Schindler's List

“In times like these, [Schindler] said, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow. He’d hate to be a priest […] in an era like this, when life did not have the value of a pack of cigarettes. Stern agreed but suggested […] that the Biblical reference Herr Schindler had made could be summed up by a Talmudic verse which said that he who saves the life of one man saves the entire world.”

Stern and Schindler first connect over philosophical conversations on religion. Schindler often brings up religion with Stern, who’s more educated on the topic. Schindler’s understanding of Christianity can’t be reconciled with the Nazis’ actions that he witnessed in Cracow. In the Bible passage that he quotes, an all-powerful, non-human entity cares about the sanctity of life, while in the Talmudic verse, how individual humans approach the sanctity of life is more important.

“[Schindler] must have hoped, also, as the Jews of Cracow did, that after its initial fury the regime would relax and let people breathe. […] After all, both Oskar and the Jews told themselves, the Germans were a civilized nation.”

The belief that the Nazis had reached the peak of their discrimination is a recurring motif throughout the novel. This repetition implies that preconceived ideas about German civility gave the Nazis an advantage, allowing them to blindside others who didn’t believe that people could commit such evil actions.

“The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.”

As in the previous quote, the belief that each step of the Holocaust was the final step gave the Nazis an advantage. The people who were once harassed daily on the streets initially felt safe in the ghetto, where antisemitic Germans and Nazi collaborators didn’t harass them. The initial safety of the ghetto, and then of Płaszów, were red herrings to distract from the Nazis’ true intentions.

“Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. Humans were incurable that way. […] People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.”

Human tenacity regardless of the odds is a recurring theme throughout the novel. The Nazis never succeeded in cowing the people that they brutalized, no matter how brutal they became.

“An SS NCO turned up—a grave middle-aged face staring in at him. He didn’t look like a man who exercised Poles to death or ruptured kidneys with his boots, but of course, that was one of the strengths of torture: you didn’t expect it from a man whose features were those of someone’s country uncle.”

“Someone’s country uncle” is a powerful image that powerfully conveys the novel’s ideas about evil. Evil was committed by everyday people, not by cartoonishly exaggerated villains.

“[What] his curtness covered was dismay at those crowds at Prokocim who, for want of a blue sticker, stood waiting for the new and decisive symbol of their status, the cattle car, to be hauled by heavy engine across their range of vision. Now, the cattle cars told them, we are all beasts together.”

Schindler’s desperate scramble to rescue his workers at Prokocim showed him the reality of the Nazis’ plans. The cattle cars symbolically equated the oppressed minorities to livestock. The Nazis’ use of equipment meant for transporting livestock was an intentional dehumanization of the people being transported.

“[If] there was no shame, it meant there was official sanction. No one could find refuge anymore behind the idea of German culture […]. They permitted witnesses, such witnesses as the red toddler, because they believed the witnesses all would perish too.”

The novel highlights the Nazis’ shamelessness many times. Their shamelessness about their crimes uses the lofty reputation of “German culture” as a shield at first. The Nazis’ self-assuredness hints at the end goal of their genocidal project.

“To write [the number of people killed in concentration camps daily] now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.”

Keneally notes the hindsight and distance through which people learn about the horrors of the Holocaust. For people living during that time, however, the number of victims was a “fundamental shock” that defied what people thought an evil regime might be capable of.

“[After] the established methodology of SS liquidation had been applied to the Podgórze ghetto, people would be grateful for the barracks of Płaszów. Even those with Aryan papers would come crawling here […]. For most of them, the [fence] wire was needed only as a prop, so that they might reassure themselves that they were prisoners against their will.”

The Nazis repeatedly escalated their hatred and violence, thus shrinking the areas of the world that were safe for Jewish people. First, they harassed Jews in the streets, making the ghetto seem safe. Then, they brutalized the ghetto, making the labor camps seem safe. The Nazis continued this escalation to corral people into extermination camps.

“[The] shooting of this Diana Reiter, the cancelling of her Western European diploma, had this practical value: that no erector of huts or roads in Płaszów would consider himself essential to the task—that if Miss Diana Reiter could not save herself with all her professional skill, the only chance of the others was prompt and anonymous labor.”

“Prompt and anonymous labor” hints at the Holocaust’s economic goals. On the way to obliterating the Jewish population, the Nazis wished to enslave them as a labor force to fuel the war machine. The camps were part of a larger, economic model that the Nazis aimed for: cheap labor to both fuel the war and produce goods for Aryan citizens.

“Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide. SS training documents, written to combat these futile casualties, pointed out the simplemindedness of believing that because the Jew bore no visible weapons he was bereft of social, economic, or political arms.”

Keneally links the high suicide rates of the SS to their irrationally paranoid views on Jewish people. SS agents were trained to see every Jewish person—no matter how harmless, abused, or malnourished—as a potential threat akin to an armed-to-the-teeth enemy. This paranoiac view of other people took its toll on SS agents and led to high rates of death by suicide.

“The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out his front door and murdered a prisoner at random, there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on Chujowa Górka, as a unique event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon’s morning routine.”

Every escalation of Nazi violence and terror was viewed as a “unique event” that couldn’t possibly become an everyday occurrence. This tendency was partly a psychological shield for the individual and partly a result of biased views on German culture as somehow particularly civilized and elevated.

