Schindler’s List
An ethnic German, Oskar Schindler was born April 28, 1908, in Zwittau, Austria-Hungary, what is now Moravia in the Czech Republic. As a young Catholic child, he had never gone without anything but the best. At 19 he married Emilie, but was not a good husband. In fact, he enjoyed drinking, gambling and womanising.
Having failed in his own family business, Oskar arrived in Krakow in southern Poland at the beginning of the war with the sole intention of making money. He dived headfirst into the black-market and the underworld and soon made friends with the local Gestapo bigwigs, softening them up with women, money and illicit booze. His newfound connections helped him acquire a factory which he ran with the cheapest labour around: Jewish. In fact, the Jews did not even get paid as the money they earned went straight to the Nazis.
At first he seemed like any other greedy German industrialist, driven by profit and unmoved by the means of gaining that profit. But somewhere along the line, something changed. He succeeded in his quest for riches, but by the end of the war he had spent everything he made on keeping 1,300 Jewish men and women alive.
Not long after acquiring his “Emalia” factory –which produced enamel goods and munitions to supply the German front— the removal of Jews from the city of Krakow to death camps began in earnest. Schindler's Jewish accountant put him in touch with the few Jews with any remaining wealth. They invested in his factory, and in return they would be able to work there and perhaps be spared. He was persuaded to hire more Jewish workers, designating their skills as “essential,” paying off the Nazis so they would allow them to stay in Krakow. Schindler was making money, but everyone in his factory was fed, no-one was beaten, no-one was killed.
The Jews were herded into the main ghetto in Krakow from all over the countryside. Those with a blauschein –a blue sticker to prove that the carrier is an essential worker– were able to leave the ghetto to work, others were gradually taken off in trains to what they thought were farming settlements but in fact to concentration camps set up as places of mass killing.
Amon Goeth -the Commandant at the Plaszow Concentration Camp
Thomas Kennally, an Australian author who wrote Schindler’s List, states that no one is certain what it was that made Schindler change from a moneymaking entrepreneur to a life saving hero. Schindler himself, after the war, never really explained why he did what he did. However, the key moment in the book and the film is when he witnesses the massacre of the ghetto. Spielberg chose to show the scared, innocent little girl in the red coat hiding in the ghetto as a symbol of human frailty and vulnerability. She later appears in the pile of bodies being burnt. The idea is that this is perhaps what changed Schindler’s mind and made him save ‘his’ Jewish people.
Schindler managed to make a deal with Amon Goeth, the commandant of the camp in Plaszow to buy Jews from him to take to his own camp in Czechoslovakia away from the brutality of Poland. Schindler spent all his money saving 1200 Jews by bribing local and Nazi officials to stay away from his factory and his Jews.
Schindler saved most of his workers when he transferred his factory to Brunnlitz (Sudetenland) in October 1944.
When the war ended, Schindler fled to Argentina with his wife and a handful of his workers and bought a farm. In 1958, he abandoned his land, his wife and his mistress to return to Germany. He spent the remaining years of his life dividing his time between Germany and Israel, where, although he was honoured and taken care of by his “Schindlerjuden,” he died in relative obscurity.
He died at Hildesheim, Germany, in 1974 after being declared a “righteous gentile” by the Yad Vashem (the Israeli committee to remember the righteous people who helped Jews in the Holocaust).
Schindler saved over 1000 Jews who have now grown to 6000, more than the remaining 4000 Jews who live in Poland today.
Questions about Schindler’s List
1. When the story begins, how is Oskar Schindler portrayed?
2. When Oskar rescues Izak Stern from the deportation train to Auschwitz he says, “What if I got here five minutes later? Then where would I be?” Why do you think Schindler says this?
3. If Schindler is celebrated as a good person in this film, then how do is it possible to explain the following:
a) he happily occupied a fully furnished apartment recently and forcibly evacuated by a wealthy Jewish family,
b) he happily associated himself very freely with the Nazi authorities,
c) he profited from slave labour.
4. Does Schindler satisfactorily justify himself and his actions throughout the war in his tearful confession at the end of the film before he has to hide from the allies?
5. What were Schindler’s faults?
6. What were Schindler’s good points?
7. At the end Schindler is given a ring with the Hebrew inscription from the Talmud, “He who saves one life will in time save the world” – what do you think is meant by this?
Oskar Schindler's grave in Jerusalem
Go back to Lesson 1 (What was the Holocaust?)
Go back to Lesson 2 (Racism and Prejudice)
Go back to Lesson 3 (The Holocaust and You)
Go to Lesson 5 (Man's Inhumanity to Man)
Go to Lesson 6 (The Milgram Experiment)
Go to Lesson 7 (God and the Holocaust)