Searching for Schindler

"Had I read Searching for Schindler before making the film, I may have made it an hour longer. I owe you so much. The world owes you more." -- Steven Spielberg
"Keneally is incapable of writing a dull book. This memoir, listed as his 38th publication, is no exception." -- Sydney Morning Herald
"SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER is the story of author Thomas Keneally's search for the many Holocaust survivors he needed to interview while writing SCHINDLER'S ARK, the basis for the award-winning movie SCHINDLER'S LIST. On its face, the book sounds self-serving, but the listener quickly discovers that it's a journey of self-exploration and inspiration. In many ways this is the story of how Schindler transformed Keneally. Narrator Humphrey Bower captures the joy, curiosity, and passion that overwhelmed Keneally as he discovered Oskar Schindler and the many people on his "list". This is a story about personalities, and Bower succeeds by imbuing each with a life. It all began innocuously when Keneally met Leopold Pfefferberg Page and learned how one man changed so many others' lives, and unwittingly changed his own." -- AudioFile Magazine
"This is Thomas Keneally's account of writing his novel Schindler's Ark and then seeing it turned into Spielberg's film Schindler's List. The central character is "Poldek" Pfefferberg, into whose Beverly Hills shop Keneally wandered in 1980 in search of a briefcase. Discovering he was an author, Poldek told him he had this "wonderful story" that he had to tell the world. This was the tale of Oskar Schindler, who saved hundreds of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland. Keneally portrays the improbably extravagant Poldek with affectionate grace and closes the book with a lament for his death in 2001. Keneally is appealingly forthright about the controversies that surrounded both book and film: his financial anxieties are alleviated, he's awed to be in Hollywood, he's not convinced that film is as good as words. But he never forgets that all this is nothing to the suffering of the people featured in both film and book. That ambivalence is entirely appropriate to a story of an "improbable saviour" with ambiguous motives, told by one of those he saved." -- The Guardian