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 fall of 1942, an Austrian dentist named Sedlacek comes to Cracow asking about Schindler. Pretending to be on a business trip, he is actually part of a Zionist rescue organization in Budapest and has heard about what Schindler is doing.
The fact that Sedlacek is part of a Zionist organization and heard about Schindler (despite being hundreds of miles away in Hungary) suggests that Jewish rescue efforts are becoming become more organized as the war ramps up.
Themes
Dr. Sedlacek has a friend named Franz Von Korab in the Wehrmacht, who is rumored to have a Jewish grandmother. Von Korab takes Sedlacek to Schindler, then leaves them alone. Sedlacek asks Schindler what he really thinks about what the Nazis are doing to Jews. Schindler says that what is happening is beyond belief.
Schindler tells Sedlacek about the recent events in Poland, and even Sedlacek can’t believe the extent of it. Sedlacek asks him to come to his organization’s headquarters in Hungary to give a direct report. Later, at another meeting, Sedlacek gives Schindler money from his organization for his efforts, which Schindler passes on to his Jewish contacts.
Sedlacek’s surprised response shows how good the Nazis were at hiding what they were doing from the rest of the world, at least during the early phases of the war.
Themes
Mordecai Wulkan is a jeweler who is visited one night by one of Spira’s OD. He’s told that the SS urgently need four jewelers. Wulkan is taken to the SS Economic and Administrative Office, where he’s brought down to the basement and shown suitcases full of valuable jewels. He begins to sort the jewelry, knowing where it came from and fearing that the Germans might eventually want his own gold teeth. After his work there is through, he gets a job in a metal factory, getting to know a comparatively moderate SS man who offers him work as a maintenance man at a barracks. Wulkan remains pessimistic, however, that anyone like the SS man can truly save him.
Wulkan’s work with the jewelry shows the brutal outcome of the ghetto liquidation. Though the extermination of Jewish residents is ostensibly an ideological issue for the Nazis, it also becomes an economic one, because it offers many opportunities for people to plunder Jewish people’s money and possessions. Wulkan is worldly enough to know that even seemingly friendly SS officers can’t offer real protection.
Themes
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