Witness - Franciszek Palowski

This is not just another movie. We have a responsibility toward the world

remembering the Holocaust. It is a film about conscience'

Steven Spielberg

When Schindler's List was released in 1993 it was acclaimed as both a motion picture masterpiece and a reaffirmation of the human spirit. In 1994 it had twelve Academy Award Nominations and won in seven categories including Best Picture and Best Director. This book is the moving story of how Steven Spielberg spent ten years bringing Thomas Keneally's winning novel Schindler's Ark to the screen. Written by Franciszek Palowski - guide, interpreter and consultant on the 1989 Booker Prize movie from Spielberg's first research visit to Poland in 1992 - it is part diary, part chronicle of the massive undertaking in bringing the story to the screen, and part witness to the responsibility of telling the traumatic stories of the Schindler jews who are still alive today. The author acted as coordinator of the 1300 Schindler jews who travelled from all over the world to participate in re-telling the wartime events. Leopold Pfefferberg (now Page) who first inspired Thomas Keneally to write Schindler's story supplied the photographs which served as a model for re-creating the past and many are reproduced in this book for the first time.