Oskar Schindler is a factory owner and member of the Nazi party living in Poland during World War II. At the start of the story, Schindler is an unlikely hero more concerned with philandering and moneygrubbing than morality. Yet as he starts to see how the Nazis are treating Jews and realizes his Jewish employees' likely fate, he slowly changes from a selfish man to a giving one. He spends a good portion of the novel bribing Nazi party members to keep his employees safe. In the end he saves about 1,100 people from the concentration camps in Germany.
Emelie Schindler
Emelie is Oskar's wife, who deeply loves her husband. However, once she realizes he is not going to stop cheating, she moves away and waits until he is willing to settle down.
Amon Goeth
Goeth is the head of a death camp in Poland, a truly angry and vile man who takes pleasure in the torture and death of his Jewish prisoners. He is a true believer of all the Nazi party's ways, and shows this in horrific fashion.
Itzhak Stern
Itzhak is Schindler's accountant and moral compass. He works for Schindler but only because he needs the money. He does not like the man, until Schindler starts to change. Itzhak's ability to help Oskar make money creates a relationship of respect, which turns to friendship as Schindler starts to realize the horrors happening to good people.
Helen Hirsch
Helen is Amon Goeth's maid and punching bag. She is Jewish, which makes her easy to despise, but Goeth also yearns for her since she is beautiful. This creates a constant tension and Helen gets the brunt of his terrible hatred.
Poldek Pfefferberg
Pfefferberg is a black market trader and ends up becoming a contact for Schindler to obtain certain goods. He is also Jewish and over time becomes Schindler's friend.
Marcel Goldberg
Goldberg though Jewish is only interested in himself and the money he can make. This makes him easy to use by Schindler, who bribes him often to smuggle goods and Jewish people to safety.
The Dresners
Chaja and Danka Dresner are mother and daughter, and, as Jews, they are singled out and put in the Jewish ghetto. However, they escape and work for Schindler until the end of the war, constantly supporting each other.
The Nussbaums
The Nussbaums are an elite Jewish couple, whose home Schindler occupies when they are forced into the ghetto. They start off arrogant and judgmental but learn that their money means nothing in the ghetto.
Regina Perlman
Regina is a Jewish woman masquerading as a gentrified woman, but risks it all when she reaches out to Schindler to ask for his assistance in saving her parents from the ghetto.
Rabbi Menasha Lewartow
Menasha was a rabbi prior to World War II, but is now no longer allowed to do his work and is almost murdered by Goeth. Yet Schindler hires him for his factory saving his life.
Girl in the Red Dress
Though this character never gets a name, she is a small little girl in a red coat that is horrifically walking through a street of Jewish people that are being slaughtered before her young eyes. She also becomes the catalyst for Schindler as he sees her small form staggering through the street, showing in stark reflection what is happening, and what type of people the Nazis truly were.
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After sweeping the Poles aside like ninepins [and seriously, the Polish Army went out against the German tanks on horseback: talk about guts], the Germans settle in and promptly begin deporting all of the country's Jews into ghettos in the cities. Their homes, businesses, and belongings are confiscated. They have no means of support. They're forced to wear armbands identifying them as Jews, just in case anyone would confuse them with human beings.
War. What Is It Good For?
Well, it's good for Oskar Schindler.
Businessman, Nazi spy, and all-around charmer, Schindler [Liam Neeson] sees a golden opportunity in this situation. After carousing with the local Nazi big shots at a city nightclub, they allow him to take over a confiscated Jewish business—an enamelware factory—using the Jews as slave labor. By producing pots and pans as mess kits for the German army, he's sure he'll make a fortune.
The business does very well. He keeps the bribes flowing to his Nazi contacts so they'll keep putting in orders for his products. It's a great deal for him, but a pretty bad one for his Jewish workers. They don't get paid—only a few surplus pots to trade on the black market. It keeps them off the cattle cars for now, but they're still living with starvation and disease in the Krakow ghetto.
It gets worse. A lot worse.
