Whoever Saves One Life, Saves the World Entire — says the Talmud, the book of Jewish Law. It’s a simple line that encapsulates the emotions of the Jews who were rescued from imminent extermination at the hands of the Nazis, by one man — Oskar Schindler. The German industrialist and member of the Nazi Party saved the lives of 1,200 Jews, having employed them in his weapons and enamelware factories in occupied Poland and the Czech Republic during the Holocaust. His story inspired Australian author Thomas Keneally’s Booker Prize-winning 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark (‘Schindler’s List’ in the US). Keneally visited Goa last month for the International Writers & Readers Festival 2014. In an exclusive to BusinessLine , the writer, whose book served as the basis for Steven Spielberg’s moving holocaust drama Schindler’s List (1993), spoke about the legacy of the acclaimed historical novel and the role of writers in shaping the world as it is today.

While writing Schindler’s Ark , were you overwhelmed, having to relive the experiences of the survivors of such a painful history?

Yes, both in the writing process and after the book was published, there was a certain depression from the experience. You think you can get in easily and tell the story, and get out. That’s what writers and journalists always want to do.

They don’t want to be touched by the story — they just simply want to write it. In a process as long as a novel and its associated research, it is inevitable that there will be phases of personal torment — nothing like what the people went through originally, but phases of it.

The thing is, I am not even Jewish. I was playing with other peoples’ stories. So I deserve to bear some of the weight of that. And you do bear some of it.

Tell us about Poldek Pfefferberg (the Holocaust survivor and one of Schindler’s Jews) who inspired you to write the book.

Poldek aka Leopold was a very funny man and very bossy. I remember once, while researching the book, the two of us were in Poland. Out there, you’re only allowed to exchange the local currency (zlotys) at the money exchange desk in the hotels. But if you traded it on the streets, you could get many more zlotys than the official rate. I always wanted to change the money legally, but Poldek wanted to do so on the streets and he did. When we were ready to leave Poland, we realised we were in trouble as we had too many zlotys.

However, at the airport, Poldek started offering the security officials parts in ‘the movie’ (based on the book which wasn’t even written at that stage!). I thought they were going to shoot us. But Poldek kept saying, “Thomas, don’t you think this man has exactly the right heroic Polish features we need for the film?” Poldek had the right manners, demeanour and delivery to utter such complete rubbish with such conviction. To my amazement, the two soldiers gave him their names and addresses. Poldek said he would be in touch. And thus we got into the plane safe.

How did your novel catch Spielberg’s attention?

Poldek was the bridge between the book and the film. He knew Spielberg’s mother. But he treated the director like an office boy. He would say, “Steven, you can’t win Academy Awards by making films about little furry animals. You have to make a great film about humanity between human beings.” And then he uttered the war cry, ‘An Oscar for Oskar!’ Poldek was pleased when the director bought the rights to the novel in 1982 but he didn’t get around to making the film until 1992. At the Academy Awards ceremony in 1994 (when the film won seven Oscars), Spielberg walked into the Governor’s Ball with two Oscars in his hands, and Poldek grabbed one of them and said, “What did I tell you, what did I tell you?”

Did you like Spielberg’s cinematic adaptation of the book?

I hoped that the film would retain the same ambiguity about Oskar Schindler’s character and his motives. I think Spielberg got that right. I would have done some of the scenes differently, but I am not a filmmaker.

Have we learned anything from the past?

I don’t think we learn enough from the past. You’d think what happened during Partition would end all quarrels between people in India and Pakistan. But it hasn’t. It’s easier to disapprove of things that were done in the past than it is to disapprove of things happening, sometimes nearly as bad, in your own environment.

So it’s possible to say ‘tut tut’ about slaughters that occurred during Partition. But it is also possible for corporations, institutions and individuals to be unaware of injustice in their own backyard. The victims of the past were abstract and we didn’t know them. So we do not understand their intimate suffering, and it’s easier to disapprove of what’s happened to them than it is to be impassioned now. Most people in Australia would disapprove of the Holocaust but not all disapprove of the country’s policy concerning asylum-seekers, which I think is inhumane. They arrive by boat and are put in a prison-like detention centre and kept there indefinitely, sometimes for many years, before they are deported again.

Can literature and art change the world for the better?

Yes, in small ways. It’s hard to quantify. When you are writing a book, you can’t predict the effect it’s going to have. There is a good argument that writers should just write their books and let them have whatever large or small influence they have. There are books that raise consciousness. I recently read Barbara Tuchman’s Guns of August (about the onset of WW I). The late US President John F Kennedy had read it and when his military advisors were urging him to go to war with Russia he gave them this book and said, “This is what I don’t want to happen.”

I had also written a book about the war in east Africa called To Asmara . It did change attitudes about that war between Mengistu’s Ethiopians and the Eritreans. (Mengitsu Haile Mariam was formerly president of Ethiopia.) It’s hard to tell whether it shortened the war, but it certainly changed attitudes towards it. When I met Senator Ted Kennedy, he told me he too had read the book and was very anxious to do what he could to end that war.

Which books keep you occupied these days?

Reading’s a considerable joy, but it’s hard to get around all the books you should read. I recently read Gone Girl and Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behaviour , which was magnificent.

I revisited Middlemarch too, which, I think is the greatest novel in the English language. It means more to me now than when I was young (I was pretty dumb when I was young). Also, I read Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (about the Spanish civil war).

I do a lot of reading while researching for books — books on 19th and 20th century history, biographies and books by Maxim Gorky and historians such as Simon Sebag Montefiore and Orlando Figes.

On a lighter note, are you enthusiastic about these literature festivals?

When I began going to fests in the 60s they were combative. In that period, the idea was you had to be an absolute ass**** to be a genius. If you were nice to people, it meant you had no talent. I am glad that has passed.

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