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
Goeth has two young typists in his office: a German named Frau Kochmann and a prisoner named Mietek Pemper. Pemper will eventually work for Schindler, but in the summer of 1944, he is still very worried about the future. He has a photographic memory, which is what attracts Goeth’s attention but will ironically become important later, in leading to the hanging of Goeth.
The Nazi bureaucracy uses paperwork to obscure and legitimize the brutal methods used in concentration camps, but this paperwork also leaves behind a trail that people like Pemper will be able to piece together after the war.
Themes
As a typist, Pemper sees a memorandum saying that many Jews and dissidents from recently conquered Hungary will need to be kept in Płaszów. Goeth’s response (which Pemper either read or typed) is that they are up to capacity, but that he might be able to accommodate new prisoners if he is allowed to “liquidate the unproductive element inside the camp” and force prisoners to double-bunk. Typhus prevents Goeth from doing the latter, but he is allowed to ship out some “reject” prisoners to Auschwitz-Birkenau. In one day, he gets rid of as many people as Schindler will eventually save, saying that his Aktion is for “health” purposes. Many children, like Olek Rosner, will either be rounded up or forced into hiding.
Goeth’s anti-Semitism causes him to underestimate the resourcefulness of prisoners like Pemper. The fact that Goeth allows a Jewish prisoner to type such sensitive documents suggests that Goeth is so secure of his dominant position that even a prisoner with information of classified documents will be powerless to act on them. The concerns about typhus aren’t humanitarian—if an outbreak occurs, it’s a risk not just to prisoners but also to German guards and Germans in the surrounding town.
Themes
