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
Stern meets Schindler again in early December. Schindler makes an announcement: “Tomorrow, it’s going to start. Jozefa and Izaaka Streets are going to know all about it.” Stern doesn’t know what this means and wonders with disappointment if Schindler is celebrating about an upcoming pogrom. It’s unclear if by “tomorrow” Schindler means the exact day or just a general future time.
Schindler still isn’t comfortable enough with his new-Jewish associates to tell them directly what will happen, so he speaks obliquely. Perhaps he has not fully developed his own plan to resist Nazi authority and is only making his first tentative attempts at resistance.
Themes
In fact, however, Schindler is deliberately trying to pass on information and feels he is doing so at great risk to himself. He knows from two inside sources that something big is coming: that a detachment of Einsatzgruppen (known for their ruthless extermination tactics) is headed to the Jewish area of Kazimierz.
Though some Nazi brutality is clouded in secrecy and bureaucracy, the Einsatzgruppen’s role is to be a very public show of force that instills fear in Jewish citizens.
Themes
Hans Frank, the governor of Poland under the Nazis, lives at the end of the same street as Schindler. Though he rules over Cracow, he doesn’t have any control over the special Einsatzgruppe squads moving into Kazimierz. Though Frank hates Jewish people, he resents the way these special squads act independently—he would prefer to have all Jewish people sent to a large concentration camp, perhaps in Lublin or even Madagascar. At the time, however, even Schindler and many in the SS didn’t know that Madagascar would eventually be replaced by a much deadlier solution: the pesticide Zyklon B.
This passage once again portrays the complicated nature of anti-Semitism. Hans Frank openly hates Jewish people, but even he does not necessarily advocate for some for some of the most extreme measures (like torture and summary executions) that other Nazis will champion. Motivations among Nazis were not uniform, and atrocities were often committed by people who had very different individual rationales for participating.
Themes
As Schindler warned, the SS go through the streets of the Jewish neighborhoods and begin smashing and stealing things. The Einsatzgruppen go to a synagogue and force the Jews inside to spit on a Torah. All but one do so, but in the end, the Nazis shoot all of them and burn the place down.
This episode starkly depicts the Einsatzgruppen’s ruthlessness, showing that their brutal tactics left no room for mercy.
Themes
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