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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Schindler’s List, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Virtue and Selflessness
Anti-Semitism and Dehumanization
Power
Duty
Bureaucracy
Summary
Analysis
Schindler’s thoughts about what will happen after the war characterize him as strategic and also somewhat optimistic. Though he isn’t naïve (he accepts the reality that Genia was almost certainly killed), he believes that he can make a difference by making sure the Nazis he comes in contact with are eventually punished.
Themes
The Judenrat don’t inform ghetto dwellers about the horrors of the camps, feeling that it would only cause more panic. Schindler and many others in the ghetto first learn about the camps from a pharmacist named Bachner, who returns from a camp eight days after being shipped off from the Prokocim depot. No one knows how Bachner escaped, but he tells of the showers where people are gassed en masse and of pyramids of corpses. (Though Bachner’s information about the camps is commonplace knowledge today, in 1942, it was shocking.)
The Judenrat’s actions are morally ambiguous: they are in a difficult position themselves, and though they withhold information, they believe that it is what their constituents would want. Bachner was presumably in a concentration camp before he escaped, and his experiences make it clear for Schindler and others that the Nazis aren’t just using Jewish people for labor—they’ve also begun to execute Jewish people en masse.
Themes
That summer of 1942, Schindler solidifies his ownership of the Rekord estate. Jereth from the box factory helps him build a refuge on his property (which Schindler lies to bureaucrats about, saying it is a rest area for night-shift workers). Schindler knows that he must be cautious, because more and more influential men are getting put into Auschwitz.
Schindler knows that if he can keep his Jewish workers on his property, there will be less chance of outsiders interfering with his affairs. Yet given that Schindler has to lie in order to do this, and that people are being sent to Auschwitz, Schindler knows he’s protecting his workers at great personal risk.
Themes
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Danka Dresner, cousin of “Redcap” Genia, is 14. She works as a cleaning woman at a Luftwaffe base, but she is still vulnerable to being taken away to a camp. When SS soldiers come to her neighborhood, Mrs. Dresner takes Danka next door to a neighbor with a false wall. The neighbor’s elderly parents are already hiding in the false wall because rumor has it an Aktion is coming, and they are vulnerable too. When Mrs. Dresner and Danka arrive, the neighbor says Danka can fit but not Mrs. Dresner, even though there is plenty of space.
The story of Mrs. Dresner not being able to stay in the wall with her daughter is darkly comic and shows how the desperate situation in Poland made people like the Dresner’s neighbor act in irrational ways. Though the war sometimes prompted acts of selflessness, it could also prompt otherwise normal people to become more selfish and look out for their own interests and the interests of their family first.
Themes
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Mrs. Dresner tells Danka to hide with the neighbor’s parents behind the fake wall. Since she has nowhere to hide, she figures she may as well go outside. She is stopped by an OD boy whom her son knows. He tells her to hide under some stairs and that the searchers will be gone in 10 minutes. The OD boy goes outside and says that no one is home at the house. Eventually, the SS men take his word and move on. Mrs. Dresner seems to be safe, but she knows there will be more sweeps in the future.
Mrs. Dresner’s experience with the OD boy shows once again how luck and circumstance contributed to who was able to survive the Holocaust. She only runs into this particular OD boy by chance, and she knows that her luck will probably run out eventually.
Themes
A Jewish resistance group uses stolen SS uniforms to plant a bomb in a restaurant, killing seven SS men and wounding 40 more. Schindler is uneasy, because he knows he could’ve been there. The resisters also arrange for two of OD chief Spira’s lieutenants to be killed by Gestapo. Others, however, take on different forms of resistance, like one Jewish man who has to make a list for deportations and puts himself and his family at the top. Schindler considers his own plans for resistance.
Schindler recognizes again that even though his own Jewish prisoners respect him, to an outsider he might appear to be just another cruel German. He has to perform a balancing act to not get caught by his German peers, and also to avoid becoming a target for Jewish resistance efforts.
Themes