There's a new sheriff in town. Kommandant Amon Goeth [Ralph Fiennes] in Krakow supervises the construction of the new Plaszow concentration camp outside Krakow. When it's built, the Nazis empty the ghetto and herd the Jews into the camp. Those who aren't quite down with the program get shot. People unfit to work are loaded onto cattle cars in trains bound for Hell, a.k.a. Auschwitz.
His workers suddenly gone and his factory empty, Schindler's all over it like it's Taken 4: Everybody. He storms into the camp demanding that "his" Jews be returned so he can keep making money. He cajoles, bribes, and threatens in order to get them back.
It works.
Oskar continues to work both sides, keeping his workers out of Plaszow while socializing with the Nazis and greasing the wheels of his bribery machine to keep business coming.
Meanwhile, Herr Kommandant Goeth, a sadistic psychopath, enjoys using Jews in his camp for target practice. He randomly shoots prisoners from his balcony just so no one gets the idea that you can count on being alive from one minute to the next.
Schindler sees all that's going on. He's horrified. As the war goes on, he slowly stops focusing on making bundles of cash and starts trying to save the Jews in his factory. Considering how happy the Nazi regime is with his work, he's uniquely positioned to do it. He continues to pal around with Goeth and his sadistic Nazi buddies to make sure he's got the clout to keep his workers out of Plaszow.
Everything changes when Goeth receives orders to liquidate the camp and send the Jews to Auschwitz to be killed. Schindler spends the remainder of his personal fortune to save more than 1,100 of his Jewish workers from deportation—written on the "list" of the film's title. Things don't go quite as smoothly as he'd like—the Jewish women and children get sent to Auschwitz by mistake—but Schindler's con artist hustle [and a big fat bribe for the Auschwitz kommandant] manages to keep them alive until the end of the war.
Even more awesome, he turns his factory into a model of inefficiency, so there's fewer shells for the German army to lob at the advancing allies. He even manages to let his workers reclaim some of their religious traditions by observing the Sabbath on Friday nights. At the end of the war, he's broke and wanted as a war criminal, but the men, women, and children on his list are alive.
His grateful workers present him with a gold ring inscribed with a passage from the Talmud: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." They give him a letter to present to the Soviet Army if he's caught, attesting to his heroic actions on their behalf.
For the record, the real-life Schindler eluded the Russians and made it all the way to the American forces with the help of several of his Jewish workers. He was unsuccessful in business after the war, and was supported by donations from the Jewish community until his death. We never see this in the movie, but it's worth noting. They never forgot him.
A narrative text at the end of the film states that there are 6,000 descendants of Schindler's Jews, and only 4,000 Jews in Poland. The late great film critic Roger Ebert writes that "The obvious lesson would seem to be that Schindler did more than a whole nation to spare its Jews. That would be too simple. The film's message is that one man did something, while in the face of the Holocaust others were paralyzed." [Source]
The film closes with real survivors, walking with the actors who played them, to lay stones [a sign of love and respect] at Oskar Schindler's grave in Israel.
And now you know why.
For Rena Finder, Dec. 31, 1942, was not a day for celebrating New Year’s Eve. It was the beginning of a new, terrifying chapter in the life of the Jewish 13-year-old in Krakow, Poland. That was when her father was accused of being a member of the resistance and arrested; she never heard from him again. “I was a little girl, and it seemed like overnight, I became an enemy of the state,” Finder, now 89, told TIME in a recent phone call from her home in Framingham, Mass.
Finder soon became one of the youngest Jewish workers in the enamelware and ammunition factory in Krakow owned by Oskar Schindler, a businessman whose story of saving more than 1,000 Jewish people during World War II was made famous by Schindler’s List, the 1993 Steven Spielberg film adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s 1982 historical fiction novel. The movie, starring Liam Neeson in the title role, is back in theaters Friday for a limited re-release timed to the 25th anniversary of a wider release in theaters on Dec. 15, 1993.
