Schindler’s List

At his factory, Schindler feels certain that the girl in red he saw (Genia) didn’t survive the Aktion. He begins paying attention to who the perpetrators of these atrocities are, in hopes that such information will one day be useful.

The Judenrat don’t inform ghetto dwellers about the horrors of the camps, feeling that it would only cause more panic. Schindler and many others in the ghetto first learn about the camps from a pharmacist named Bachner, who returns from a camp eight days after being shipped off from the Prokocim depot. No one knows how Bachner escaped, but he tells of the showers where people are gassed en masse and of pyramids of corpses. (Though Bachner’s information about the camps is commonplace knowledge today, in 1942, it was shocking.)

That summer of 1942, Schindler solidifies his ownership of the Rekord estate. Jereth from the box factory helps him build a refuge on his property (which Schindler lies to bureaucrats about, saying it is a rest area for night-shift workers). Schindler knows that he must be cautious, because more and more influential men are getting put into Auschwitz.

Danka Dresner, cousin of “Redcap” Genia, is 14. She works as a cleaning woman at a Luftwaffe base, but she is still vulnerable to being taken away to a camp. When SS soldiers come to her neighborhood, Mrs. Dresner takes Danka next door to a neighbor with a false wall. The neighbor’s elderly parents are already hiding in the false wall because rumor has it an Aktion is coming, and they are vulnerable too. When Mrs. Dresner and Danka arrive, the neighbor says Danka can fit but not Mrs. Dresner, even though there is plenty of space.

Mrs. Dresner tells Danka to hide with the neighbor’s parents behind the fake wall. Since she has nowhere to hide, she figures she may as well go outside. She is stopped by an OD boy whom her son knows. He tells her to hide under some stairs and that the searchers will be gone in 10 minutes. The OD boy goes outside and says that no one is home at the house. Eventually, the SS men take his word and move on. Mrs. Dresner seems to be safe, but she knows there will be more sweeps in the future.

A Jewish resistance group uses stolen SS uniforms to plant a bomb in a restaurant, killing seven SS men and wounding 40 more. Schindler is uneasy, because he knows he could’ve been there. The resisters also arrange for two of OD chief Spira’s lieutenants to be killed by Gestapo. Others, however, take on different forms of resistance, like one Jewish man who has to make a list for deportations and puts himself and his family at the top. Schindler considers his own plans for resistance.