Searching for Schindler

A memoir of Tom's journey around the world to discover the complete story of Oskar Schindler and that list.

In 1980 Tom Keneally was in Beverley Hills returning from the Sorrento film festival where The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith had been showing. Looking for a new briefcase, Tom meets the Polish-Jewish Leopold Pfefferberg Page aka Poldek and his life for the next few years is taken over by this charismatic and driven man and the story he wants shared.

"It's a story for you, I swear," he says to Tom.

The story is, of course, that of "The all-drinking, all-screwing, all black-marketeering Nazi. But to me he was Jesus Christ, Oskar Schindler". And Poldek shared with Tom the story of SCHINDLER'S ARK which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately to become the Oscar award-winning film SCHINDLER'S LIST.

Schindler, the ruined Catholic hedonist, had something ambiguous about him that appealed to the ex-seminarian Tom Keneally who still struggled with his own Catholicism and his humanist view of the world. Oskar showed that virtue, regardless of race, creed or religion, emerged where it would.

Tom was a small child during WWII and these memories, along with the appeal of Schindler and Poldek's insistence, influenced him to write the book SCHINDLER'S ARK. Oskar and his Jews reduced the Holocaust - an almost untellable story in its scope and devastation - to an understandable human scale.

After the enormous success of the book, Tom is there for the film adaptation and on set for the filming. Filled with stories of Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and many other well-known and strong characters SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER gives Tom Keneally scope to show the wonderful, warm, thinking, compassionate and very funny man that he is.