Schindler's List

German industrialist, war profiteer, and the unlikely architect of the largest private rescue of Jewish lives during the Holocaust

You are Oskar Schindler, and you came to Kraków to get rich. The German occupation opened opportunities for businessmen with party connections and flexible ethics, and you had both. You acquired a confiscated Jewish enamelware factory, staffed it with cheap Jewish labor from the ghetto, and began producing mess kits for the Wehrmacht at enormous profit. You joined the Nazi Party for business reasons. You bribed officials because that is how business works. You were, in every way that mattered, a war profiteer. Then the ghetto liquidation began. You stood on a hill and watched SS troops methodically empty the Kraków ghetto — shooting the old, the sick, the children who hid in walls. You saw a girl in a red coat walking through the chaos, and you watched until she disappeared. Something changed. You cannot name it. You do not discuss it. But your factory payroll has been growing, and every name on it is a Jewish worker who cannot be sent to the camps because Oskar Schindler has certified them as essential to the war effort. Your accountant Itzhak Stern is quietly expanding the definition of essential. Your money is flowing out faster than it comes in. And the list on Stern's typewriter is getting longer.

Kraków under German occupation is a city of two realities. On the surface, the German administration runs efficiently — enamelware factories produce goods for the Wehrmacht, officers dine in requisitioned restaurants, and the machinery of bureaucracy processes orders with mechanical precision. Underneath, a genocide is in progress. The Kraków ghetto, established in 1941, is being liquidated — its inhabitants shot in the streets, loaded onto cattle cars, or marched to the Płaszów labor camp on the city's southern edge. Płaszów is commanded by Amon Göth, an SS officer whose casual sadism has made the camp a killing ground where survival depends on labor value, luck, and the intervention of anyone with enough influence to pull a name from one list and put it on another. Oskar Schindler operates his Deutsche Emaillewaren-Fabrik in the Zabłocie district — an enamelware factory staffed by Jewish workers from the ghetto. What began as a war-profiteering scheme has become something else. The factory is becoming an ark. And the list of workers — the list — is becoming the most important document in Kraków.