In 1993, when Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was released, I was well aware of its phenomenal success and still, it largely passed me by. It was only recently, fresh from my visit to Cracow, that I picked up a copy of Thomas Keneally’s book Schindler’s Ark at my local discount bookshop. This is the book on which Spielberg’s film is based.

The story of Schindler’s war-time activities is an astonishing one, minutely researched and conveyed by Keneally. For in a period in which between 11 and 17 million people were killed, including 6 million Jews, Oskar Schindler became increasingly determined to save as many Jews as he could from the death camps. As the war proceeded he took increasingly significant risks to this end. No wonder then that, with the end of the war in sight, members of the camp gave up remnants of jewellery and even gold teeth in order to make a gold ring for Oskar, bearing the inscription from the Talmud: He who saves a single life, saves the world entire.

Schindler challenges us in many ways. Keneally’s account of Schindler’s life tests simple views, for example, of what is good and what is evil. For whilst his growing passion to save the Jews in his workplace marks him out as a hero, he also carroused on a regular basis with all sorts of members of the Nazi party. And whilst some of this activity can be firmly put down to the kind of political awareness that made his commercial and other enterprises possible, other activities are not so easily explained away. Throughout his marriage, for example, he made no secret – not even to his wife – of his extra-marital affairs.

Schindler also challenges modern concepts of leadership and especially the idea that once you have acquired the skills of leadership you will always remain a leader. In the early part of the war, for example, Schindler enjoyed a large measure of commercial success. Towards the end of the war he gave this up in favour of guarding the Jews in his care (his factory in Brinnlitz did not produce a single shell and was funded entirely by the profits from the early years of the war). Following the war Schindler’s business enterprises were largely unsuccessful and his home, when he died in 1974, was a small apartment near the railway station in Frankfurt.

In a similar way, Schindler’s heroic acts of leadership on behalf of the ‘Schindler Jews’ during the war brought them to the point of freedom but no further. Keneally gives an account of the speech Schindler made both to the Jewish inmates of his factory camp and to the SS men who were responsible for guarding the camp following the announcement of the end of the war. This was a speech that was finely judged and not without risk – the kind of speech that defines leadership. By his words Schindler secured the peaceful departure of the SS guards and invited the suriving Jewish men and women to act in a humane and just way.

As an account of the extraordinary acts of the most unlikely of heroes, Schindler’s Ark is a ‘must read’ book. At the same time it raises challenging questions about what it means to be a leader, a hero, a ‘good man’.