Thomas Keneally’s nonfiction novel Schindler’s List is based on the true story of Oskar Schindler, a man known for astonishing acts of generosity. At great personal risk to his own life, Schindler helps over a thousand Jewish people survive the Holocaust during World War II (and helps slow down the German war effort in other ways too). Many of these survivors can’t explain why Schindler would act so selflessly when, before the war, he seemed to be a regular German industrialist with few particularly virtuous qualities. In fact, not all of Schindler’s generosity is selfless: in his dealings with Germans, Schindler uses generosity quite tactically, offering “gratitude” as a bribe to get what he wants. Even Schindler’s dealings with the Jewish people he helps arguably have a selfish element to them: later in life, he ends up relying on his former prisoners, both financially and emotionally. Keneally’s retelling of Schindler’s story thus demonstrates that virtue isn’t black and white—people tend to be complicated, a mixture of both selfishness and selfless, and people with selfish qualities can still be capable of generosity and self-sacrifice. Moreover, it suggests that even small-scale acts of selflessness are worthwhile and impactful.
Oskar Schindler isn’t an outwardly saintly man, particularly in his earlier life, and this makes his eventual selflessness all the more surprising and complicated. One of Schindler’s noteworthy flaws is how he treats his wife, Emilie. Despite his reputation for kindness, Schindler is, at best, indifferent toward his wife, having multiple affairs and making little attempt to hide them. Schindler is also a heavy drinker and smoker, which clashes with certain stereotypes of how virtuous people should act. Perhaps the biggest gray area in Schindler’s life is his involvement with the Nazi Party as a younger man. Though he was clearly never a hardliner, it is difficult to determine to what extent young Schindler agreed with the Party’s goals and to what extent he was just playing the system. Though Keneally and almost all the Jewish people saved by Schindler’s actions agree that his good deeds far outweigh the bad ones, this doesn’t mean Schindler is innocent of all wrongdoing. He, like all people, is complicated and imperfect.
Though Schindler remains a morally complicated figure, throughout the war he continuously puts himself at risk to save other people, suggesting that selfishness and selflessness aren’t clear-cut or mutually exclusive categories. One of the complicated elements of Schindler’s character at the beginning of the war is his desire to seek a profit. When he first meets Itzhak Stern, he has Stern look over the books of a Jewish business he is thinking of taking over to make sure it is a solid venture. Schindler doesn’t have any plan to rescue Jewish people yet; despite his disagreements with the Nazi Party, he is just another German industrialist trying to make a profit in occupied Poland. It’s only after talking with Stern that Schindler’s plan (to save Jewish prisoners by keeping them alive as workers in his factory) begins to take shape. As the war goes on, however, and Schindler finds his own life in danger multiple times, and he ends up in prison three times. Schindler doesn’t know who reports him to the Nazis—anyone who happens to witness what Schindler is doing to help the Jewish prisoners could report him. This means Schindler’s life is constantly in danger, yet he makes the selfless decision to accept this risk. By the end of the book, Schindler has given away most of his fortune, with a large chunk of it spent on creating the Brinnlitz camp, where his prisoners go after the dissolution of Płaszów. The factory at Brinnlitz does not make any materials for the war effort and therefore does not make any money for Schindler—its only purpose is to help his Jewish prisoners try to survive until the end of the war. Schindler, then, has finally given up his role as an industrialist and put aside any selfish stake he could have had in the factory. Though he remains a flawed person and never gives up his womanizing ways, his decision to sideline his business interests and put himself at risk to save his prisoners shows that even people who are selfish in some respects can be selfless in other respects.
Given the small scale yet powerful impact of Schindler’s actions throughout the book, his story also suggests that acting virtuously doesn’t necessarily require grand gestures. At one point in the book, Schindler’s Jewish accountant (and trusted confidante) Itzhak Stern quotes a Talmudic verse to Schindler that has a profound impact on his way of thinking: “He who saves a single life saves the world entire.” This verse suggests that acts of selflessness don’t have to be huge and profound to be impactful, because helping even one person is worthwhile. And indeed, although Schindler’s helps a relatively small number of people compared to the millions who died in the Holocaust, his actions still matter to those he saved (and to the millions of people his story has gone on to inspire). When Abraham Bankier and some other Jewish workers are rounded up to be shipped away because they lack Blauscheins, Schindler personally comes to the station to save his men. An SS guard there is dismissive of Schindler’s efforts, saying that any men he saves will just be replaced by others on the list. Schindler recognizes that this might be true—that his efforts might be futile, and that perhaps it is selfish to favor his friends when so many others are suffering. Still, he lives according to the Talmudic verse: while he isn’t a perfect person and knows that he can’t save every victim of the Holocaust, he also knows that even saving one life is tremendously valuable.
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Virtue and Selflessness 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.
It is not immediately easy to find in Oskar’s family’s history the origins of his impulse toward rescue. He was born on April 28, 1908, into the Austrian Empire of Franz Josef, into the hilly Moravian province of that ancient Austrian realm. His hometown was the industrial city of Zwittau, to which some commercial opening had brought the Schindler ancestors from Vienna at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
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.
Victoria Klonowska, a Polish secretary, was the beauty of Oskar’s front office, and he immediately began a long affair with her. Ingrid, his German mistress, must have known, as surely as Emilie Schindler knew about Ingrid. For Oskar would never be a surreptitious lover. He had a childlike sexual frankness.
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.
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.
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.
Oskar later estimated that he spent 100,000 RM.—nearly $40,000—to grease the transfer to Brinnlitz. Few of his survivors would ever find the figure unlikely, though there were those who shook their heads and said, “No, more! It would have to have been more than that.”
“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.”
For the factory produced nothing. “Not a shell,” Brinnlitz prisoners will still say, shaking their heads. Not one 45mm shell manufactured there could be used, not one rocket casing.
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.
