Most of the conflict in Thomas Keneally’s Schindler’s List, which takes place during the Holocaust, is spurred by anti-Semitism. The Nazi Party made its “Final Solution”—the elimination of Jewish people—a part of its political platform and succeeded in killing millions of Jewish people (and people who belonged to other marginalized groups) through concentration camps, executions, and other brutal methods. In fact, the Holocausts’ atrocities helped define the entire concept of genocide (mass extermination of a particular group of people). One of the key strategies used in the so-called Final Solution was the dehumanization of Jewish people, so that killing them could be portrayed not as a moral problem, but as a practical or even scientific one that would require the latest technologies to solve. But Keneally also depicts how, particularly at the individual level, the process of dehumanizing people can be conflicted and inconsistent. Amon Goeth, for example, is a cruel man who relentlessly beats his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, essentially treating her as an object rather than a person. But when he catches the Jewish man Poldek Pfefferberg trespassing in the ghetto and has the chance to shoot him, he offers mercy, simply because Pfefferberg does something to make him laugh. Throughout Schindler’s List, then, Keneally depicts dehumanization as a complicated and flawed yet extremely powerful tactic for targeting a group of people, while also suggesting that one of the most powerful ways to resist discrimination and genocide is to help people reclaim their humanity (as Oskar Schindler does with the Jewish people he saves).
The Nazis’ anti-Semitic policies and practices were designed specifically to strip Jewish people of their humanity. The dehumanization of Cracow’s Jewish residents is a gradual process: first their businesses are seized, then they’re confined to ghettos, then they’re rounded up in concentration camps, and from there many prisoners are sent off to extermination camps. This multi-step process helps both Jewish people and their Nazi rulers acclimate to the new system, slowly brainwashing society as a whole to view Jewish people as subhuman. Cracow’s Jewish population is also frequently moved to different locations. This has the effect of breaking up families and communities, and it also makes it hard for Jewish people to own anything that isn’t portable. As such, the Nazis rob Jewish people of deeply important aspects of the human experience—love, camaraderie, and personal property. Transportation to a new location can also be deadly, given that the Jewish prisoners are crammed into cattle cars and deprived of food, water, or sanitation. And once the Jewish prisoners reach concentration camps like Płaszów, they’re starved and forced to do manual labor—essentially, they’re treated worse than livestock. These conditions, combined with the constant threat of executions by men like Amon Goeth, helps reinforce the idea that prisoners’ lives are disposable.
Yet even the cruelest concentration camp guards in the novel sometimes recognize the humanity of their prisoners in surprising ways—though this does not meaningfully hinder the Nazis’ overall efforts. Albert Hujar, for example, is an SS officer who leads a death squad that guns down a hospital full of children. Still, even a man as ruthless as him sometimes hesitates to kill: when Goeth overhears an argument between Hujar and a Jewish prisoner, he orders Hujar to execute her. Hujar does so, but only reluctantly. Later, Hujar even falls in love with a Jewish prisoner. Again, this is not enough to stop him from carrying out orders to kill her, but it does seem to make Hujar regretful. This suggests that dehumanizing a group of people isn’t straightforward or easy, since even Nazis’ emotions and moral beliefs can be complex. Even Goeth, the camp commandant who oversees all this cruelty and frequently encourages it, seems to have a sentimental side. For example, he appreciates the music of the Rosner brothers (who are Jewish) so much that he always invites them over when he has guests. And his relationship with his Jewish maid Helen Hirsch, though abusive and dehumanizing, also has a sentimental component to it. He regrets losing Hirsch to Schindler in blackjack, suggesting that he doesn’t see Hirsch as completely interchangeable with any other Jewish maid. These brief moments of Nazis recognizing the humanity of Jewish prisoners may show the limit of dehumanization techniques, but they also show the effectiveness of the techniques—after all, despite moments of hesitation, most Nazis continue to carry out orders.
Men like Oskar Schindler and Julius Madritsch recognize that one of the best things they can do to help their Jewish prisoners is to help them regain their humanity, as a sense of identity can empower them and give them the strength to carry on. Although Schindler and Madritsch are technically overseers of concentration camps, they are sympathetic toward their Jewish prisoners and want to help them survive. One of the most basic things that Schindler and Madritsch do for their prisoners is make sure they get proper nutrition, as this helps the Jewish workers think about matters beyond just day-to-day survival and thus allows them to feel like people rather than animals. Schindler also tries to give his prisoners autonomy. He does this in part by asserting his own autonomy over his factories, in order to keep the SS from interfering with his prisoners’ daily lives. He also does this by helping prisoners form a new community and maintain their religious practices, such as when he allows Rabbi Menasha Levartov to observe the Shabbat. So, although dehumanization is an incredibly powerful tool in controlling and exterminating a group of people, the novel shows that humanization can be just as powerful in helping people endure their suffering and come out the other side of it with their dignity intact. Indeed, the effects of these techniques are felt long after the war, when men like Schindler and Madritsch are honored with plaques and ceremonies to commemorate their good deeds.
