A central idea in Schindler’s List is power: how it works, who has it, and what its limits are. Viewed from one angle, the power dynamics in the book might seem straightforward: the Nazis have power, and they use it to oppress the Jewish populations of the territories they occupy. But Keneally shows that power is never quite that simple. Supposed hierarchies of command like the Nazis institute do not always reflect the way power works in the real world, and this is something that men like Oskar Schindler frequently use to their advantage. Though Schindler’s List demonstrates the short-term effectiveness of the kind of violent power favored by Nazis like Commandant Amon Goeth, the book seems to suggest that true, lasting power isn’t gained through violent force, but through strength of character.
For much of the novel, Amon Goeth (leader of the concentration camp Płaszów in Cracow, Poland) seems to be the person who holds the most power. But his reign is short-lived, suggesting that Goeth’s tyrannical form of leadership doesn’t equate to real, long-term power. Goeth establishes his style of leadership early on, by executing prisoners over minor offenses. He is both cruel and arbitrary, and at first, this demoralizes prisoners and helps Goeth rule based on fear. As more time passes, however, the negative effects of Goeth’s undisciplined leadership style begin to catch up with him. People who rank above him in the Nazi Party favor more methodical strategies of killing Jewish prisoners and understand that Goeth’s scattershot methods of discipline have limited effectiveness. Ultimately, Goeth finds out that he isn’t the absolute dictator he thought he was, as he gets arrested by his own party for doing black-market deals. Goeth gets so preoccupied with exercising his dominance over those below him that he doesn’t consider how he’s making himself vulnerable to action from his superiors. Goeth is executed in 1946 after the American soldiers who capture him hand him over to the Polish government, which solidifies how flimsy his power really was. His fate proves that, despite his short-term success, his methods of maintaining power are not effective over the long term.
By contrast, men like Oskar Schindler and his Jewish confidant Itzhak Stern may seem disempowered compared to Commandant Goeth for much of the book, but in fact, they understand that real power comes more from inner strength than from external shows of dominance. Despite not having a high official rank, Schindler becomes a powerful leader of sorts by treating other people well and earning their trust and respect. Schindler is primarily a leader of his Jewish prisoners, but he is also sometimes able to exert influence over Nazi officials. He uses nonviolent bribery and trickery, which helps him wield influence even in situations where he may seem powerless—such as when he’s arrested and thrown in prison but appeals to powerful officials he knows in order to get bailed out. As a Jewish man in Nazi-occupied Poland, Stern would seem to be in an even less powerful position than Schindler. But in fact, Stern ends up wielding a great deal of power, as he encourages those around him—especially Oskar Schindler—to be resilient and influences them to take risks. Most importantly, he is the one who inspires Schindler to offer a safe place for Jews at Emalia and later at Brinnlitz. Stern’s tremendous influence on Schindler is proven after the war, when Schindler struggles to run a successful business without guidance from Stern and his other allies. History has revealed how powerful and cunning men like Schindler and Stern really were because of how many people they were able to save and because Schindler is now venerated as a hero, whereas Goeth was executed and is remembered as a villain. Had Schindler chased power in a traditional way, like Goeth, he might have met the same fate after Germany’s surrender.
The story of power in Schindler’s List mirrors the overall trajectory of power in World War II. Adolf Hitler’s swift victories at the beginning of the war shocked the world and seemed to project an unprecedented level of new power. But while this power was impactful, it was also fragile: within only a few years, Nazi Germany would lose the war, and all of its territory gains would be quickly reversed. Keneally looks at this phenomenon at the personal level, showing how men like Schindler and Stern were able to form a more resilient kind of power that allowed them to build a community around them, survive the war, and help others in the process.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Power ThemeTracker
Power Quotes in Schindler’s List
In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it and—in the lapel of the dinner jacket—a large ornamental gold-on-black-enamel Hakenkreuz (swastika) emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straszewskiego Street, on the edge of the ancient center of Cracow, and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and, even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler limousine.
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.
Then, in the butt end of 1941, Oskar found himself under arrest. Someone—one of the Polish shipping clerks, one of the German technicians in the munitions section, you couldn’t tell—had denounced him, had gone to Pomorska Street and given information. Two plainclothes Gestapo men drove up Lipowa Street one morning and blocked the entrance with their Mercedes as if they intended to bring all commerce at Emalia to an end.
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.
He did not mention the money he had brought, nor the likelihood that in the future trusted contacts in Poland would be handed small fortunes in Jewish Joint Distribution Committee cash. What the dentist wanted to know, without any financial coloring, was what Herr Schindler knew and thought about the war against Jewry in Poland.
Once Sedlacek had the question out, Schindler hesitated. In that second, Sedlacek expected a refusal. Schindler’s expanding workshop employed 550 Jews at the SS rental rate. The Armaments Inspectorate guaranteed a man like Schindler a continuity of rich contracts; the SS promised him, for no more than 7.50 Reichsmarks a day per person, a continuity of slaves. It should not be a surprise if he sat back in his padded leather chair and claimed ignorance.
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.
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.
He was mourned on every continent.
