Them and Us

Schindler’s List by Thomas Keneally, 1982, is fiction.  It is a novel.  It’s a creation, designed by Keneally.  This book is loosely constructed from about 50 of Oskar Schindler’s survivors of the holocaust.  A story based on actual events, no fuzzy line here, it is, fiction. But if, say, Keneally went undercover as Schindler’s business cohort for several weeks, excused himself from duty, returned to wearing a journalist’s hat, and then wrote a story about the 50 nonfiction Schindler survivors, then we might have cause for ambiguity. 

Albeit for instance, there are sentences in this work where Keneally writes, “We know, for example, that it distressed Frau Schindler that her son, like his father, was a negligent Catholic.”  The, “We know,” is drawn from nonfiction research yet the book, fiction.

Schindler’s List by Keneally isn’t only fact filled fiction, I think it’s good. 

Anyway, how can we be a whole, modern people, while knowing this holocaust happened, so, recently?

Permanent yellow stripes on their bodies, ovens…it can’t help but give you pause, as a human being?  No? 

Do let us pause and let us consider, for if it is not us the next time it will be, as we are us and we are them.

Sheila Cull
Twin Cull ©