Schindler's List

The state-sponsored, bureaucratic extermination program of the Nazis murdered at minimum 15 million people. The Nazis first terrorized—and exterminated en masse—people with disabilities, communists, and LGBTQ+ people, before setting their sights on racial, ethnic, and religious minorities. The vast majority of those murdered during the Holocaust were Jewish people, accounting for roughly six million of the total victims. Schindler’s List portrays characters who lived in the moment of the Holocaust, slowly coming to terms with the atrocity as the Nazis’ plans are revealed. The Nazis tried to hide their crimes, both from privileged “Aryan” citizens and from the Soviets, who were ideologically opposed to the Nazis and, after the war, broadcast the Nazis’ crimes globally. Keneally set out to write the novel in order to shed light on the Holocaust and the people who lived through it; Spielberg’s film continued this mission.

The people persecuted by the Nazis demonstrated resilience by continuing life as normally as they could despite their oppression. The Jewish people of DEF and Płaszów engaged in marriages, religious ceremonies, and other communal activities that defied their status as property of the state. The rate of death by suicide was high among Holocaust survivors, both during and after the war, as depicted in the novel by Clara Sternberg’s attempts to throw herself on Auschwitz’s electric fence. The traumas of the Nazi genocide left people scarred and often dead, but survivors kept some semblance of normalcy through communal activities, which the Nazis prohibited; for example, in the novel, Schindler must give his people illegal wine for their Sabbaths, and marriage is illegal in the camps. These activities were forbidden because they directly correlated to resilience: Community kept people alive. The Nazis worked to destroy semblances of community so that they could implement their plans without resistance. For example, the OD were turned against their fellow Jewish community members with the promise that they and their families would be guaranteed safety for their betrayal. In the novel, the backstabbing behavior of Symche Spira and his men generates suspicion between people in the ghetto because the Nazis wish to fracture the community; Spira and his fellow OD members are executed when they’re no longer useful—that is, when they’ve served their purpose of fracturing the Jewish community. Community was both the source of resilience in the face of the Holocaust’s horrors and the first point of attack in the Nazis’ schemes.

The Holocaust’s perpetrators didn’t escape their atrocities unscathed, however. Keneally notes that “Every SS officer had friends who had committed suicide” (174). The higher Goeth climbs in the SS ranks, the more he has insomnia and drinks alcohol. Henry Rosner moves an unnamed SS guest of Goeth’s to death by suicide by playing a particularly depressing ballad. Death by suicide, trauma, and substance abuse mark the lives of every SS officer in the novel. Keneally notes that “death hung over the passions of the SS” (240), suggesting that even the Nazis themselves are incapable of coping with their atrocities. Goeth’s frequent, lavish parties keep him and the other SS men of Płaszów liquored up as a guard against the atrocities they commit daily. Nazis like Goeth, unlike the people they persecute, don’t have a solid community and communal traditions to turn to in their time of need. This results in maladaptive ways of dealing with the atrocities they personally inflict daily, the two most common maladaptive mechanisms being death by suicide and substance use. Keneally’s focus on the Nazis’ self-destructive tendencies suggests that their vision of the world is incapable of overpowering the communal resilience of minority groups.