The film has been considered a landmark in the history of Holocaust storytelling because it inspired survivors to tell more stories and the world to listen.
Until Schindler’s List hit theaters, depictions of history in films were often “essentially set decoration,” TIME’s then-film critic Richard Corliss noted in a feature when the movie was first released in 1993. The Holocaust especially had “been left mostly to documentarians and to Europeans,” but, he explained, that was changing:
…Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is a consequential event. It is a high-profile, big-studio film, produced and directed by the most popular filmmaker of our era, possibly of all time [four of the top 10 grossing movies ever are Spielberg’s, including the biggest of them all, this year’s Jurassic Park. These factors alone would grant it an access to the mainstream public consciousness that no other movie on this subject has enjoyed. The fact that it is a very good movie means it has a chance to lodge there instructively, and perhaps permanently.
“The Movie simply needed my clout to get it made,” Spielberg says, and he is not being immodest. Since no filmmaker has a track record like his, none has his power to encourage both a studio and the young mass audience to take a risk on a movie the subject of which is inherently repellent, not to say terrifying.
Not all film critics loved it. Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz quoted a historian who called it “Spielberg’s Holocaust park,” while the German newspaper Die Welt described it as “the fantasies of a young boy from California who had never taken an interest in the Holocaust or the Jews before.” Others said Spielberg took on the project only because he thought it could win him his first Academy Award. [Indeed, it won Best Directing and Best Picture.] When Spielberg spoke of his own motivation for making the movie, he pointed to its educational value. Holocaust survivors were getting older, and there was a push to record their accounts to debunk Holocaust denial; Spielberg himself founded what’s now called the USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education in 1994 to do just that. Then, as now, levels of knowledge about the Holocaust could be shockingly low. “We’re not making a film, we’re making a document,” Spielberg told the cast.
That’s an idea that historians and survivors can get behind.
“Up until 1990, it was hard to find a good textbook about the Holocaust,” says David Crowe, author of Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List and a past member of the education committee of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “Once the museum opened and Spielberg’s film came out the same year, there was an explosion in this country in terms of interest in Holocaust.”
That phenomenon extended to the real people who lived through the story Spielberg told. Finder says that the movie release was when she stopped feeling like she was alone in her willingness to talk about her experience, which she had been doing since 1979 as part of a group called Facing History and Ourselves. “After the movie came out, more people wanted to learn,” she says. “It seemed like the wall of silence fell down.”
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But if the movie’s value was educational, how accurate were the lessons it taught?
Twenty-five years later, the film is seen as a realistic depiction of life during the Holocaust, in terms of the brutality of the Nazis and the lifestyles of those they persecuted, though it does stray from the real story in a few big ways. For example, the person who gave the real Schindler the idea of putting Jewish people to work as essentially slave laborers in his factory, thus saving them, was a Jewish Polish former factory co-owner named Abraham Bankier — a critical role that is not in the film.
After the Nazis invaded Poland in the fall of 1939, they stripped Jewish citizens of their property and forced them into ghettos. From there, the SS used them as free labor, including at factories like Schindler’s in Krakow. As more and more German males were drafted into the military, these slave laborers were relied upon even more. When Schindler started out, his reasoning wasn’t quite altruistic. “What he feared most was getting drafted,” according to Crowe, especially as he led a lavish lifestyle that he needed to fund, and he’d make more money as a factory owner than in the military. Bankier sold Schindler on the idea that Jewish laborers would be cheaper than Polish workers who were not Jewish.
However, Schindler started to show that he cared about his Jewish laborers as human beings when he got a sub-camp constructed on the factory premises in 1943. Before, SS guards would march them from the Plaszów camp where they lived to the factory and back home late at night. Though Schindler told officials he wanted them closer so they could work more, their quality of life also improved, which benefited his bottom line while also helping the workers.
“It was the first major gesture he made in which he was really trying to help [his Jewish laborers] have a little bit of a better life,” says Crowe. “The food was better. Males and females weren’t separated. He didn’t let the SS guards into the camp; they could stay in watchtowers, but couldn’t come in.”
