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
People like Goeth and Bosch believe that Schindler has some virus-like condition that makes him sympathize with Jews. Sussmuth seems to be one who “caught” Schindler’s disease. Over the winter of 1944 to 1945, they plan to get 3,000 more women out of Auschwitz. They will be sent to factories in Moravia that are harsh but endurable, camps that are perhaps small enough to escape the extermination orders coming to the bigger camps.
Because Schindler has invested so much in building relationships with Goeth and Bosch, they see Schindler as a victim instead of an opponent. Schindler, meanwhile, looks for ways to expand his rescue effort, as saving his prisoners has seemingly emboldened him to try to save even more lives.
Themes
Schindler has an almost religious drive to keep doing more, so he applies for 30 metalworkers, partly because the request will help validate this camp. Moshe Henigman is one of the 30. Previously, he was one of 10,000 prisoners at Auschwitz who were marched in the cold to Gröss-Rosen, of which only 1,200 would survive.
In the context of the Holocaust, during which millions of people were killed, 30 lives isn’t very many. But Schindler seems to be living by the Talmudic verse that Stern quoted for him years ago (“he who saves a single life saves the world entire”) and chooses to help anyone he possibly can.
Themes
Advancing Russians continue to seize more territory. As news of Russian advances comes in, Henigman and the other survivors of the march are taken to an SS compound. There, he is surprised to be put in a railway car with 30 others and even given food for the trip. He is even more amazed when he arrives at Brinnlitz and finds “a camp left where men and women worked together, where there were no beatings, no Kapo.” (Henigman slightly exaggerates: there was still some segregation and rare cases of beatings.) Though Schindler was able to save Henigman and the other 29 tinsmiths, this is only a fragment of the 10,000 originally in Henigman’s group.
Henigman provides an eyewitness account of what it was like to come to Schindler’s camp at Brinnlitz as an outsider. Keneally is careful to point out that Henigman exaggerates a bit, although perhaps after the conditions Henigman endured, it’s not surprising that he would be so amazed by Schindler’s camp.
Themes
Schindler makes another costly deal with the Gestapo about prisoners. One subject of this deal is Benjamin Wrozlawski, who is an inmate at an Auschwitz subsidiary camp called Gliwice. When the threat of an impending Russian attack causes the Nazis to start shipping prisoners out of Gliwice, Wrozlawski and a friend named Roman Wilner jump off a train, managing to escape before being arrested in a small village and taken to the Gestapo offices. A Gestapo officer tells them that nothing bad will happen to them, though they don’t believe it. About two weeks later, they are released and amazed to find themselves at Brinnlitz, feeling just as amazed as Henigman. They are part of 11 escapees that Schindler arranged to take in from the Gestapo, prisoners who otherwise would have been shot.
Schindler once again strains the pretense that his prisoners are actually doing useful work for the war effort. He is effectively banking on his own personal connections and the goodwill he’s amassed (as well as the money) in order to get what he wants and avoiding interference.
Themes
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In 1963, Dr. Steinberg tells the story of another one of Schindler’s wildly generous whims. Steinberg was a doctor in a small Sudeten work camp. He heard a rumor about Brinnlitz and visited the camp to see if he could pick up some supplies to take back. He took food back to his own camp, and his medical opinion is that this extra nutrition helped save 50 lives.
Though Schindler focuses on the prisoners at his own camp, he knows that he can do the most good by helping others too, which is why he allows Steinberg to have some of his supplies. Again, 50 lives is a small number compared to the millions who died in the Holocaust, but Dr. Steinberg’s gratitude suggests that gestures like these are nonetheless meaningful and worthwhile.
Themes
One of Schindler’s most amazing feats involves the prisoners from Goleszów, a quarry and cement plant in Auschwitz. As the various parts of Auschwitz are being disbanded, 120 quarry workers from Goleszów are packed into two cattle cars. Many others in Auschwitz are also being moved around at this time. Dolek Horowitz is shipped away to Mauthausen, though his son Richard will stay and eventually be found by Russians. Henry Rosner and Olek, meanwhile, survive a perilous seven-day trip to Dauchau where half of the people in their car die.
