Schindler's Ark

But for the present, Hauptsturmführer Amon Goeth, a sadist when drunk, was an exemplary Viennese gentleman.

“He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”

Oskar was unstoppable.

“She was dominated by Oskar,” Lutek would say. “As we all were. Yet she was her own woman.”

It would not surprise anyone to find out later that no such reunion occurred anywhere else in stricken Europe. That there had never been, and would not be, any other Auschwitz rescue like this one.

The list is an absolute good. The list is life.

It can be said to begin with that Oskar was a gambler, was a sentimentalist who loved the transparency, the simplicity of doing good; that Oskar was by temperament an anarchist who loved to ridicule the system; and that beneath the hearty sensuality lay a capacity to be outraged by human savagery, to react to it and not to be overwhelmed.

For Hitler was more than a man: he was a system with ramifications. Even if he died, it was no guarantee the system would alter its character.

If it was true, said Oskar, then Germans, ordinary Germans like himself, could begin to redeem themselves.
Purely because someone close to Hitler had had the
guts to remove him from the earth. It’s the end of the
SS, said Oskar. Himmler will be in jail
by morning.

He managed it as one would manage a country
fair. When it began, on the morning of Sunday,
May 7, the Appellplatz was hung with
banners: “FOR EVERY PRISONER,
APPROPRIATE WORK!”