Finder, who remembers making shells for ammunition, says she felt like Schindler took good care of them. “He’d smile and ask how you are, pat you on the head,” she says. “I remember I had pneumonia, and I stayed in the clinic for three days. If I got sick in Plaszów they would have killed me. If you stayed in the clinic there for more than a day, they’d shoot the patient. That didn’t happen in Oskar Schindler’s factory.”
She also recalls a moment when she had trouble operating a machine, to the point that it stopped working properly. “I was crying, I was scared. The foreman accused me of sabotage,” she recalls. “Schindler said a small girl cannot handle that machine and nobody but a man should be using that machine. I was convinced he was sent from heaven.”
In the summer of 1944, as the Soviets’ Red Army advanced, factory owners who made some armaments for the German military moved their factories westward. Schindler moved his operations from Krakow to Brünnlitz, in what’s now the Czech Republic.
That was when the famous list comes in: the people on it would be sent to Brünnlitz to work, and thus saved.
But Schindler was in fact in jail when the list was made, having been detained during an investigation into whether he’d bribed a commandant. The scene of him being directly involved in drawing it up “is totally bogus,” says Crowe.
In addition, there was actually more than one list. In October of 1944, a Plaszów camp orderly named Marcel Goldberg made two lists of people approved to go to Brünnlitz, which can be considered “Schindler’s lists.” One has the names of 300 women; one has the names of 700 men. Throughout the war, Goldberg — one of Jewish prisoners who had been forced by the Nazis to be a camp orderly — had coordinated the transportation of Jewish slave laborers from Plaszów to other labor camps in German-occupied central and eastern Europe. It’s not clear exactly how Goldberg chose who would be on the lists, but it’s thought that he included people he knew, perhaps friends of friends. “He also would have sought advice from other Jewish inmates working in the camp office who would have helped him choose people,” says Crowe, who thinks only about a third of the people on the lists had actually worked for Schindler before.
Finder says her mother heard that Goldberg was compiling a list of young people with “skinny fingers” good for factory work. “My mother sent me to Marcel Goldberg,” she recalls. “I went to him and told him my mother and I want to be on the list and he put us on the list.”
Before the 1,000 “Schindler Jews” could go to Brünnlitz, they had to be “inspected”; the men were sent to the Gross-Rosen camp and the women were sent to Auschwitz. While the men were quickly processed, some women got lost in the system. This phase of the story is another where the truth differs slightly from the movie — Schindler sent a secretary to retrieve them, rather than going himself — but the truth of the experience is so horrifying that perhaps no film could capture it accurately, no matter how careful it was with the detail.
“When we got to Auschwitz, we were so thirsty. We tried to catch the snowflakes. But it was not snow falling; it was ashes,” Finder recalls. “Then we were told to undress for an inspection. I remember, after they shaved my head, we were put in dark room and cold water came down. We were completely naked, and I remember looking at my mom and I couldn’t recognize her. I said, ‘Now we won’t suffer anymore because we are dead already.’ She said, ‘We are not dead. We are alive.'”
Read more: Behind the Picture: The Liberation of Buchenwald, April 1945
Brünnlitz operated from October of 1944 through the German surrender in May 1945. Based on transport lists, Schindler ended up saving 1,098 people by having that factory open.
The 1,000 came from the two lists Goldberg made, and Crowe believes the other 98 were people who came from other camps and perhaps got diverted there as Allied forces advanced on the Nazis.
With the money he made during the war, Schindler acquired 18 truckloads of wool, khaki material, shoes and leather, which he passed on to his workers. “This is your money,” Finder recalls him saying. After the war, the tables turned; the people who had once been his Jewish laborers helped support him through a string of business failures. He died in 1974 in Frankfurt at the age of 66, but for survivors like Finder, the gratitude lives on.
“He was sent by God to take care of us,” she says.
Write to Olivia B. Waxman at .