Author's Encore To 'Schindler'

Like Oskar Schindler, who employs Jews in his factory to protect them from the Nazis and to profit from their labor, Gerstein uses various subterfuges as he pretends to play along with the Nazi regime. Nonetheless, Keneally notes, every Jew saved by Schindler "would draw a different line between his altruism and opportunism -- the lines run together like the Orange and Blue lines in the Metro."

By contrast, according to Keneally, Gerstein is a more "conventionally virtuous" character: Once he decides to put his life on the line, his moral compass swings a bit less wildly in every direction. He becomes the only SS officer on record to notify the West and the Vatican about the extermination camps.

Keneally dubs Gerstein a whistle-blower rather than a martyr. Gerstein does not throw in his lot with the victims, although he does sacrifice his safety to expose the Nazi plans. In "Either Or," one of his most heroic acts is deciding to destroy a shipment of Zyklon B that he pretends is contaminated and thus unsuitable for use in the gas chambers.

Gerstein ultimately develops such deep sympathy for the Jewish victims that he makes a fruitless visit to the papal nuncio (John Lescault) to plead for the intervention of the Catholic Church. He is joined by Pastor Martin Niemoeller (John Dow) and other Protestant ministers in resisting the Third Reich.

"Anti-Semitism may be the cultural bread and butter of Christendom," Keneally asserts, "but when these Christian pastors in Germany see the human face, they can't live with its obliteration."

A major motivation in writing the play, Keneally says, was his interest in exploring what it means to be a whistle-blower. As a contemporary example, he cites those who challenged the Bush administration on the intelligence that led to the war in Iraq and were consequently "disbelieved, discredited and destroyed."

Wavering between "moral certitude and moral bewilderment," Keneally says, the whistle-blower often risks his own life and the lives of those dearest to him for those of people he doesn't know. And the mind behind "Schindler's Ark" remains most interested in the moral anguish faced by those who refuse to be silent in the face of evil.

"These moral crises," Keneally says, "always make a great story."