Schindler’s Artk (1982) by esteemed Australian writer Thomas Keneally tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party who saves the lives of 1200 Jews during the Holocaust and who therefore becomes an unlikely hero.

Along the way, Keneally includes accounts of many of the Jews forced to live in the Krakow (Cracow in Keneally, a common spelling until the 1990s) Ghetto and in the Plaszow concentration camp.

Among them are 3 orphans:

There is the 3-year child being cared for by the Dresner family after a Polish couple decided they couldn’t “keep a Jewish child in the countryside any more” This child loved to wear red: “red cap, red coat, small red boots (Keneally, Schindler, 100).

There’s also Rebecca Tannenbaum who at least “had not been bereft of kindly aunts and uncles” (Keneally, Schindler, 232). At nineteen she is a manicurist for the brutal commandant and marries Joseph Bau.

Then there’s a 13-year-old orphan who was able to save himself “with that infallible instinct which had once characterised the movement of the red-capped child…And as with Redcap, no one had seen him (Keneally, Schindler, 259).

Schindler’s Ark won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was adapted for the multi-award film Schindler’s List by Steven Spielberg in 1993.