Olek rosner biography templates

Schindler is flamboyant, a man of "magnetic charm," who uses his considerable skill to make friends with and grease the palms of SS officials so that he keeps his workers alive. But he risks his business to save his workers and eventually bankrupts himself by setting up a nonproductive factory so that they may be safe from the death camps.

Not only does he have indulgences, but he is a character of ambiguity. It is not clear what Schindler sees on the day of the ghetto liquidation that makes him act in the way he does. For sure, Schindler is not a thinking man although he fancies himself a philosopher but a practical one, and his methods are those of a man of action. But still there is a mystery as to what in him changed so that this congenial, apolitical man suddenly felt he needed to risk his life to save others.

As his wife, Emilie, says, before and after the war Schindler's life was unexceptional, but in the short era between andhe met people who "summoned forth his deeper talents. Sedlacek is the Austrian dentist who works for a Zionist rescue organization in Budapest and who elicits Schindler's help to gather information. He takes his orders from SS headquarters and rules the ghetto with a misguided sense of power.

He extorts people and makes out lists for the SS of unsatisfactory or seditious ghetto dwellers. He is referred to as "highbooted" Spira, the "Napoleon" of the ghetto. He is eventually executed by the SS. Itzhak Stern is Schindler's accountant, friend, and "confessor. Stern thinks of Schindler as dangerous and resents his gestures of equality, and the first thing he tells Schindler is that he should know that he is "a Jew.

During their first conversation, Schindler remarks on the difficulty that priests must have during these times talking about the verse in the Bible that talks about God caring about the death of even one sparrow. Stern replies that the sentiment may be summed up in the Talmudic verse that says that he who saves the life of one man saves the whole world—the verse that the prisoners later have inscribed on the ring they present to Schindler as a goodbye gift.

Stern is well connected and practical besides being learned. He gets Jews into Schindler's factory and helps him with the details of the factory. He also, ironically, comforts Schindler before a coming Aktion and is Schindler's strength when he is depressed. Even when he works at the Plaszow camp, he is invaluable to Schindler's work and continues to be his confidant at Brinnlitz.

Rebecca is the young woman who works as Goeth's manicurist and is courted by and marries Josef Bau in a traditional Jewish ceremony in the labor camp. The Madritsch supervisor in Plaszow, who smuggles in truckloads of food for prisoners in the uniform factory, is a quiet, clerkly Austrian Catholic man. He plays chess with Goeth and loses to improve the commandant's mood—and so olek rosner biography templates the prisoners' lives by preventing random executions.

Tisch types the list of prisoners that will go to Schindler's camp. He is eventually honored by the Israeli government. In the opening pages of Schindler's ListKeneally says explicitly that it is the story "of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil" and of the story of a man who is not "virtuous" in the customary sense. Writing about evil, he goes on to say, is fairly straightforward, but it is more risky and complex to write about virtue.

The hero of the novel, Oskar Schindler, is complicated because he seems to be at once virtuous and immoral. Schindler is married but keeps house with his German mistress and maintains a long affair with his Polish secretary. He is outgoing and generous but has even greater personal indulgences, including good cigars and cognac. He excels in profiting from shady dealings, procuring goods from the black market and bribing officials, through which he saves his workers' lives.

From the beginning of the novel, Schindler seems to treat the Jews he encounters with respect, but for a long time he seems oblivious to the cruelties they face, being more interested in his business than the political situation around him. Also, after the war, and after his heroic olek rosner biography templates of his Jewish workers, Schindler leads an unremarkable life: he does not do good works or act as a champion of the powerless, but rather he again cheats on his wife, spends money lavishly, fails at his business ventures, and bankrupts himself.

His motivations? His personality? Throughout the book, Keneally draws attention to the difficult nature of virtue again, seen most obviously in the character of Schindlerto the not-so-obvious contrast between good and evil Schindler is compared repeatedly to his "dark twin," the clearly evil Amon Goethand to what exactly constitutes morality.

For example, the Austrian bureaucrat Szepessi has "a humane reputation even though he serviced the monstrous machine. The German prisoner Philip, whom Schindler meets after he is arrested for kissing a Jewish girl in his factory, complains about the corruptibility and thievery of the SS but seems unmoved by the fact that they routinely murder Jews.

Goeth's conception of good and evil is perhaps most distorted, as seen when Goeth is "tempted" toward restraint and goodness by Schindler and entertains the idea the he might be seen as "Amon the Good. Lists of various kinds figure throughout Schindler's List. The Nazis use lists to keep track of Jews, and they keep lists such as invoices, manifests, and vouchers to sort the loot they plunder from their victims.

