THE article that follows is, so far as we can determine, not only the earliest reportage on Oskar Schindler but the only account that includes direct contemporary interviews with Schindler himself, as well as with the accountant Itzhak Stern.
The story of Schindler and Stern, the central figures in Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, became known to the world at large primarily through Thomas Keneally's 1982 novel Schindler's Ark. Keneally, an Australian, never met Schindler, who died in 1974, but thirteen years ago in Los Angeles he did meet one of the more than 1,000 Jews whom Schindler had saved from the gas chambers. This chance encounter set him off on his research. Although Keneally's book about the opportunistic Nazi businessman who ended up redeeming himself at the vortex of the Holocaust was factual, he decided to call it a novel because of the imagined or "re-created" dialogue that he felt was necessary to the narrative.
Unknown to Keneally or Spielberg, another writer--a Canadian-- had stumbled on the Schindler story nearly forty-six years ago. Herbert Steinhouse, a Montreal-born journalist, novelist, and broadcaster, flew with the RCAF during the war and afterwards became an information officer for the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). While stationed in Paris, he signed on with Reuters but in 1949 jumped to the CBC as its Paris bureau chief.
Read Full Article »