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Anti-Semitism and Dehumanization Quotes in Schindler’s List
Not to stretch belief so early, the story begins with a quotidian act of kindness—a kiss, a soft voice, a bar of chocolate. Helen Hirsch would never see her 4,000 złoty again-not in a form in which they could be counted and held in the hand. But to this day she considers it a matter of small importance that Oskar was so inexact with sums of money.
Aue liked Stern’s dry, effective style with the legal evidence. He began to laugh, seeing in the accountant’s lean features the complexities of Cracow itself, the parochial canniness of a small city. Only a local knew the ropes. In the inner office Herr Schindler sat in need of local information.
Within two minutes the men were chatting like friends. The pistol in Pfefferberg’s belt had now been relegated to the status of armament for some future, remote emergency. There was no doubt that Mrs. Pfefferberg was going to do the Schindler apartment, no expense spared, and when that was settled, Schindler mentioned that Leopold Pfefferberg might like to come around to the apartment to discuss other business. “There is the possibility that you can advise me on acquiring local merchandise,” Herr Schindler said. “For example, your very elegant blue shirt . . . I don’t know where to begin to look for that kind of thing myself.” His ingenuousness was a ploy, but Pfefferberg appreciated it. “The stores, as you know, are empty,” murmured Oskar like a hint.
Six Einsatzgruppen had come to Poland with the invading army. Their name had subtle meanings. “Special-duty groups” is a close translation. But the amorphous word Einsatz was also rich with a nuance-of challenge, of picking up a gauntlet, of knightliness. These squads were recruited from Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst (SD; Security Service). They already knew their mandate was broad. Their supreme leader had six weeks ago told General Wilhelm Keitel that “in the Government General of Poland there will have to be a tough struggle for national existence which will permit of no legal restraints.” In the high rhetoric of their leaders, the Einsatz soldiers knew, a struggle for national existence meant race warfare, just as Einsatz itself, Special Chivalrous Duty, meant the hot barrel of a gun.
By November 1, 1940, Frank had managed to move 23,000 Jewish volunteers out of Cracow. Some of them went to the new ghettos in Warsaw and Łódź. The gaps at table, the grieving at railway stations can be imagined, but people took it meekly, thinking, We’ll do this, and that will be the brunt of what they ask. Oskar knew it was happening, but, like the Jews themselves, hoped it was a temporary excess.
Before the Hilos had even been properly calibrated, Oskar began to get hints from his SS contacts at Pomorska Street that there was to be a ghetto for Jews. He mentioned the rumor to Stern, not wanting to arouse alarm. Oh, yes, said Stern, the word was out. Some people were even looking forward to it. We’ll be inside, the enemy will be outside. We can run our own affairs. No one will envy us, no one stone us in the streets. The walls of the ghetto will be fixed. The walls would be the final, fixed form of the catastrophe.
The councilmen of Artur Rosenzweig’s Judenrat, who still saw themselves as guardians of the breath and health and bread ration of the internees of the ghetto, impressed upon the Jewish ghetto police that they were also public servants. They tended to sign up young men of compassion and some education. Though at SS headquarters the OD was regarded as just another auxiliary police force which would take orders like any police force, that was not the picture most OD men lived by in the summer of ’41.
His eyes slewed up Krakusa to the scarlet child. They were doing it within half a block of her; they hadn’t waited for her column to turn out of sight into Józefińska. Schindler could not have explained at first how that compounded the murders on the sidewalk. Yet somehow it proved, in a way no one could ignore, their serious intent. While the scarlet child stopped in her column and turned to watch, they shot the woman in the neck, and one of them, when the boy slid down the wall whimpering, jammed a boot down on his head as if to hold it still and put the barrel against the back of the neck—the recommended SS stance—and fired.
The first morning Commandant Goeth stepped out his front door and murdered a prisoner at random, there was a tendency to see this also, like the first execution on Chujowa Górka, as a unique event, discrete from what would become the customary life of the camp. In fact, of course, the killings on the hill would soon prove to be habitual, and so would Amon’s morning routine.