The official refuses to release Bankier and Schindler's other workers because "they're on the list. It is through the use of such lists that the Nazis create a seemingly clean, orderly system to rid Europe of Jews. Lists make individuals seem less than human, like objects that can be counted, categorized, and dispensed with. Even the Jewish police, such as Symche Spira and other OD members, make out for the SS lists of unsatisfactory or seditious ghetto dwellers; in this way they aid the Nazi in their systematic annihilation of their brethren.

Other Jews, such as Marcel Goldberg, a clerk in charge of lists "labor lists and transport lists and the lists of living and dead"receive bribes for putting Jews on favorable lists, including a list of those who work at Schindler's factory. Schindler, however, is not at all partial to lists. He does not like paperwork, preferring under-the-counter work and leaving details to his managers and secretaries.

Olek rosner biography templates

But, ironically, it is by creating a list of workers that he extricates and saves them from the labor camps and almost certain death. It is by creating this list, which Dolek Horowitz thinks of as "a sweet chariot which might swing low," that Schindler saves more than 1, Jews from the well-oiled German machinery whose purpose it was to exterminate them.

The importance of the testimony of witnesses is stressed in many discussions of the Holocaust. Witnesses are survivors who tell the world of the horrors they experienced so that perhaps history will not repeat itself. Schindler's List is a story that is reconstructed through the eyewitness accounts of fifty Holocaust survivors. As characters in the novel, many of them are represented as being distinctly aware of their status as witnesses.

As Schindler observes the Aktion in which the Jewish ghetto is decimated, he has the sense of being a witness. It is at this stage, too, that he recognizes that the SS officer's leniency to the little girl in red means that the Nazis believe that all witnesses will perish—that is, that all Jews and Jewish sympathizers will be exterminated.

Poldek Pfefferberg, too, when he moves among the dead bodies after an Aktion"sensed why he had been placed there. He believed unshakably in better years to come, years of just tribunals. As one of the women at the Auschwitz camp says to Clara Sternberg as the latter looks for the electric fences on which to electrocute herself, "Don't kill yourself on the fence, Clara.

If you do that, you'll never know what happened to you. Schindler's List is a "documentary novel," a novel that recreates events that actually took place in real life. Keneally goes to great lengths to describe characters as they were in real life and to create a sense of realism. But he uses the texture and devices of the novel—a form normally used for fictional accounts—to tell the true story of Oskar Schindler because, he says, "the novel's techniques seem suited for a character of such ambiguity and magnitude as Oskar.

The result is a work that moves back and forth between simply telling a story and embellishing or commenting upon that story by examining how the author came to know the olek rosner biographies templates, how the facts may be disputed, or how the witnesses feel about certain events. For example, the author sometimes intrudes into a story to mention that another witness has a different account of those events, how a particular survivor says he or she felt about Schindler, and so on.

The effect of this authorial intrusion is always to return the reader to reality, to make it plain that the events described are not merely a novelistic fantasy but a true account that impacted people's lives in ways that can barely be imagined. The story of Oskar Schindler and the rescue of the "Schindler Jews" unfolds through a series of stories about dozens of characters.

The narratives are pieced together by the author so that they are interesting anecdotes or character sketches on their own, but they also weave into the larger story about Schindler. The effect of this technique is that what becomes of most importance in the book is people, the minute details of their lives, the ideas they held and intimate moments they cherished.

Unlike the film version of Schindler's ListKeneally's novel is memorable not so much for the backdrop of the labor camps and atrocities of war but for the realistic description of people and the personal sufferings or victories they experienced. There is, for example, the story of the courtship and marriage of Josef and Rebecca Bau in the barracks of the Plaszow camp, that of Henry Rosner playing the fiddle so magically that an SS officer kills himself, that of the young man who escapes Belzec by hiding for three days in the pit of the latrines, and that of young Janka Feigenbaum dying of cancer.

That the novel is constructed in this way conveys a sense that the story of the Holocaust is made up of stories of individuals, each one a human life. Despite its factual tone, Schindler's List uses a number of symbols and images, some of them recurring, to underscore its central questions and ideas. One of the most memorable scenes in the book is when Schindler, sitting on his horse, observes the destruction of the Jewish ghetto and, amidst all the turmoil, the figure of a small child wearing a red dress.

It is after witnessing this event that Schindler vows to do everything he can to defeat the system. The red dress makes the young girl stand out, and it seems, for the first time, Schindler really understands that the Jews in the ghetto are individuals—humans—who are being subjected to the most inhuman treatment imaginable. The smallness of the child may be seen to represent innocence and the red to represent the blood of the Jewish people.

Other ideas that are used repeatedly in the book are those of gods, kings, and heroes. Oskar is referred to as a "minor god of deliverance, double-faced" who brings salvation to his Jewish workers. This ties in with the question of the complex nature of morality, for Schindler is not a conventional type of god. He is like Bacchus, the god of wine, who loves to indulge in good food and drink, but he also performs good acts.

