Searching For Schindler

In 1980, Tom Keneally was in Beverly Hills returning from the Sorrento film festival where The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith had been showing. Looking for a new briefcase, Tom meets the Polish-Jewish Leopold Pfefferberg Page, aka Poldek. His life for the next few years is taken over by this charismatic and driven man and the story he wants shared.

The story is, of course, that of "the all-drinking, all-screwing, all black-marketeering Nazi. But to me he was Jesus Christ, Oskar Schindler." And Poldek shared with Tom the story of Schindler's Ark, which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately became the Oscar award-winning film Schindler's List.

Schindler, the ruined Catholic hedonist, had something ambiguous about him that appealed to the ex-seminarian Tom Keneally, who still struggled with his own Catholicism and his humanist view of the world. Searching for Schindler is very much Tom's journey. He reflects on his early days as a writer with quite a bit of success and how this book, the people he met, and the film it became, changed his life.