Schindler’s List Study Guide[1]
Foreword
The film Schindler’s List focuses on the years of the Holocaust—a time when millions of Jews and other men, women, and children were murdered solely because of their ancestry. It is one of the darkest chapters in human history. Yet an appalling number of people, young and old, know little if anything about it. Even today the world has not yet learned the lesson of those terrible years. There are far too many places where hate, intolerance, and genocide still exist. Thus Schindler’s List is no less a “Jewish story” or a “German story” than it is a human story. And its subject matter applies to every generation. Schindler’s List is simply about racial hatred—which is the state of mind that attacks not what makes us people but what makes us different from each other. It is my hope that Schindler’s List will awaken and sustain an awareness of such evil and inspire this generation and future generations to seek an end to racial hatred.
--Steven Spielberg Amblin Entertainment, Inc.
Preface
Schindler’s List, the award-winning film directed by Steven Spielberg from a screenplay by Steven Zaillian based on the book by Thomas Keneally, tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a war profiteer and member of the Nazi party who saved over 1,100 Jews during World War II. The movie explores our capacity for monumental evil as well as for extraordinary courage, caring, and compassion. And by revealing how fragile civilization truly is, it turns history into a moral lesson. No lesson is more needed in our schools today. As Spielberg recently told members of Congress, “History has to cease being facts and figures, stories and sagas from long ago and far away about them or those. In order to learn from history, rather than just about it, students need to rediscover that those people were just like us.” Hannah Arendt, one of the foremost political philosophers of our time, explained why the teaching of history must have a moral component when she argued that we can put past evils into the service of a future good only by squarely facing reality. She wrote, “The methods used in the pursuit of historical truth are not the methods of the prosecutor, and the men who stand guard over the facts are not the officers of interest groups—no matter how legitimate their claims—but the reporters, the historians, and finally the poets.” And, she might have added, the filmmakers. The facts—no matter how horrifying--must be preserved, not “lest we forget,” but so that we may judge. Preservation and judgment do not justify the past but reveal its meaning. Several years ago, Steven Spielberg was asked to choose an image that summarized all of his films. He chose “the little boy in Close Encounters [of the Third Kind] opening the door and standing in that beautiful yet awful light, just like fire coming through the doorway.” That “beautiful yet awful light” is knowledge and it offers both promise and danger. In Schindler’s List, Spielberg encourages us to take a step toward the light—“toward what we don’t understand and what we don’t know about and what scares us.” --Margot Stern Strom
A Chronicle of Key Events in Schindler’s List
This timeline provides a summary of Schindler’s List by relating key events in the film to the unfolding of the Holocaust. It is based on historian Christopher Browning’s observation that “at the core of the Holocaust was an intense eleven-month wave of mass murder. The center of gravity of this mass murder was Poland, where in March 1942, despite two and a half years of terrible hardship, deprivation, and persecution, every major Jewish community was still intact; eleven months later, only remnants of Polish Jewry survived.”
September, 1939 Germany conquers Poland in two weeks; World War II begins in Europe; Polish Jews are ordered to register and relocate.
October 26, 1939 Krakow becomes the capital of German-occupied Poland.
December, 1939 Oskar Schindler takes over the enamelware factory in Krakow, meets Itzhak Stern, and with Stern’s help, begins using Jewish workers in his plant.
1940-early 1941 Germans expel some Jews in Krakow to other towns.
March 3, 1941 Germans establish a ghetto in Krakow.
March, 1942 About 20 to 25 percent of the Jews who would die in the Holocaust have already perished.
June, 1942 The Germans build a forced labor camp at Plaszow.
June-October, 1942 Deportations and shootings terrorize the Krakow ghetto.
February, 1943 Amon Goeth takes command of Plaszow. About 80 to 85 percent of the Jews who would die in the Holocaust have already perished.
March 13-14, 1943 The Germans liquidate Krakow ghetto.
March 1943 Schindler sets up a branch of his factory at Plaszow.
August, 1944 Schindler’s factory is closed and his Jewish workers are taken back to Plaszow.
October, 1944 Schindler creates a list of Jewish workers for his new plant in Brennec, Czechoslovakia; workers are transferred from Plaszow via Auschwitz.
January, 1945 Plaszow is closed and the remaining prisoners are sent to Auschwitz.
May 8, 1945 World War II ends in Europe. The Holocaust is over.
May 9, 1945 The Soviet army liberates the camp at Brennec.
September 13, 1946 Goeth is found guilty of war crimes and is hung in Krakow.
