OSKAR SCHINDLER by David M. Crowe Westview Press/Perseus, 19.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 706, ISBN 081333375 19.99 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.25 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 800 4848

Most biographies are written against a sketchy background of historical events drawn with just enough broad strokes of the brush to provide context for a life. Martin Crowe's book, apart from the affecting last chapters on the autumn of Schindler's life, is just the opposite. The milieu in which Oskar Schindler, the famous saviour of Krakow ghetto Jews during the Holocaust, operated is presented in exhaustive and brightly lit detail, while Schindler himself haunts the pages as a shadowy figure, elusive to the eye. The explanation is twofold. Crowe's indefatigability as a researcher is beyond question. But Schindler was a minor figure in the great scheme of Nazi things and the evidence on which to build a biography is flimsy and bafflingly inconclusive. The greater part of it is to be found in those most tricky of source materials for the historian, personal memoirs and other after-the-event accounts, not least from Oskar himself. The second reason is that Crowe has not really set out to write a biography at all. His book is an investigation of the question whether Schindler is rightly to be considered a hero worthy of Jewish beatification as a 'righteous Gentile' and if the answer is yes, why and how did he pull it off?

Running through the book is a commentary on the versions of Schindler known to millions from Keneally's biographical 'novel' and Spielberg's film. Viewed as history, the film comes off badly. Take two key episodes. Spielberg, following Keneally, makes Schindler an eye-witness of the massacre of the children in the Kinderheim in the Krakow ghetto in March 1943. He almost certainly did not witness it. And though there may be little doubt that the event shocked him deeply, there is no evidence that it was a road-to-Damascus moment, transforming him into a warrior against the Holocaust. Nor did the famous scene in which Schindler dictates the names of 1,000 Jews to be saved from the death camps by removal from Krakow to his factory in Moravia ever take place. Indeed, Schindler played no direct part in the drawing up of the list.

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