Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Schindler’s List, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Virtue and Selflessness
Anti-Semitism and Dehumanization
Power
Duty
Bureaucracy
Summary
Analysis
In the summer of 1941, the Judenrat enlist men into the OD, the Jewish ghetto police, by trying to portray the role as one of public service. The SS, meanwhile, see the OD as just another arm of the police force that will take orders. As time passes, more and more Jews begin to view the OD with suspicion, suspecting them of collaborating with the Nazis.
Early on, however, these suspicions are not as prevalent. Leopold Pfefferberg is one member, enlisting in part because he hopes that bringing order to the ghetto will encourage the Germans to go away faster. Even as a member of the OD, however, Pfefferberg continues to be involved in the smuggling of black-market goods. He is helped in part because he has an “Aryan” appearance.
Pfefferberg wants to do what’s right, but morality is often hard to figure out in chaotic occupied Poland. He has more leeway than other Jewish men in the ghetto because he doesn’t look stereotypically Jewish in the Nazis’ view, though this alone won’t be enough to save him.
Themes
Schindler visits the ghetto in April, partly to see a jeweler he’s commissioned. The jeweler tells him things are changing and becoming more repressive in the ghetto. Control of the ghetto has been handed down from Governor Frank to Julian Scherner, a middle-aged SS officer who looks like a standard bureaucrat (and whom Schindler has met at cocktail parties). Schindler suspects Scherner will be more in favor of putting Jewish people to work than exterminating them.
Schindler is an outsider to the ghetto, but he feels it’s his duty to find out what conditions inside are really like. Schindler was smart to begin building a relationship with Scherner early on, because suddenly Scherner has a lot more influence in the city. Generally, Schindler can’t predict transfers of power like this—he just knows as a basic principle that it’s always a good idea to make connections in case they ever turn out to be useful.
Themes
As the OD becomes increasingly controlled by the SS (and therefore more repressive), Pfefferberg starts looking for a way out. He finds a doctor named Alexander Biberstein and asks for a medical certificate to leave the OD. Biberstein says it’ll be difficult but tells him to fake a bad back. Despite some initial resistance—Pfefferberg is required to see a Gestapo doctor too—Pfefferberg is eventually discharged from the OD. The next day, Germany invades Russia. Schindler knows that if the Madagascar plan ever was real, it’s finished now.
Pfefferberg’s defection from the OD shows that the situation in the ghetto is getting worse. The OD is partially made up of Judenrat, which means that some Jewish people are even turning on their fellow Jewish citizens in the hope that it will earn them protection from the Nazis. This is yet another way in which life in Nazi-occupied Poland is morally ambiguous, as sometimes people’s only option to save themselves is to sacrifice others.
Themes
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