Schindler's List

Steven Spielberg's 1993 film Schindler's List tells the harrowing true story of Oskar Schindler, a German businessman who saved more than a thousand Jewish refugees from the Holocaust by employing them in his factories. Shot in stark black and white, the film is a stark, unflinching look at the horrors of the Nazi regime, and it remains one of the most powerful and important films ever made about the Holocaust.

Liam Neeson stars as Schindler, a man who initially sees the war as an opportunity for profit, but whose conscience gradually awakens. Ben Kingsley delivers a quietly powerful performance as Itzhak Stern, Schindler's Jewish accountant who becomes his conscience, and Ralph Fiennes is chilling as Amon Goeth, the sadistic Nazi commandant of the Plaszow labor camp. The film was a massive critical and commercial success, earning seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director, and grossing over $321 million worldwide against a modest $22 million budget. It is a haunting, essential cinematic experience that confronts the darkest chapter of human history with unflinching honesty and profound humanity. [edit]

September 1939. Nazi Germany invades Poland, and Kraków's Jewish population is forced into a cramped ghetto. Oskar Schindler, a flamboyant Czech-German businessman and member of the Nazi Party, arrives in the city with an eye for wartime profit. He charms SS officers with black-market goods and lavish parties, securing the lease of a formerly Jewish-owned enamelware factory, which he renames Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik (DEF). Through the Judenrat, he staffs the factory almost entirely with Jewish workers, not out of compassion, but because they are cheaper than Poles and the council arranges financing.

Schindler hires Itzhak Stern, a Jewish accountant, to manage the books. Stern quietly becomes the moral engine of the operation, forging documents that classify unskilled workers, rabbis, intellectuals, the disabled, as essential war workers, saving them from deportation. Schindler remains indifferent at first, treating his workers as cheap labor. But as he witnesses the brutality of the Nazi regime firsthand, his conscience begins to stir.

The ghetto is liquidated in March 1943, a harrowing sequence of SS troops under Amon Goeth slaughtering hundreds in the streets. Goeth, the sadistic commandant of the Plaszów labor camp, becomes Schindler's dark mirror, a man who shoots prisoners from his balcony for sport. Schindler, by contrast, uses charm and bribery to protect his workers, even as conditions in the camp deteriorate. When Goeth's young housemaid Helen Hirsch is beaten, Schindler intervenes, kissing her forehead and lecturing Goeth on the difference between power and control, a sign of his growing moral awakening.

As the war turns against Germany in 1944, the SS begins deporting Plaszów's prisoners to Auschwitz. Schindler, now fully transformed, decides to save his Jews. He negotiates with Goeth to purchase approximately 1,100 workers, paying the SS for each prisoner and declaring them essential to his new ammunition factory in Brünnlitz, Czechoslovakia. Stern types the famous list, a document of life, while Schindler frantically tries to include as many names as possible. The film follows this gradual evolution from profiteer to savior, culminating in the desperate, last-minute effort to secure the workers' release before the SS can deport them to the gas chambers.

The narrative is framed by scenes set after the war, showing survivors and their descendants paying tribute at Schindler's grave in Jerusalem. The film is shot almost entirely in black and white, with one notable exception: a little girl in a red coat, a symbol of innocence lost amid the carnage.[edit]