When Levartov and his wife came to the Emalia factory subcamp in the summer of ’43, he had to suffer what at first he believed to be Schindler’s little religious witticisms. On Friday afternoons, in the munitions hall of DEF where Levartov operated a lathe, Schindler would say, “You shouldn’t be here, Rabbi. You should be preparing for Shabbat.” But when Oskar slipped him a bottle of wine for use in the ceremonies, Levartov knew that the Herr Direktor was not joking. Before dusk on Fridays, the rabbi would be dismissed from his workbench and would go to his barracks behind the wire in the backyard of DEF. There, under the strings of sourly drying laundry, he would recite Kiddush over a cup of wine among the roof-high tiers of bunks. Under, of course, the shadow of an SS watchtower.
Josef married Rebecca on a Sunday night of fierce cold in February. There was no rabbi. Mrs. Bau, Josef’s mother, officiated. They were Reformed Jews, so that they could do without a ketubbah written in Aramaic. In the workshop of Wulkan the jeweler someone had made up two rings out of a silver spoon Mrs. Bau had had hidden in the rafters. On the barracks floor, Rebecca circled Josef seven times and Josef crushed glass—a spent light bulb from the Construction Office—beneath his heel.
On April 28, 1944, Oskar—by looking sideways at himself in a mirror—was able to tell that his waist had thickened for his thirty-sixth birthday. But at least today, when he embraced the girls, no one bothered to denounce him. Any informer among the German technicians must have been demoralized, since the SS had let Oskar out of Pomorska and Montelupich, both of them centers supposed impregnable to influence.
The orders, labeled OKH (Army High Command), already sat on Oskar’s desk. Because of the war situation, the Director of Armaments told Oskar, KL Płaszów and therefore the Emalia camp were to be disbanded. Prisoners from Emalia would be sent to Płaszów, awaiting relocation. Oskar himself was to fold his Zablocie operation as quickly as possible, retaining on the premises only those technicians necessary for dismantling the plant. For further instructions, he should apply to the Evacuation Board, OKH, Berlin.
Three or four miles out into the hills, following a rail siding, they came to the industrial hamlet of Brinnlitz, and saw ahead in thin morning light the solid bulk of the Hoffman annex transformed into Arbeitslager (Labor Camp) Brinnlitz, with watchtowers, a wire fence encircling it, a guard barracks inside the wire, and beyond that the gate to the factory and the prisoners’ dormitories.
As they marched in through the outer gate, Oskar appeared from the factory courtyard, wearing a Tyrolean hat.
“I’m getting them out,” Schindler rumbled. He did not go into explanations. He did not publicly surmise that the SS in Auschwitz might need to be bribed. He did not say that he had sent the list of women to Colonel Erich Lange, or that he and Lange both intended to get them to Brinnlitz according to the list. Nothing of that. Simply “I’m getting them out.”
This deft subversion may not have satisfied Liepold and Schoenbrun. For the sitting had not reached a formal conclusion; it had not ended in a judgment. But they could not complain that Oskar had avoided a hearing, or treated it with levity.
Dresner’s account, given later in his life, raises the supposition that Brinnlitz maintained its prisoners’ lives by a series of stunts so rapid that they were nearly magical. To tell the strict truth though, Brinnlitz, both as a prison and as a manufacturing enterprise, was itself, of its nature and in a literal sense, the one sustained, dazzling, integral confidence trick.
To call either of them a speech, however, is to demean their effect. what Oskar was instinctively attempting was to adjust reality, to alter the self-image of both the prisoners and the SS. Long before, with pertinacious certainty, he’d told a group of shift workers, Edith Liebgold among them, that they would last the war. He’d flourished the same gift for prophecy when he faced the women from Auschwitz, on their morning of arrival the previous November, and told them, “you’re safe now; you’re with me.” It can’t be ignored that in another age and condition, the Herr Direktor could have become a demagogue of the style of Huey Long of Louisiana or John Lang of Australia, whose gift was to convince the listeners that they and he were bonded together to avert by a whisker all the evil devised by other men.
Oskar’s birthday speech was delivered in German at night on the workshop floor to the assembled prisoners. An SS detachment had to be brought in to guard a gathering of that size, and the German civilian personnel were present as well. As Oskar began to speak, Poldek Pfefferberg felt the hairs on his lice stand to attention. He looked around at the mute faces of Schoenbrun and Fuchs, and of the SS men with their automatics. They will kill this man, he thought. And then everything will fall apart.
