarette box, “Take the cognac and some cigarettes and get some sleep. We’ll have to wait a little longer for our freedom.” In the confusion of the cognac of the news and of its sudden reversal in the small hours, Garde did not think it’s strange that Oskar was talking about, “Our freedom.” As if they had an equivalent need were both prisoners who had to wait passively to be liberated.
So it’s like this recurring thing, sometimes there’s another point earlier in the book where Stern has to comfort Oskar because he doesn’t want him to be so demoralised that he stops running the factory. That Oskar, by today’s standards millionaire free man at his leisure has to be comforted by an enslaved and downtrodden person. I think it’s an interesting conundrum that Keneally deals with in the book’s form that although the thing that makes this story interesting is a Nazi official, a free man to whatever extent, morally ambiguous man, there’s this bigger picture of people who are actually suffering and where do you place the emotional weight.
James Walton:
I read that completely different. I read that passage as proof of just again, how great Schindler is that he is as much trapped as the Jews. But you’re right, he’s not.
Jo Hamya:
Yeah, quite clearly.
James Walton:
But the fact that he feels that he is right at the end, there’s big set piece speech, which is again slightly different from in the film when the factory is about to close ‘cause the Russians are approaching, they’re about to be liberated. This is when the factory has been moved and he makes a speech in which he tells the SS guards who are still there, although he’s kept them at arm’s length from his factory, that you are as much imprisoned as the Jews are. And I think we’re meant to think that’s really great, aren’t we? But you think, “Actually no, they’re not.” Okay. No, that’s interesting.
Jo Hamya:
Yeah. But I think this is as much a conundrum for Keneally as a writer in shaping this novel in order to sustain the reader’s interest as it is a crucial to the plot conundrum.
James Walton:
Okay. Maybe here’s the synthesis right at the end, he saves 30 tinsmiths and Keneally says, “They were merely a fragments of the 10,000.” And because of that, it must be said again that Oskar was only a minor God of rescue, but still the word God, but a minor God of rescue. Maybe we get onto another thing that the book I think certainly achieves, we can’t, we’re not going to disagree on this. Even us, Jo, which is it works to restore in a way the unimaginability of the Holocaust. So all the way through every terrible thing that happens, the Jews kind of thing… Well, it’s not going to get any worse than this. Okay, this is it.
Right at the start, they’re quite convinced that they’ll always need us ‘cause one in 11 Poles are Jewish, then a lot of them are moved out of Kraków and they say to each other, “We’ll do this, and that will be the brunt of what they ask.” Then the ghetto set up, which is terrible enough, and they say, “We’ll be inside.” But one person says, “We’ll be inside, the enemy will be inside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us. No one will stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls will be final fixed form of the catastrophe to flash off.” So then the ghetto’s liquidised, “We need to flash off. At least we’ve got work. We’re in a camp now.” And yet it’s all building up to the thing that nobody can imagine.
And in fact, when the first reports someone has found out what’s happening further east in Auschwitz and comes back and explains and they say what’s happening. And then Keneally breaks off to say, “To write these things now is to state the commonplace of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.” And I think is very good on that. And also, the politics of that actually.
‘Cause one thing that the many could think Schindler does, he occasionally goes to Budapest and Istanbul to report to Zionists what’s going on in Europe or what’s going on in Poland. And essentially again, they won’t believe him. It cannot be imagined that this is going to happen. And we know from other reports that actually that was one of the great, and it is thing to say one of the great clever tricks of Auschwitz is when people are arriving on trains, it was unimaginable that they were just going to be entered to gas chambers and that made it possible to do. Sorry. We like to keep it lies on this podcast. I suppose I haven’t left too much to make of that though.
Jo Hamya:
No. [inaudible 00:29:56] ‘cause I’m on the verge of tears actually.
James Walton:
But that restoration of the unimaginability of it all I think is absolutely brilliantly done in the book.
Jo Hamya:
Yeah. The only thing I would add to that before we segue into our conversation about the film is the specific way in which it’s achieved. And I think the paragraph you read about the unimaginability of this at the time versus the fact that it’s commonplace now to believe is that Keneally on a sentence level is so deft with how he positions his readers. It happens on page one in the third paragraph of the book.