The imagery of kings is used often when describing Goeth, who fancies himself an emperor. He is compared to the Roman emperor Caligula, famed for his cruelty and excesses. Also, when he plays blackjack with Schindler over the fate of Helen Hirsch, Goeth draws a king and loses the game. The notion of heroism is explored not only with the unlikely heroism of Schindler but in the olek rosner biography templates of many of the Jewish characters.

During the Aktion in which the Jewish ghetto is razed, for example, Dr. H's nurse administers cyanide to his dying patients so that they can "escape" being murdered by the SS. The destruction of the Jews in Europe stands as the archetype of genocide in human history. Jews had been the subjects of persecution in Europe at least since the seventeenth century.

When Adolph Hitler, the charismatic, Austrian-born demagogue, rose to power in Germany during the s and early s, he rallied the German people with a message that included notions of "Aryan," or white, superiority and the inferiority of other races. The Jews were a special target of his hatred, and they were incorrectly represented during this time of social, political, and economic upheaval as being wealthy and in control of the country's economy.

InHitler ran for president of Germany. He did not win, but he did well, and when the party in power was unable to end the depression, its leaders turned to Hitler for help. He became chancellor, or prime ministerof Germany in Within weeks, he set into motion a series of laws that destroyed the nation's democratic government. He eliminated all opposition and launched a program of world domination and extermination of the Jews.

His government, like all totalitarian regimes, established complete political, social, and cultural control over its subjects. In Hitler's program for the "Aryanization" of Germany and world conquest, Jews were subjected first to discrimination, then persecution, and then state-condoned terrorism. This had as a turning point, the "night of the broken glass" also known as Kristallnacht, which took place in Munich, Germany, in November Nazi storm troopers burned down synagogues and broke into Jewish homes, terrorizing men, women, and children.

Over twenty thousand people were arrested and taken to concentration camps. After Kristallnacht, Jewish businesses were expropriated, employers were urged to fire Jewish employees, and offices were set up to expedite emigration. Jews could buy their freedom and leave the country, but they had to abandon their assets when they left.

By the outbreak of war in Septemberhalf of Germany's five hundred thousand Jews had fled, as had many Jews from other German-occupied areas. When the Nazis invaded western Poland intwo-thirds of Polish Jews—Europe's largest Jewish community—fell into their hands. As is described in Schindler's ListPolish Jews were rounded up and placed in ghettos, where it is estimated that five hundred thousand people died of starvation and disease.

After Soviet invasion in Junethe Nazis launched a crusade against the supposed Jewish-Communist conspiracy. Police battalions called Einsatzgruppen operations groups moved from town to town, rounding up Jewish men and suspected Soviet collaborators and shooting them. They then began to target Jewish women and children as well. The Einsaztgruppen murdered some two million people, almost all Jews.

While these massacres were taking place, Hitler's Nazi government was planning a "Final Solution" to the "Jewish question. At Chelmno and Semlin,Jews were killed in this way. More camps opened in the spring and summer ofwhen the Nazis began clearing the ghettos in Poland and rounding up Jews in western Europe for deportation to labor and concentration camps such as those at Treblinka, Belzec, and Sobibor.

The largest of the death camps was at Auschwitz. It was originally a concentration camp for Polish political prisoners but was expanded in with the addition of a larger camp at nearby Birkenau. Auschwitz-Birkenau and its subcamps heldprisoners, includingJews. In the spring ofgas chambers were built at Birkenau, and mass transports of Jews began to arrive there.

Some were held as registered prisoners, but the great majority was gassed. These gassing operations were expanded inand four gas chamber and crematorium complexes were built. Before they were killed, the victims' valuables were stripped from them. Their hair was used to stuff mattresses, and any gold in their teeth was melted down. In total, about one million Jews died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The Final Solution moved into its last stages as Allied forces closed in on Germany in The camps were closed and burned down. Prisoners remaining at concentration camps in the occupied lands were transported or force-marched to camps in Germany. Thousands of prisoners on these death marches died of starvation, exhaustion, and cold, or they were shot.

When the war ended and the concentration camps were liberated by Allied troops, thousands of unburied corpses and tens of thousands of sick and dying prisoners were found crammed into overcrowded barracks without food or water. Much of Europe was destroyed in the war. Survivors of the camps were in terrible condition, both physically and psychologically.

Trials were held in Nuremberg in at which top surviving Nazi leaders were tried for war crimes. Similar trials followed, but thousands of war criminals eluded justice. Israel was established as a state in and opened its doors to all Jews, and many of them who survived the Holocaust migrated there, as well as to the United States, Australia, and elsewhere.