“Seen in peacetime, the gallows of Płaszów and Auschwitz would intimidate not by their solemnity but by their ordinariness.”

Keneally’s conception of human evil as perfectly normal in appearance extends to the Nazis’ infrastructure. Nothing about individual Nazis or their infrastructure conveyed their evil. This lack of legible evil on the surface only heightened the evil underneath through their “ordinariness.”

“Bosko had gone to the forest because he had no other option. He lacked the financial resources with which Oskar greased the system. But it accorded with the natures of both men that one be found with nothing but a cast-off rank and uniform, that the other would make certain he had cash and trade goods. […] In proportion to their natures, the moral disgust of both Party members, Bosko and Schindler, was equal, even if Bosko manifested his by leaving his empty uniform on a coat hanger in Podgórze, while Oskar put on his big Party pin and went to deliver high-class liquor to mad Amon Goeth in Płaszów.”

Bosko’s story reveals how resisting Nazi oppression had many different avenues, which largely depended on an individual’s socioeconomic background. Bosko could never be a passive resister like Schindler. He lacked access to privilege and wealth, so he had to take a more direct, active, and risky role in fighting the Nazis.

“The Waffen SS who had run [the concentration camps] had been ordered to dynamite the chambers and the crematoria, to leave no recognizable trace, and had then been posted to Italy to fight partisans. The immense complex at Auschwitz, in its safe ground in Upper Silesia, would complete the great task in the East, and once that was concluded, the crematoria would be plowed under the earth. For without the evidence of the crematoria, the dead could offer no witness, were a whisper behind the wind, an inconsequential dust on the aspen leaves.”

The infrastructure of the concentration camps bore metaphorical witness to the Nazis’ crimes. Since the Nazis didn’t wish to leave a single witness, even the infrastructure had to go.

“Hitler was more than a man: he was a system with ramifications. Even if he died, it was no guarantee the system would alter its character.”

Hitler was a symbolic figurehead for a system of beliefs, practices, and political infrastructure that demanded white supremacy over people deemed non-Aryan. Although Schindler had high hopes for Hitler’s assassination, Keneally’s view of evil as not extraordinary means that the death of one man would likely not abolish the system of bureaucratic evil that the Nazi party thrived on.

“It was a heady thing to withhold your labor. Everywhere else in Europe, the slaves worked to the limit of their 600 calories per day, hoping to impress some foreman and delay the transfer to the death camp. But here in Brinnlitz was the intoxicating freedom to use the shovel at half-pace and still survive.”

The economic logic of the Nazis demanded every ounce of labor from prisoners, both to enrich corporation shareholders like those of Krupp and Farben and to fuel the war machine. Should prisoners withhold their labor, both profits and the war effort would suffer. The freedom for DEF workers to withhold their labor is an act of autonomy and resistance that was unparalleled in Nazi territory at the time.

“The moral universe had not so much decayed [in Auschwitz]. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the earth’s malice—a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out.”

The observation that language “flew inside out” conveys the difficulty of communicating the horrors of the camps. The inversion of morality in the camps created a disorienting effect, while the vaporization of “histories” made them irrecoverable. The goal of the camps, as Keneally presents them, was to create a void of meaning and language around the genocide.

“When they saw themselves shaven and in odds and ends of clothing, they broke into laughter—the hilarity of the very young. The sight of little Mila Pfefferberg, down to 70 pounds, occupying garments cut for a fat lady had them reeling with hilarity. Half-dead and dressed in their paint-coded rags, they pranced, modeled, mimed, and giggled like schoolgirls.”

Laughter didn’t cease for the concentration camp prisoners, even when they were close to death. The ability to laugh together in such circumstances exemplifies how human tenacity and community defied the Holocaust’s horrors.

“One wonders if some of Emilie’s kindnesses in this matter may not have been absorbed into the Oskar legend, the way the deeds of minor heroes have been subsumed by the figure of Arthur or Robin Hood.”

Keneally suspects that many of Emilie Schindler’s own actions have been attributed to Schindler over the years. The erasure of women throughout modern history is common, and Emilie herself evidently cared for the plight of the prisoners independently of her husband.

“[The letter] said that Oskar’s antitank shells were so badly produced that they failed all quality-control tests. They were imprecisely calibrated, and because they had not been tempered at the right heat they split under testing. Oskar was ecstatic at this telegram, pushing it toward Stern and Pemper, making them read it. Pemper remembers that he made another of his outrageous statements. ‘It’s the best birthday present I could have got. Because I know now that no poor bastard has been killed by my product.’”

The move to Brinnlitz allows Schindler to stop his complicity in the Nazis’ war efforts and, by extension, their genocidal campaign. Schindler’s relief that his goods are no longer killing people reveals the guilt he felt for years over the goods his factory produced.

“When you saw Goeth […] you saw death.”

Nazis and death are synonymous in Keneally’s portrayal of Schindler’s life. The Nazis thought so, too, given their use of death-related imagery like the Death’s Head.

“He who saves a single life saves the world entire.”

This Talmudic verse, which challenges Schindler’s worldview, is inscribed on the ring that his prisoners give him as a parting gift. Schindler’s wearing this ring and verse symbolizes the importance of the verse to his life and actions.