October 9, 1974 Oskar Schindler dies in Frankfurt, Germany.
As you watch the film, try not to reach a conclusion about the story or the characters until it is over. Then write a response on three of the following six questions:
A scene in Schindler’s List: As the radio plays a “moody” song, a camera pans a hotel room in Krakow to reveal a glass of expensive cognac, several expensive-looking business suits, an assortment of neckties, a pile of cuff links, a silk handkerchief, a stack of money, cigarettes, a watch, and finally, a swastika pin—a sign of membership in the Nazi party.
Later the camera reveals the owner of these items—Oskar Schindler. By then, an impression has been formed. It is an impression that is deepened as Schindler makes friends with the German officers he encounters in a Krakow night club. Amon Goeth, the commandant at Plaszow, is introduced in a similar way. He, too, is not visible at first. Instead the camera shows a large open car moving slowly through the Krakow ghetto. The car is accompanied by an SS officer on a motorcycle. As the entourage passes, a Jewish policeman holds back a crowd of residents. In the back seat of the car sits a man in an officer’s uniform. His name and title appear briefly on the screen as a Nazi official seated in front explains the organization of the ghetto. Amon Goeth speaks but once during the entire scene. It is a complaint. He’s freezing and demands to know why the top is down. As the story unfolds, those images are refined and expanded. In one scene, the two men discuss power. Goeth, who clearly has had too much to drink, tells Schindler, “The more I look at you—I watch you—you’re never drunk.” As Schindler stares, the commandant continues, “Oh, that’s, that’s real control. Control is power. That’s power.” Schindler is not so sure. He wonders, “Is that why they fear us?” To Goeth, the answer is easy. He argues, “they fear us” because “we have the power to kill.” Schindler disagrees. “They fear us because we have the power to kill arbitrarily. A man commits a crime, he should know better. We have him killed, and we feel pretty good about it. Or we kill him ourselves, and we feel even better. That’s not power, though. That’s justice. That’s different than power. Power . . . is when we have every justification to kill . . . and we don’t.” When Goeth says he does not understand, Schindler expands on the idea, “That’s what the emperors had. A man stole something, he’s brought in before the emperor, he throws himself down on the ground, he begs for mercy. He knows he’s going to die. Then the emperor . . . pardons him. This worthless man. He lets him go. That’s power, Amon. That . . . is power.” Goeth roars. He mockingly gestures like a Roman emperor and laughingly says, “I pardon you.” Yet the next day, Goeth seems taken by the notion and even practices “pardoning” prisoners, particularly Lisiek, the young Jew responsible for cleaning his bathtub. But in the end, he returns to his old ways and the shootings begin again. His first target is young Lisiek.
Power is sweet; it is a drug, the desire for which increases with habit.
--Bertrand Russell
Power does not corrupt men; fools, however, if they get into a position of power, corrupt power. --George Bernard Shaw
Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
--Lord Acton
Power buries those who wield it.
--Talmud
Betraying the Youth
A scene from Schindler’s List: The cameras shift from one part of Krakow to another as individuals and groups prepare for the final liquidation of the ghetto. Through it all, Amon Goeth can be heard addressing his men: Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now, the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history, and you
are part of it. Six hundred years ago .. . , Kazimierz the Great so-called told the Jews they could come to Krakow. .. . They took hold. They prospered. In business, science, education, the arts. They came here with nothing. Nothing. And they flourished. For six centuries, there has been a Jewish Krakow. Think about that. By this evening, those six centuries are a rumor. They never happened. Today is history.
Goeth’s speech reflects years of Nazi propaganda. He joined a Nazi youth group in Austria at the age of seventeen and became a member of the SS at 22. He was convinced that he belonged to a “superior race” and the Jews were his “racial enemy.” Most of his men held similar views. The Nazis focused much of their propaganda on young people. Soon after Hitler took power, a new course was added to the curriculum. Its objectives were to:
1. Give pupils an insight into the relationship, causes and effects of all basic facts having to do with the science of heredity and race.
2. Impress the pupils with the importance of the science of heredity and race for the future of the nation and the purposes of the government.
3. Awaken in the pupils a sense of responsibility toward the nation, as represented by both its ancestry and its posterity; imbue the pupils with pride in the fact that the German people are the most important exponent of the Nordic race, and to influence them in favor of complete “Nordification” of the German people.
