Schindler's List: film analysis and historical significance

Schindler's List

Summary of the Movie Schindler's List (1993) and Historical Events Depicted

The movie Schindler's List (1993) is based on the actual life story, which took place during the World War II Holocaust, of a German businessman, Oskar Schindler, who saved over 1000 Polish Jews from the Nazis by putting them to work in a factory he owned that made war materials for the Third Reich. The film's title reflects an actual list of names, of 1,100 Polish Jews hired by Schindler for this work, and therefore saved from being shipped to concentrations camps, and almost certainly gassed immediately upon arrival, or, if not, worked to death there (Fischel).

The film is based entirely on historical events of World War II and the Holocaust. World War II began when, on September 1, 1939, Nazi Germany invaded, defeated, and then occupied Poland ("World War II"), a nation with a large Jewish population (Fischel). After that, Polish Jews were herded into crowded ghettos (the most historically infamous of these was the Warsaw Ghetto in Poland's capital, but there were others as well; e.g., the Krakow ghetto in the central Polish city of Krakow, from within which Oskar Schindler compiled his list of Jews to work in his factory).

Next in the film (and as actually occurred) Oskar Schindler, a German and (up to this point in his life) a failed businessman in everything he has ever tried, arrives in Krakow. Being the opportunist that he is, Schindler, after e3stablishing himself, as a Nazi party member, among the German military elite now occupying the city, arranges through a Jewish contact to borrow money from Jewish businessmen, to open a factory that would manufacture cook ware needed by the Nazis and pay these businessmen a share of the profit. After Schindler gets his factory, his next move is to put Jews who would otherwise certainly be deported, to work in his new factory (without having to pay them). All of this then allows Schindler to earn a profit; to please the Nazis (since Schindler's factory makes pots, pans, and other cookware they need) and, in the process (although this is, honestly, the least of Schindler's considerations at first) save more than 1000 Polish Jews lucky enough to have their names placed on "Schindler's List," and therefore, selected to be allowed to work in his factory, from almost certain death in the Nazi concentration camps.

All of Schindler's Jewish factory workers are, moreover, given the crucially important, to their survival, designation of "essential workers" (which Schindler carefully arranges with the Nazis, thereby assuring the protection of these workers) which means that when not working they can go outside the Krakow ghetto but not be rounded up, like any other Jews caught outside the Ghetto, for deportation to concentration camps. Schindler's "essential workers," as the film shows, are not just strong, able-bodied men and women, but also (and this shows Schindler's compassion in addition to his business sense) people missing arms; children, and elderly men and women. After the Krakow Ghetto itself is next destroyed, Schindler bribes the Nazis to let him keep his workers, although some of them actually have few or no skills, which puts the factory itself at risk. Still, Schindler absorbs this risk in order to save these Jews from deportation with all the rest. When Schindler's workforce once again risks deportation, Schindler arranges, again through bribery, to have them shipped to a factory outside Poland, in his old hometown in Moravia, outside Poland in what is now part of Czechoslovakia.

Ultimately, Oskar Schindler, whose compassion for his Jewish workers continually evolves throughout the film, loses the entire fortune that he has amassed during the war in bribing the Nazis, again and again, to leave his Jewish workers alone. At the end of the war, though, Schindler still will face arrest by the fast-approaching Soviet Army of wartime profiteering, so he is forced to flee his factory as the Russian Army approaches his factory in Moravia. His workers give him a letter to carry with him testifying to his good deeds and how he has saved them all from death. The next morning, when the factory itself is liberated by the Russian Army, Schindler himself is already long gone.