To conceive of the unendurable present as part of a story with a significant plot and uncertain outcome presupposed an outside world of shared meanings and moral continuity. It assumed human recognition; a day of reckoning. Because the Holocaust provides an objective correlative of Hell, outstripping the craziest nightmares and the cruellest dreams, the imagination is constantly challenged, and soon exhausted, by the effort of grasping it. As we know from government archives, Whitehall officials refused to credit what were described as 'the exaggerations … of these wailing Jews'. In the face of strained credulity and closed minds, new words are always needed. But any novelist who attempts to do justice to these facts comes up against the limitations of his own creative vision and energy, while feeling confined by the limitations of literature itself….

Schindler's Ark is based on the wartime recollections of 50 Jews, now living in Israel...