This is to be accomplished early enough so that no child shall leave school without a conviction of the necessity of pure blood. As homework for the new “race science” classes, students were to collect pictures of great scholars, statesmen, artists, and others who “distinguish themselves by their special accomplishments.” Students were then to determine the “preponderant race” of these individuals “according to physical characteristics.” Racial instruction was not limited to a single course. Every course taught that Jews, blacks, and “Gypsies” were inferior to “Aryans.” Even arithmetic text books contained “story problems” like this one: “The Jews are aliens in Germany—In 1933 there were 66,060,000 inhabitants of the German Reich, of whom 499,682 were Jews. What is the percentage of aliens?” The emphasis on “race” accentuated the isolation of Jewish students. One recalls, “People started to pick on me, ‘a dirty Jew’ and all this kind of thing. And then we started to fight. In the break time there was always one of us fighting.”
“Race science” classes had a different effect on “Aryan” students. A former member of Hitler Youth recalls them as fostering pride. “The flag, the people—they were everything. You are nothing, your people everything. Yes, that’s how children were brought up, that’s how you can manipulate a child.” Erika Mann, a German writer who opposed the Nazis, held similar views. In a book called School for Barbarians, she wrote: You leave the house in the morning, “Heil Hitler” on your lips. .. . All the way down the street, the flags are waving, every window colored with red banners, and the black swastika in the middle of each. You don’t stop to ask why; it’s bound to be some national event. . .. You meet the uniforms on the way to school: the black [uniformed] SS men, the men of the Volunteer Labor Service, and the Reichswehr soldiers. And if some of the streets are closed, you know that an official is driving through town. . . . And here, where a building is going up, the workmen are gone—probably because of the “national event.” But the sign is on the scaffolding. “We have our Fuhrer to thank that we are working here today. Heil Hitler!” The familiar sign, seen everywhere with men at work, on roads, barracks, sport fields. . . .There are more placards as you continue past hotels, restaurants, indoor swimming pools, to school. They read . . .“Not for Jews.” And what do you feel? . . . You don’t feel anything; you’ve seen these placards for almost five years. This is a habit, it is all perfectly natural, of course Jews aren’t allowed here. Five years in the life of a child of nine—that’s his life, after four years of infancy, his whole personal, conscious existence. Through the Nazi street walks the Nazi child. There is nothing to disturb him, nothing to attract his attention or criticism. Alfons Heck, a former member of Hitler Youth, is not as certain that it was just propaganda that made it easy to manipulate children: Traditionally, the German people were subservient to authority and respected their rulers as exalted father figures who could be relied on to look after them. .. . Hitler used that yearning for a leader brilliantly. From our very first day in [a Nazi youth group], we accepted it as a natural law—especially since it was merely an extension of what we had learned in school—that a leader’s orders must be obeyed unconditionally, even if they appeared harsh, punitive or unsound. .. . I still recall with wonder that [our leader] once marched all 160 of us in his [troop] into an ice-cold river in November because our singing had displeased him. We cursed him bitterly under our breath, but not one of us refused. That would have been the unthinkable crime of disobeying a “direct order.”
Discussion Questions
Obedience and Choice
A scene from Schindler’s List: During the evacuation of the Krakow ghetto, soldiers hide in the stairwell of a tenement. As they wait to see if any Jew remains hidden in the building, they hear a sound. The commander promptly gives an order and the men rush to the second floor with their machine guns blazing. In the midst of the action, an SS officer plays the piano in a deserted apartment. A soldier and an officer appear in the doorway and listen briefly. The officer asks in German, “What is it? Is it Bach?” The soldier tells him, “No. Mozart.”
