Lists Symbol Analysis

In the novel, lists—both those that the Nazis make and Schindler’s titular list—represent the fragility of Jewish people’s fate under the Nazi regime. As the Holocaust gets underway in Nazi-occupied Poland, lists are what doom people to suffering and death. At one point, Schindler goes looking for Bankier, his Jewish manager, at a train station and finds that he’s been loaded onto a cattle car bound for a concentration camp. An SS officer informs him that Bankier’s name is one of many on a list of people to be sent to the camp, and Schindler observes that the officer regards the list as “hol[y]”: “for this man it was the secure, rational, and sole basis for all this milling of Jews and movement of rail cars.” In other words, lists are how the Nazi bureaucracy makes the extermination of Jewish people into a “secure, rational” problem to solve and turns human lives into pieces of data. Who does or doesn’t make these lists is largely arbitrary, and evading the lists is often a matter of luck or oversight—reflecting how trivial, interchangeable, and disposable Jewish people’s lives are to the Nazis. A superior SS officer at the station lets Bankier and several others go at Schindler’s request, but he acknowledges the random nature of the list when he tells Schindler, “it makes no difference to us, you understand. We don’t care whether it’s this dozen or that […] It’s the inconvenience to the list, that’s all.”

Indeed, even Schindler’s famous list of Jewish prisoners—whom he will transfer from Emalia to Brinnlitz factory to save them from dying in concentration camps like Auschwitz—is arbitrary. The initial list is chosen by nature of the people’s proximity to Schindler and Julius Madritsch (both of whom run factories in Płaszów): only prisoners from their factories are included, since Schindler is, of course, limited in the number of people he can help. Some people are also included if they’re able to bribe a prisoner named Marcel Goldberg. In this way, even those who make it on Schindler’s list are only included because of luck and happenstance: they happen to be sent to Płaszów and not one of the many other concentration camps throughout Europe, or they happen to have enough money to be able to bribe Goldberg. Thus, the lists in the novel—both good and bad—highlight the fact that survival in Nazi-occupied Europe was tenuous at best and often relied on a combination of personal connections and random chance.