In fact, you become aware that actually you are part of the novel as reader. So the book opens on this scene of Schindler exiting a car in 1943 onto icy ground, and his chauffeur cracks a joke with him. And then in the middle of that, Keneally says, “In observing the small winter scene, we are on safe ground.” And with that, he signals to you that there is a particular mode of attention that you have to sustain throughout this book. That yes, you are on the one hand reading a novel, but it’s very much based in fact. And based in a lot of modes of supposition or assumption that you may already have about the Second World War or about the Holocaust itself.
And so often he’s very careful to lift you out of the text with a few sentences and this very documentary like nature refer to the audiences. We include himself in that and adjust your focus in a way that reminds you, “Yes, you may have learned about this in school. Yes, this is probably something that you’ve had in the background of your education or general cultural historical knowledge, but here I am giving it to you again in this particular way.” Okay. Well, I think there’s a lot that we can pick up on. Stay with us. We’ll be back in part two.
James Walton:
Okay. Welcome back to part two whereas promised we’re moving on from Schindler’s Ark by Thomas Keneally to Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s film. In our Booker at the Oskars series episode one. Just a little bit of background to the film is that Spielberg was sent a review of the novel when it came out actually, and then the novel itself by the head of MCA in entertainment who later became head of Universal, which made the film in the end.
This was 1982, and he didn’t feel ready to make the film at that point. I think he just felt he was too young for such a massive story. It was only 10 years later when Universal… He had another go with Universal. And one of the other things in film history really is that the studio agreed to fund Schindler’s List unconditioned that he made Jurassic Park first that same year.
So he was given three times the budget. He was given 22 million for Schindler’s List, but first 66 million to make Jurassic Park, which had to be made first. So in fact, that ended up with must’ve been one of the oddest experiences in the history of filmmaking old Spielberg over in Europe, filming Schindler’s List by day and editing Jurassic Park by night. Quite an achievement in filmic terms. And starring Oskar Schindler himself was the… Then comparatively unknown Liam Neeson with Ralph Ray Fines as Amon Goeth Villainous Commandant and completing a pleasing Tree of Brits. Jo, come on, Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, his Schindler’s main sidekick in the factory. And as well-
Jo Hamya:
Well, sidekick is a bit of a nod.
James Walton:
Yeah. Okay.
Jo Hamya:
Right-hand man maybe or something.
James Walton:
Yeah. That’s okay. No, fair point. Well, put. Okay. Sidekick. Okay. Yes, right-hand man, comrade.
Jo Hamya:
Slave.
James Walton:
I’m [inaudible 00:34:10] does all the work as well, as acknowledged. But anyway, so it won a lot of Oscars. As we mentioned, best picture, best director for Spielberg, best adapted screenplay for Steven Zaillian. There were none for the actors. In 2008, the American Film Institute named it the eighth Best American film of all time being back in the days when Citizen came, was always at number one. And the film led directly to the establishment also of the show, a foundation by Spielberg himself to educate people about Holocaust and other genocides, mainly through the testimony of survivors.
But Jo, the acclaim has been entirely universal. Lorde Landsman, who made the epic and highly influential nine-hour documentary show, which some people might have seen called it Kitschy Melodrama. I think it was Stanley Kubrick. You think it was someone else who said that, “Think that’s about the Holocaust. That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler’s List is about 600 who don’t.” Which is the wrong number actually it’s 1,100 who don’t. But I suppose-
Jo Hamya:
I think it’s just [inaudible 00:35:13].
James Walton:
Does return us to Oliver Twist problem, I suppose. So where do you stand on that, Jo, on the film?
Jo Hamya:
See, I have very mixed feelings about the film, the ways in which Spielberg translates elements of Keneally’s novel successfully make it a weaker film. And the ways in which Spielberg goes off and does his own thing, even though allegedly he spent the entire shoot insisting that it wasn’t going to be a Spielbergian film, that he wasn’t going to rely on his so-called Bag of Tricks is where it actually succeeds more for me.
I will say to anyone who hasn’t seen Schindler’s List and wants to… By the end of listening to this episode, it would be unfair of us not to warn you that it’s an extremely brutal graphic, horrific film. I think in a way it’s more successful than Keneally’s book because the slaughter in it is so graphic. But then that documentary style that we were talking about towards the end of part one of Keneally plucking the reader out above the text and refocusing the way in which they read was the film’s downfall, for me. I thought of the film in two ways, this is maybe a bit odd, but to me there was the documentary style and then there were intimate moments.
