Schindler’s List

Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, released in December 1993, is the most-watched single film about the Holocaust. It tells the story of Oskar Schindler, the Sudeten German industrialist who used his Kraków enamelware factory and later his Brünnlitz munitions factory in occupied Czechoslovakia to protect around 1,200 Jewish workers from deportation to Auschwitz. The film won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director and grossed over $320 million at the international box office. It is, in 2026, the principal popular-culture point of contact between most non-Jewish viewers and the events of the Holocaust.

The book and the film

The film was adapted by Steven Zaillian from Thomas Keneally’s 1982 novel Schindler’s Ark, published as Schindler’s List in the United States. The novel had won the Booker Prize in 1982 and was based on Keneally’s interviews with Poldek Pfefferberg, a Schindler survivor who had been campaigning for decades to have the story filmed. Pfefferberg had approached Spielberg in 1982 about a film adaptation, and Spielberg had agreed in principle but delayed for more than a decade, partly because he felt unprepared for the subject matter and partly because he wanted other directors to consider the project first. Roman Polanski, who had survived the Kraków ghetto as a child, declined; Martin Scorsese was attached briefly before deciding against; Billy Wilder, who had lost most of his family in the Holocaust, also declined. Spielberg eventually committed to the film in 1991 and shot it in Poland in early 1993.

The directorial choices

The film was shot in black and white on location in Kraków, with the Płaszów camp scenes filmed at a reconstruction set near the original site (the original site itself, now a memorial, was unsuitable for filming). The cinematographer Janusz Kamiński, working on his first major Spielberg project, drew on the visual vocabulary of the German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s and the wartime documentary footage to produce a high-contrast monochrome that became the film’s distinctive visual register. The film makes a single, much-discussed exception to its monochrome: the figure of a small girl in a red coat, glimpsed during the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto in 1943, who reappears later as a body on a cart of corpses. The red-coat sequence has been the most-praised and the most-criticised single device in the film, depending on whether the critic regards it as a respectful gesture towards a single victim or as a sentimentalising intrusion.

The casting was central to the film’s effect. Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ben Kingsley as the accountant Itzhak Stern, and Ralph Fiennes as the Płaszów camp commandant Amon Göth gave the film its three major performances. Fiennes’s Göth, in particular, was the film’s most-discussed dramatic creation; Fiennes drew on documentary photographs and the surviving witnesses’ descriptions to produce a portrayal of a sadist whose ordinariness was the centre of the performance. Spielberg had Fiennes meet survivors during the production; one survivor, Mila Pfefferberg (Poldek Pfefferberg’s wife), reported that meeting Fiennes in his Göth costume had reduced her to physical shock, which Spielberg took as confirmation that the performance was achieving what he wanted.

The criticism

The film’s reception was substantially praising. The Holocaust historian Sir Martin Gilbert called it the most important Holocaust film since Shoah. Many survivors and survivor-organisation officials supported it. The New York Film Critics Circle and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association both named it film of the year.

The criticism, however, has been sustained. Claude Lanzmann, the director of Shoah, attacked the film as a Hollywood vulgarisation that turned a story about industrialised murder into a redemption narrative centred on a non-Jewish saviour. The critic Stanley Kauffmann argued that the film’s structural choice (a German rescuer at the centre of a story about the murder of European Jewry) was historically and emotionally misleading. The historian Yehuda Bauer argued that the film conflated different camps and operations in ways that sacrificed historical accuracy for narrative clarity. The argument that the film centres a non-Jewish protagonist while the Jewish characters function largely as objects of his protection has been made repeatedly and is the most sustained critical line.

Spielberg’s response, made over the following decades, has been pragmatic. He argued that the film was made for the wider non-Jewish public who would not be drawn to Shoah or The Sorrow and the Pity; that the film was a way into the subject for that audience rather than its definitive treatment; and that the proceeds of the film, which he refused to take personally, would fund the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, which would record the testimony of tens of thousands of survivors before they died. The Foundation, established in 1994, has since recorded over 55,000 testimonies in 65 countries and 43 languages, and the recordings are now held in the USC Shoah Foundation archive at the University of Southern California. The argument that the film bought the archive that Shoah could not has substance.

Schindler himself

The historical Schindler is a more ambiguous figure than the film could straightforwardly portray. He had joined the Sudeten German Party in 1935 and the Nazi Party in 1939; he had worked as an Abwehr informant for German military intelligence in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s; he had been arrested twice during the war on bribery and corruption charges and rescued each time through his SS contacts. His protection of his Jewish workers was real and produced the survival of around 1,200 people, but it began as a calculated operation to retain a productive labour force at low wages and developed into a rescue effort over time. He left for South America after the war, attempted unsuccessfully to run a farm in Argentina, returned to West Germany broke, and lived in declining circumstances until his death in 1974. He had been reduced for years to seeking financial support from those he had saved.

The film simplifies the chronology and sentimentalises some elements of the story (the speech in which Schindler weeps over not having saved more Jews has no documentary foundation in the surviving record). It is broadly accurate on the central events and on the protective relationship Schindler developed with his workers. The complexity of his earlier wartime conduct is left implicit rather than shown. The historiography remains divided over whether the simplification is a fair narrative compression or a misleading sanitisation; the argument is unlikely to be settled.

Schindler is buried in Jerusalem, on Mount Zion, the only Nazi Party member to be honoured as Righteous Among the Nations and to be buried at that site. The honour was conferred by Yad Vashem in 1993, the year the film was released.

See also

Sources

  • Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s Ark, Hodder and Stoughton, 1982
  • David M. Crowe, Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, Wartime Activities, and the True Story Behind the List, Westview Press, 2004
  • Yosefa Loshitzky (ed), Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical Perspectives on Schindler’s List, Indiana University Press, 1997
  • Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust, Cambridge University Press, third edition 2003 (chapters on the film and its context)
  • Claude Lanzmann, “Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth”, The Guardian, 3 April 1994 (an example of the sustained Lanzmann critique)
  • Yad Vashem, “Oskar and Emilie Schindler”, https://www.yadvashem.org/righteous
  • USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive, https://sfi.usc.edu