"In those uneasy two days, between the declaration of peace and its accomplishment, one of the prisoners, a jeweler named Licht, had been making a present for Oskar, something more expressive than the metal stud box hed been given on his birthday. Licht was working with a rare quantity of gold. … Licht melted the gold down and by noon on May 8 was engraving an inscription on the inner circle in Hebrew. It was a Talmudic verse which Stern had quoted to Oskar in the front office of Buchheisters in October 1939. "He who saves a single life saves the world entire."
Thomas Michael Keneally is an Australian novelist, playwright, essayist, and actor. He is best known for his historical fiction novel Schindler's Ark, the story of Oskar Schindler's rescue of Jews during the Holocaust, which won the Booker Prize in 1982. The book would later be adapted into Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List, which won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
"Peter Thompson: Was one of the things that really attracted you to the story, the obvious moral ambiguity of Schindler? Tom Keneally: Absolutely, it was the fact that you couldnt say where opportunism ended and altruism began. And I like the subversive fact that the spirit breatheth where it will. That is that good will emerged from the most unlikely places."
Thomas Keneally"In times like these, he said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. Hed hate to be a priest, Herr Schindler said, in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a packet of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested, in the spirit of the discussion, that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man, saves the entire world."
Thomas Keneally"Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother-fluid of historians. But it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue."
Thomas Keneally"The more Orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan—"An hour of life is still life."
Thomas Keneally"The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All round its cramped margins lies the gulf."
Thomas Keneally