When it was published in Britain in as Schindler's ArkKeneally's book was widely and prominently reviewed. Even before its publication, it had been short-listed for the Booker McConnell Prize, and there had been some mention in pre-publication reviews that the documentary style of the book made it an unusual contender for a fiction prize. The day after its official publication, Schindler's Ark won the Booker Prize, and a storm of controversy erupted.

A number of critics felt that its deficiency in the fictional aspect undermined its quality. Enright in the Times Literary Supplement found it to be on a par with second-rate adventure-style documentaries and "not a great literary novel. One reviewer, Marion Glastonbury of the New Statesmanobjected to the portrayal of Schindler as a man of virtue.

Despite the controversy, however, Schindler's Ark was popular among British readers, selling forty thousand copies in two months. American reviewers of Schindler's List also noted the book's documentary style but were less concerned with whether its nonfictional status meant it was or was not a novel. Paul Zweig in the New York Times declared that Keneally "has chosen a subject that art can contain," and numerous other writers found the work to be "remarkable.

Universal Pictures obtained rights for Steven Spielberg to turn Keneally's book into a film soon after it was published, but it did not reach development for about ten years. Before the release of the film, Keneally's book continued to have modest success and sales. There was some interest in the work among academics, and a handful of articles appeared that discussed its status as fiction and the character of Schindler.

However, after the release of the film version of Schindler's List in and particularly after it earned seven Academy Awards, the book enjoyed renewed popularity. Articles on the work appeared, many of them comparing Keneally's treatment of the story with that by director Steven Spielberg. But the phenomenal success of the movie has also overshadowed Keneally's accomplishment, and there are certainly more discussions in print on Spielberg's Schindler than on the work by the Booker Prize-winner.

No volume of criticism has been devoted to Keneally's prose version of the work, for example, but there have been several books and countless articles analyzing the film, including the collection Spielberg's Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on "Schindler's List," edited by Yosefa Loshitzky. The film also regularly appears in high school curricula as part of the study of the Jewish Holocaust.

While Spielberg's work has certainly eclipsed Keneally's, it has also made the story of Oskar Schindler part of the American cultural imagination, and the novel has become a fixture on high school reading lists. It also continues to enjoy a wide general readership and has sold over a million copies since its publication. Kukathas is a freelance writer.

In this essay, Kukathas considers the olek rosner biography templates strategies Keneally uses in his novel. When Schindler's List under the title Schindler's Ark won the Booker Prize inmore than one critic objected to the fact that this work of nonfiction could win a major literary prize that had traditionally been awarded to the year's best book of fiction.

Other critics complained that not only was the work not fiction, it was not olek rosner biography templates literature, mainly because of its documentary style. Schindler's List is an unusual novel, to be sure, because it moves back and forth between telling a story and reporting the facts of history—and people's very personal accounts of that history.

It perhaps does not read like a literary novel because, in some sense, things are told too plainly. There are dozens of characters in the novel, but with the exception of Schindler and a few of his close associates, those characters are not "developed"; their complexities do not unfold in such a way that the reader begins to know them from their actions.

Rather, the author explicitly tells their stories, narrates the events of their lives, reports what they are like, notes their characteristics, and offers a few key details about what they went through during the war and afterward. Also, because it is a true story, there is a certain lack of tension in the plot; from the beginning, the author makes clear exactly what will happen—that Schindler will rescue over a thousand Jews from the death camps through his own brand of ingenuity and charm.

There are, then, few surprises in the sense that one usually expects from a novel; even in the thick of the main action of the story, Keneally offers information about who survives the war, how a particular character ultimately meets his or her end, and so on. However, while the narrative style of Schindler's List is different from traditional novels, it is far more than mere reportage and has characteristics not merely of a "good read" but of good literature.

This is because of the techniques Keneally uses to suggest questions, present ambiguities, and offer layers of meaning even as he tells a straightforward, true story. Keneally uses devices found in more traditional works of fiction that make his documentary novel rise to the level of "literature," but at the same time his particular narrative technique has its own strengths for recounting the type of story he tells in Schindler's List.

In his author's note, Keneally says explicitly that his book is not fiction, because fiction would "debase the record" of the Holocaust. The stories he tells of the victims, survivors, and oppressors in Schindler's List are all based on eyewitness accounts, historical documents, and visits to the sites described in the novel. Thus, it can be assumed that Keneally does not embellish stories or infuse characters with his own authorial imagination, making them "stand for" or represent certain ideas he is trying to communicate to his reader.

The film and guest speaker coincided with Holocaust Remembrance Month. Hopefully, his words enlightened us all. His visit was a gift of immeasurable value. Write Chronologically or Thematically Decide whether to present the biography in chronological order or group information by themes to create a cohesive narrative. Include Relevant Details and Anecdotes Incorporate interesting facts, personal stories, and insights to make the biography engaging and relatable.

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