Schindler's List

Schindler’s List

Thomas Keneally

Hodder & Stoughton; Australia,c1982

ISBN: 0340278382

Schindler’s List  is based on the true story of German industrialist and war profiteer,Oskar Schindler.

Confronted with the horror of the extermination camps,he gambles his life and his fortune to rescue 1,300 Jews from the gas chambers. Schindler triumphs as being one man who was able to make  a difference to mankind and, because of him, many Jews survived one of the darkest and most horrific chapters in human history.

Schindler’s List is a “ Documentary Novel “, based on the recollections of the Schindlerjuden
( Schindler's Jews), Schindler himself, and other witnesses, and is told in a series of snapshot stories."The book recounts the lives of the flamboyant profiteer and womanizer Schindler,his long suffering wife Emilie, the brutal SS Commandant Amon Goeth, Schindler’s factory manager Itzhak Stern, and several other Jews who witnessed the horrors and inhumanities at Auschwitz. The main protagonist is Oskar Schindler himself. He comes to Krakow, Poland, seeking his fortune and ends up outwitting the SS to protect his Jewish employees. The book explores the complex nature of virtue, the importance of individual human life, the role of witnesses to the Holocaust, and the attention to rules and details that sustained the Nazi system of terror.

Historical Fiction

           

           

          

Those who save us

Those Who Save Us

Jenna Blum

Canongate Books Ltd; 2005

ISBN: 9781920885540

Those  Who Save Us is the story of Anna Schlemmer, a young woman living in Germany in the 1940’s. Anna and her three-year-old daughter,Trudy, are liberated by an American soldier and go to live with him in Minnesota.

Trudy has never known much about her mother’s past, but fifty years on,  when she finds a photograph showing Anna, Trudy and a Nazi officer, the Obersturmfuhrer of Buchenwald, her curiosity is aroused and she begins to investigate the past and uncovers the dramatic and heartbreaking truth of her mother’s life.

This is the story of the relationship between mother and daughter, guilt, the will to survive, and the pain and suffering when remembering the atrocities of war and the Holocaust.

Historical Fiction

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas

John Boyne

David Fickling Books; Oxford,2006

ISBN: 038560940X

This is the story of nine-year-old Bruno. When his father Karl,a German soldier during the Second World War,is promoted to Commandant in the SS, the family move to a new home that Bruno calls Out-With – Auschwitz.

Bruno is unhappy is his new home. It is a cold, stark house and there is no-one to play with and he is forbidden to explore – something that he loves to do.

One day , his boredom and curiosity get the better of him and he escapes into the woods .While exploring, he comes across a high barbed wire fence and sees a boy ,in what he thinks, are striped pyjamas, sitting on the other side of the fence.This is Shmuel, and he and Bruno strike up a friendship, even though Bruno comes from a Nazi family and Shmuel is Jewish.

Bruno is innocent and naïve, but soon learns more about where he lives, how other people live, and the devastating consequences of war. The friendship between the two boys shows that children can, given the chance, overcome differences in identity and culture. Friendship, compassion and loss are shown through the eyes of two young innocent boys.

Bruno and Shmuel are the main characters in the book There are also his twelve-year-old sister Gretel, the maid,Maria, his Grandparents and Lieutenant  Kotler, who has his own demons to face.

The ending is sad, unexpected and devastating.

Historical Fiction