James Walton:
Thought we probably should say people loop ‘cause I should have said it at the beginning of this bit, and I forgot it’s in black and white.
Jo Hamya:
Yes, it is black and white.
James Walton:
Which the studio had big reservations about Spielberg in [inaudible 00:37:08].
Jo Hamya:
No, I think the black and white works. In fact, the very famous instance of colour, which we’ll talk about, The Gull and The Red Coat, to me feels kitschy and feels Hollywood. That doesn’t work for me. But I think the shots where Spielberg is essentially taking these vast passages that Keneally invest so much time and care into of individual stories within the camp, and he plunks them into the film. They tend to happen as a wide shot, and they tend to involve some form of someone’s being shot in the back of the head. Prisoners are being made to run around the camp, the camps are being built, people are shovelling snow, or a truckload of children as being driven out to Auschwitz.
There’s no doubt that the things these scenes are depicting are horrific. But that kind of documentary style distance, I would expect to cry at a film like Schindler’s List, but it just felt so dry to me. It’s not that I wanted to cry, all the success of it made me… Or that I thought it would only be successful if I cried. But there was just this very sounds awful to say dead and not in a… I feel numb in response to this just dead.
I wonder what the next scene is going to be feeling when these moments occur. But I will say my feelings are mixed because I think what Spielberg does really well is sometimes, he will give you these incredibly intimate moments where I think the brutality of what happens in Płaszów is it hits way harder. So for me, a really good example of this is when Ray Fines as Amon Goeth is talking to his maid, Helen Hirsch, and he’s having this very one-sided conversation with her where she is utterly silent because she doesn’t know what if she says one word, it might be the word that kills her.
Speaker 6:
I would like so much to reach out and touch you in your loneliness. What would that be like? I wonder, what would be wrong with that? And I realise that you’re not a person in the strictest sense of the world, but maybe you’re right about that too. Maybe what’s wrong? It’s not us, it’s this. When I compare you to [inaudible 00:40:05] or [inaudible 00:40:05] to lies, just… No, you make a good point. Make a very good point. The face of the rat. Are these the eyes of the rat? That’s not a Jew eyes. No, I don’t think so. You’re Jewish. You never talk me into it, didn’t you?
Jo Hamya:
So Ray Fines is just circling her around this… I think it’s a basement or an [inaudible 00:41:06], I can’t remember which.
James Walton:
Yeah, basement, I think.
Jo Hamya:
He’s just circling her as her as the man who is imprisoning her talking this delusional nonsense about how perhaps he might love her. He’s very fond of her. If she ever needs a reference after the war, he’s more than happy to give one. Helen is a good person. And then without her uttering a word, it turns, and he goes, “No, you’re a Jew. You’re a bitch”. Excuse my language, and ends up beating her. But the beating isn’t the horrific part of that scene.
To me, the horrific part of that scene are these really close shots of Helen Hirsch and Amon Goeth character and the tension that’s building ‘cause he know that he’s going to hurt her. Similarly, there’s a scene where certain camp members are being taken like cattle, I think to Auschwitz, and they’re discussing the possibility that they might be gassed. But the way its shot is a sleepover that they’re on their leaning forward on their elbows, exchanging rumours, like swapping rumours. They’re at a party going, “Well, I heard this, I heard this. Someone told me this. I heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend. It’s like gossip.” And it’s so horrifying ‘cause they’re being sent to their death. But here they are doing in this kind of pose that you must have had as a child whenever you went to your friend’s house. And that’s where the film works for me, not in these big displays of violence.
James Walton:
Well, really for me it’s both. Those two scenes you mentioned a fantastic, particularly the one and Helen. Girl in Red might give you by the way, but we can come onto that.
Jo Hamya:
Well, see, Girl in Red for me is… I know this is actually something that comes directly from the book because in the book, Schindler does see this girl and a scarlet hat and a scarlet coat, and she’s quite a pivotal moment at which he realises the full extent, the full horror of what’s happening. And it’s the same in the film, but I think that’s just something so in an entirely black and white film.