What kind of person stops for music in the midst of a massacre? Murders babies? Slaughters old people? Were the soldiers so blinded by propaganda that they did not know right from wrong? To find answers to such questions, historian Christopher Browning studied interrogations made in the 1960s and early 1970s of 210 men in Reserve Police Battalion 101. The battalion was originally formed from the German equivalent of city policemen and county sheriffs. After 1939, it and other Order Police battalions served as occupation forces in conquered territory. Battalion 101 was assigned to the district of Lublin in Poland. Although Amon Goeth was not a member of the battalion, he was assigned to Lublin before coming to Plaszow. Like the National Guard in the United States, German battalions were organized regionally. Most of the men in Battalion 101 came from Hamburg, Germany. They were older than the men who cleared Krakow. The average age was thirty-nine. Most were not well-educated. The majority had left school by the age of fifteen. Still few were Nazis and none was openly antisemitic. Major Wilhelm Trapp, a 53-year-old career police officer who rose through the ranks, headed the battalion. Although he became a Nazi in 1932, he did not belong to the SS. His two captains did. The unit’s first killing mission took place on July 13, 1942. Browning used interrogations to piece together the events of that day. Just as daylight was breaking, the men arrived at the village [of Jozefow] and assembled in a half-circle around Major Trapp, who proceeded to give a short speech. With choking voice and tears in his eyes, he visibly fought to control himself as he informed his men that they had received orders to perform a very unpleasant task. These orders were not to his liking, but they came from above. It might perhaps make their task easier, he told the men, if they remembered that in Germany bombs were falling on the women and children. Two witnesses claimed that Trapp also mentioned that the Jews of this village had supported the partisans. Another witness recalled Trapp’s mentioning that the Jews had instigated the boycott against Germany. Trapp then explained to the men that the Jews in Jozefow would have to be rounded up, whereupon the young males were to be selected out for labor and the others shot. Trapp then made an extraordinary offer to his battalion: if any of the older men among them did not feel up to the task that lay before him, he could step out. Trapp paused, and after some moments, one man stepped forward. The captain of 3rd company, enraged that one of his men had broken ranks, began to berate the man. The major told the captain to hold his tongue. Then ten or twelve other men stepped forward as well. They turned in their rifles and were told to await a further assignment. Trapp then summoned the company commanders and gave them their respective assignments. Two platoons of 3rd company were to surround the village; the men were explicitly ordered to shoot anyone trying to escape. The remaining men were to round up the Jews and take them to the market place. Those too sick or frail to walk to the market place, as well as infants and anyone offering resistance or attempting to hide, were to be shot on the spot. Thereafter, a few men of 1st company were to accompany the work Jews selected at the market place, while the rest were to proceed to the forest to form the firing squads. The Jews were to be loaded onto battalion trucks by 2nd company and shuttled from the market place to the forest. Once Trapp gave his men their assignments, he spent the day in town. No one recalled seeing him at the shooting site. Those who did describe him as bitterly complaining about the orders and “weeping like a child.” Despite his discomfort, Trapp insisted that “orders were orders” and must be carried out. Browning says of the massacre, “While the men of Reserve Battalion 101 were apparently willing to shoot those Jews too weak or sick to move, they still shied for the most part from shooting infants, despite their orders. No officer intervened, though subsequently one officer warned his men that in the future they would have to be more energetic.” As the killing continued, some asked to be reassigned. A few officers complied, while others pressed their men to continue. By midday, the men were given vodka to “refresh” them. By afternoon, a number of men had broken down, but the majority continued to the end. After the massacre, the battalion was transferred and platoons were divided up, each stationed in a different town. But they all took part in at least one more shooting action and most of the men found it easier to participate this time. Therefore Browning regards the first massacre as an important dividing line. It changed everyone who took part. Even twenty-five years later they could not hide the horror of endlessly shooting Jews at point-blank range. In contrast, however, they spoke of surrounding ghettos and watching [Polish “volunteers”] brutally drive the Jews onto the death trains with considerable detachment and a near-total absence of any sense of participation or responsibility. Such actions they routinely dismissed with a standard refrain: “I was only in the police cordon there.” The shock treatment of Jozefow had created an effective and desensitized unit of ghettoclearers and, when the occasion required, outright murderers. After Jozefow nothing else seemed so terrible. Browning says of the choices open to the men he studied: Most simply denied that they had any choice. Faced with the testimony of others, they did not contest that Trapp had made the offer but repeatedly claimed that they had not heard that part of his speech or could not remember it. A few who admitted that they had been given the choice and yet failed to opt out were quite blunt. One said that he had not wanted to be considered a coward by his comrades. Another—more aware of what truly required courage—said quite simply: “I was cowardly.” A few others also made the attempt to confront the question of choice but failed to find the words. It was a different time and place, as if they had been on another political planet, and the political vocabulary and values of the 1960s were helpless to explain the situation in which they found themselves in 1942. As one man admitted, it was not until years later that he began to consider that what he had done had not been right. He had not given it a thought at the time. The men who did not take part were more specific about their motives. Some attributed their refusal to age or lack of ambition. Browning notes: What remains virtually unexamined by the interrogators and unmentioned by the policemen was the role of anti-Semitism. Did they not speak of it because anti-Semitism had not been a motivating factor? Or were they unwilling and unable to confront this issue even after twenty-five years, because it had been all too important, all too pervasive? One is tempted to wonder if the silence speaks louder than words, but in the end—the silence is still silence, and the question remains unanswered.
Discussion Questions
[1] Adapted from Facing History and Ourselves http://www.facing.org/facing/fhao2.nsf/all/home?opendocument