KENEALLY'S novel Schindler's Ark told the epic story of a man who kept several hundred Jewish slave labourers alive close by Plaszow, one of the most murderously cruel Nazi concentration camps, during the Second World War. Stephen Spielberg's film gave that narrative black-and-white solidity.

Searching for Schindler is Keneally's own story of accident, literary good fortune and a daunting global pursuit. The book opens in 1980, with Keneally entering a Californian leather-goods shop owned by Leopold Page (once Pfefferberg) to buy a briefcase. Poldek, as he is nicknamed, is one of the Polish Jews rescued by Oskar Schindler and he has a single mission: to have Schindler's courageous exploit more widely known.

In Schindler's Ark, Poldek appeared briefly as a young man, once as a teacher, sometimes in army uniform; a vivid figure, but not a key player. Here he is a force of nature, far more than a link into a worldwide network of survivors; an exuberant guide and companion in the search for all those who remember Schindler and his wife and know what happened to him in the years of his decline after the war.

Keneally loves research and for all the use he makes of Poldek's personal memories, he takes on board the advice of Moshe Belski, a distinguished moderate of the Israeli Supreme Court, who warns him against accepting all the details of Poldek's account without corroboration. No problem there, it soon emerges, as survivors were eager to expand the story and add new details of their own. Schindler appears as an ambiguous figure, part opportunist, part compassionate; a bon viveur in good suits, a hard-drinking Aryan womaniser with a Nazi pin on his lapel, whose decision to use his factory as a refuge made those who lived under his protection see him as an angel.

Times Archive, 1967: Peace prize for Oskar Schindler

Herr Schindler, now in his sixties and not in good health, organized rescue work from the extermination camps at the risk of his life

Background

• The making of Schindler's List

This is not a sentimental book. Keneally has to accept that Schindler came into Poland in the first place largely to make money. It was an ambition soon jeopardised by his horror at the brutality he witnessed. Unlike other factory owners who exploited Jewish slave labour, he spent nearly two million zloty on food for his workforce. There are new insights into how he found the money to do so, including a suggestion from the mistress of the commandant of Plaszow, confided to an earlier interviewer on her deathbed, that some of Schindler's capital came from the Abwehr (a Geman intelligence organisation). Of the monstrous Amon Goeth, who ran that camp, however, not a relation remained for Keneally to question about the origins of the man's fanatic sadism, or to explain his penchant for casual murder.

Keneally's travels in Poldek's company take him from Hitler's favorite hotel in Vienna to the backyards and cellars of Cracow, where Poldek once played as a boy and can still find childhood friends among the few Jews remaining.

They also discover the shell of Schindler's Emalia workshop. They visit Lodz, whose inhabitants also found themselves, alongside the inhabitants of Cracow, in Goeth's monstrous killing machine. Poldek insists that Keneally visit the Wavel, a Cracow district home to many Polish dynasties, as well as look at the street where his own parents once lived, close by the district of Kazimierz, one-time home of the town's Jewish population. In the Eighties this was a shabby area, not yet prettified for American tourists.

With his Irish heritage, Keneally understands the political passion of Jewish nationalism, and he explores Israel with enthusiasm on the next leg of his journey. In Jerusalem he meets Dr Sophia Stern, the widow of Itzhak Stern, Schindler's meticulous accountant; it was Stern who assembled the list of Schindler's supposedly essential metal workers, some of whom were talented musicians and some children.

The last section of the book takes us behind the scenes of Keneally's triumph. He is very clear why he chose to have Schindler's Ark put out as fiction. He did not have the Booker in mind. He simply didn't want the book to languish on the already packed shelves of Judaica. Poldek, although pleased by the immense sales of the book, had always clamoured to see the story made into a film.

Keneally himself had little hope that Spielberg's option would be taken up. And though Poldek was not responsible for the first meeting, he insisted on being there, on the ground that he knew Spielberg's mother and had often eaten at her restaurant. (He took Keneally to eat there too.) The portrait of Spielberg that emerges - urbane, soft spoken and wearing trainers, which Poldek finds inappropriate for such a wealthy man - is one of the most charming in the book.

It was Spielberg who deci-ded that his film use the American title, Schindler's List. This was partly because of the resistance felt by American Jews to the idea of their fellows going passively two by two to their deaths but, more cogently, because a list could be made into a potent visual symbol while the biblical metaphor could not.

But it is Poldek who is the star of this memoir. Ingenious and fearless, he knows exactly how to flatter men with a sense of importance, and women of all ages with their beauty. He is a genial luftmensch, a benign fixer, and an altogether suitable figure to introduce Oskar Schindler.

Searching for Schindler: A Memoir by Thomas Keneally
Sceptre, £20; 320pp Buy the book

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