The experience Goleszów prisoners’ experience viscerally demonstrates how lucky Schindler’s prisoners are compared to some of the alternatives. It also shows how transportation between camps may seem innocuous but was in fact one of the deadliest parts of the Holocaust.
Themes
The Goleszów quarry prisoners will face an even worse trip than the Rosners. They stay in their train cars for more than 10 days, with the doors frozen shut, surviving off ice scraped from the inside walls. They are refused at many camps because the biggest killing machines are winding down, and the prisoners have no industrial value. Sometime near the end of January, they are abandoned in Zwittau, where Schindler hears about them from a friend.
On the one hand, the Goleszów prisoners end up being particularly unlucky because their journey occurs during a transitional period at the concentration camps. The fact that any of them survive, however, is due to their tremendous luck in being abandoned near Schindler.
Themes
On a morning with subzero temperatures, Schindler orders for the two cars of Goleszów prisoners to be taken to Brinnlitz. Pfefferberg gets welding gear to cut open the cattle car doors. Inside, they find a gruesome scene, with a pyramid of frozen corpses and none of the survivors weighing more than 75 pounds.
Even at such a late period of the war, men like Schindler and Pfefferberg encounter new horrors. The graphic image of the pyramid of frozen corpses and emaciated survivors is a testament to the Nazis’ brutality and callous dismissal of Jewish people’s lives.
Themes
Liepold doesn’t want to take the survivors and says there’s no way anyone could pretend they’re munitions workers. Schindler admits this is true but asks to pay for their labor, anyway, saying he’ll use them once they recover. Though Liepold still disapproves, he sees an opportunity to please Hassebroeck by getting more labor fees on the book.
Liepold’s desire to look good for his boss is stronger than his commitment to Nazi ideology. Schindler intuits this and uses it to his advantage, rescuing prisoners who have very little value as laborers.
Themes
Schindler refuses to have any of the corpses burned. In the past, he caused trouble with Liepold over this issue, at one point allowing a prisoner who died of cancer to be buried instead of burned. When the Goleszów cars arrive, Schindler goes a step further by buying a plot for a Jewish cemetery. He even pays a middle-aged SS officer a small sum to keep the burial area well-maintained.
Schindler’s refusal to burn corpses is a symbolic refusal of Nazi principles. By burning bodies, the concentration camps treat prisoners like garbage to be disposed of. Schindler reasserts deceased people’s dignity by giving them a ritual burial, and the ritual also helps the survivors maintain some semblance of normalcy and dignity.
Themes
Meanwhile, Emilie Schindler is making her own deals. She procures frostbite medicine and other necessities to help the Goleszów prisoners. After some early deaths, there are no more among the Goleszów people.
Fewer stories exist about Emilie’s role in helping prisoners survive, but from passages like these, it seems clear that her role in helping Schindler’s operation was vital.
Themes
That winter, Amon Goeth, released from prison because of his diabetes, comes to see the Schindlers. Even today, it’s unclear exactly what motivated Goeth’s visit. After prison, Goeth is a shell of his old self, and the investigation into him is ongoing.
Goeth’s visit reinforces just how fragile his power really was. Gone are the days when Goeth had a whole camp at his command as a tyrant. This was always the risk he took by putting so much stock in hard power and physical domination. By contrast, the book implies that true, lasting power is the type that Schindler embodies—that which is gained not through violence, but through building trust and mutual respect (or, sometimes, through nonviolent trickery.
Themes
During Goeth’s visit, he corners his old typist Pemper, having heard the SS officials were interrogating Pemper in relation to his work with Goeth. Pemper refuses to tell Goeth anything, which enrages him, but he has no power to do anything anymore. When Goeth finally leaves, it becomes clear that he’s lost all of his old power, although prisoners will continue to be haunted by him in their dreams, even 30 years later.
The fact that Goeth continues to haunt prisoners even after he’s powerless (and even after he’s dead) shows that, while his style of ruling wasn’t effective in terms of giving him lasting power, it was very effective in traumatizing the people below him.
Themes
