Schindler’s List
Logline: A charismatic and greedy German war profiteer undergoes an astonishing transformation of conscience, spending his entire fortune to save over 1,100 Polish Jews from certain death in the Holocaust.
Genre: Historical Drama / Biographical War Film
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast:
· Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler
· Ralph Fiennes as Amon Göth
· Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern
· Caroline Goodall as Emilie Schindler
The Story
The film opens in the smoky, glamorous world of a Kraków nightclub in 1939. The city is newly occupied by Nazi forces. Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a tall, imposing, and impeccably dressed Sudeten German, holds court. He is a member of the Nazi Party, a womanizer, and a consummate opportunist, drawn to Kraków not by ideology, but by the prospect of vast wealth. He plans to profit from the war by exploiting cheap Jewish labor.
With charm and bribes of black-market goods, he ingratiates himself with the local SS command. He acquires a formerly Jewish-owned enamelware factory, Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik (DEF), and appoints a quiet, astute Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), to run it. Stern understands the grim reality of the ghetto and uses his position to help Schindler hire “skilled workers”—often academics, artists, and other intellectuals deemed expendable by the Nazis, thus saving them from deportation. Schindler, initially concerned only with the bottom line, tolerates this as Stern is a brilliant organizer who makes him incredibly rich.
Schindler’s hedonistic world exists in stark contrast to the brutal oppression just outside his factory gates. The Jews of Kraków are forced into a squalid, walled ghetto. The man tasked with its liquidation and the construction of the Płaszów forced labor camp is Amon Göth (Ralph Fiennes), a newly arrived SS commandant.
Göth is the dark mirror to Schindler. Where Schindler is all smooth charm, Göth is raw, psychotic violence. Fiennes portrays him with a terrifying, reptilian coldness. He is capricious and godlike in his cruelty, randomly shooting inmates from the balcony of his villa for minor infractions or simply for sport. He embodies the banality of evil, sipping coffee while committing murder.
The turning point for Schindler is the 1943 liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto. Spielberg films the sequence in devastating, documentary-style realism, with one exception: a little girl in a red coat, the only splash of color in the black-and-white film. Schindler and his mistress watch the horror from a hilltop. He is mesmerized by the small, helpless figure in red, a symbol of innocent life amidst unimaginable chaos. For the first time, he is not a spectator but a witness, and his humanity is violently awakened.
From this moment, Schindler’s factory is no longer just a source of profit but a fortress. He begins a dangerous double game, using his wit and charm to protect his “workers” – his Schindlerjuden (Schindler’s Jews). He bribes Göth with luxury goods, alcohol, and flattery to keep his workers housed within the factory compound, safe from the random killings of Płaszów.
The central dynamic of the film becomes the psychological duel between Schindler and Göth. Neeson portrays Schindler’s transformation with immense subtlety. The swagger remains, but it now masks a profound fear and a burning purpose. His eyes, once twinkling with avarice, now hold a deep, weary sorrow. He uses Göth’s own greed and vanity against him, arguing that “productivity” is more valuable than mindless slaughter.
Fiennes’s Göth is a masterpiece of villainy. He is a man torn between a twisted admiration for Schindler’s style and a deep-seated suspicion of his motives. In a chilling scene, Göth muses to his mirror that “power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don’t.” It’s a concept he understands intellectually but is pathologically incapable of practicing. He is the chaos against which Schindler must constantly strategize.
As the war nears its end, Göth is ordered to ship the remaining Jews at Płaszów to Auschwitz. Schindler makes his final, audacious play. With Stern, he composes a list of 1,100 essential workers to be transferred to a new munitions factory in his hometown of Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia—a factory designed, with Stern’s help, to never produce a single usable shell.
In a nerve-shredding sequence, he must bribe and negotiate with SS officials and a camp clerk to get every name on the list approved. The list itself becomes a sacred document, not of workers, but of lives redeemed. In a final, iconic confrontation, Schindler must personally intervene to save a trainload of his women and children who were accidentally routed to Auschwitz, using the last of his dwindling influence and wealth to pull them from the gates of the gas chamber.
The war ends. A bankrupt Schindler, now a hunted war criminal, must flee. In a heartbreaking farewell to his workers, he breaks down, sobbing that he could have saved more. “This car… why did I keep the car? Ten people right there.” He is presented with a gold ring, forged from the gold fillings of those he saved, inscribed with a Talmudic verse: “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.” He is absolved by the very people he once exploited.
The film concludes in a powerful, poignant present-day epilogue, shot in color. The actual Schindlerjuden, accompanied by the actors who portrayed them, place stones on Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem, a solemn and living testament to the man who chose to save a world.