I think the only other colour in the film comes at the very end with a scene of the actual survivors laying stones on Schindler’s grave and also from two candles at the beginning and end. But this girl in Red for some reason, to me, in the book it works, but visually with greatest respects to Steven Spielberg, it feels like such a cheap ploy. It’s like your eye needs to go here and your sympathies need to go here as if a load of other people around her weren’t being killed.
James Walton:
But Spielberg has said in interviews that The Girl in Red is meant to, in a way signify the red flag of the allies, could have known that it was clear to see what was going on, and there should have been bombing of the tracks to Auschwitz and so on. And she represents the red flag that the allies should have seen. You don’t get in the film at all. I think what you do get is that slightly kitschy bit, and I’m not very keen on the bit right at the end of the film where he breaks down as well about.
Jo Hamya:
I was about to ask you about that. So for listeners who don’t know, this does not happen in the book, but at the end of the film, it follows the book. There is a speech where Oskar tells everyone that the Reich has fallen, Hitler is dead, the allies of one, and then this moment where he comes out of the factory and he promises to stay with the Schindler Jews five minutes past midnight before he makes his escape.
And in the book, this is a very calm, a sequence in which Schindler, I suppose the significance in the book is that it represents this reversal where after these years in which the people in his care have depended on his largesse and his money for the rest of his life, he will be dependent on their care and their money because he will essentially be penniless after 1950. In the film what happens is that Schindler comes out, he’s given a ring in Talmudic, first, as he is in the book, but then he has this complete breakdown.
Oskar:
This car good would’ve bought this car. Why did I keep the car? 10 people right there. 10 people. 10 more people. This pin, two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would’ve given me too far, at least one, he would’ve given me one, one more. One more person. Person stand for this… God, what person. [inaudible 00:46:28].
Jo Hamya:
And to be fair to Liam Neeson, Liam Neeson’s a great actor, it’s affecting, it works. But I think that my problem with the film generally is reflected in that scene because in the film it’s a three-hour-long movie and I feel like up until two hours and 15 minutes in Schindler is pretty much like a grey area if not a bad guy. And then all of a sudden there’s this flip to me, it’s way too sudden in the film. So after like 45 minutes of him suddenly euphoric being like a good man to then have him break down, it’s too much.
James Walton:
He’s a bit post ghost scrooge, isn’t he? That’s a bit bit harsh. I know what you mean. I’ve been going on about the character arc in the film rather than the book. And it’s true that it really accelerates. But he does get better and better in the book too, but not quite to the same extent of the film where becomes pretty much full on certain. But that breakdown at the end, I could have saved more. That Spielberg’s answer, I think to what we’ve been calling the Oliver Twist problem. He wanted to remind people, remind viewers of all the people who didn’t make it out.
Jo Hamya:
James, it’s a one-word answer book off film.
James Walton:
It’s so not a one-word answer, Jo. There used to be a theory-
Jo Hamya:
God safety.
James Walton:
… [inaudible 00:47:51] bloody is. There used to be a theory that there’s no great book that became a great film. It’s not entirely true this, but on the whole, great films are made of rubbish books and great books become rubbish films. Plenty of exceptions. And one of the exceptions I think is this. I think it’s a great book and a great film. And I’m sorry, I’m just going to have to sit on the fence there.
Jo Hamya:
That’s rubbish.
James Walton:
Okay, then go on. You make it, you go for it then.
Jo Hamya:
Book.
James Walton:
Okay. Oh, you did [inaudible 00:48:13]-
Jo Hamya:
That’s all it took, James.
James Walton:
And that’s it for our first The Booker at the Oscars episode on Schindler’s Ark and List. To find out more about Thomas Keneally’s novel head of thebookerprizes.com. And also, you can check the show notes for a handy article which details every single Booker Prize book that’s been adapted into any film or TV series ever.
Jo Hamya:
You can follow us on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Substack @thebookerprizes, and join our book group on Facebook.
James Walton:
We’ll be back next week with a regular episode, but do look out soon for another, The Booker at the Oscars. This time about The English Patient.
Jo Hamya:
Until next time, bye.
James Walton:
Bye.
Jo Hamya:
The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by me, Jo Hamya and by James Walton. It is produced and edited by Kevin Meola and the executive producer is Jon Davenport. It is a Daddy’s SuperYacht Production for the Booker Prizes.