Schindler’s List Retrospective: The List is Life

In March 2023, I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas Keneally, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler’s Ark. At the age of 87, he was in Brno with his wife for a series of events leading up to his first visit to Oskar Schindler’s factory, which lies in semi-ruin about 50 miles north of the Czech Republic’s second city.

The first event was a Q&A with Daniel Löw-Beer, the man who is actively shaping the next chapter of the Schindler’s Ark story. His Jewish family owned the factory before World War II but fled to England in 1938 for safety. The Nazis seized the site and later gave it to one of their party members, an industrialist named Oskar Schindler. With a certain sense of poetic justice, he later used the stolen property to save the lives of around 1,200 people from the Nazi killing machine.

 The remains of Oskar Schindler's factory at Brněnec, Czech Republic

The factory, formerly used as a textile mill, has fallen into severe disrepair over the past few decades. In more recent years, however, Löw-Beer has founded the Arks Foundation with the local community. Their goal is to restore the historic buildings and open a museum and visitor’s centre to make sure that the story of the Schindler Jews (Schindlerjuden) is not forgotten. He also intends to partially return the factory to its original use, producing the first local textiles on the site since before the war.

I’m easily starstruck and I was nervous about meeting the author, but I needn’t have worried. Thomas is a wonderfully warm and welcoming man, eager to talk with anyone he meets. As the guest of honour at the Q&A, that meant a lot of people. His chattiness caused some headaches for the organisers, who discreetly tried to pry him away from me while he was in full flow to start the discussion!

Thomas is one of those people who has a knack of making any subject fascinating and I could have easily listened to him talk all day. I wasn’t alone in this. There was a tangible feeling of affection for the author among the audience crammed into the exhibition space of Schrott, a trendy industrial bar in Brno, where he spoke for about an hour.

One of the stories he recounted was the origins of his novel, which may be familiar to movie buffs who know their Schindler’s List lore. He was in Los Angeles in the early ‘80s when he suddenly found himself in the market for a new briefcase. He stepped into a Beverly Hills store owned by Leopold “Poldek” Pfefferberg, a Holocaust survivor thanks to Oskar Schindler. Thomas’s credit card took about 40 minutes to clear, in which time the gregarious Pfefferberg eagerly told him the whole story. When Thomas left the shop, he not only had a nice new briefcase, but also the seeds for an important new novel.

Leopold Pfefferberg was an integral figure in getting the story of the Schindler Jews to the screen. Without his tireless efforts, the tale may have never received the wide public attention it knows today. Taking up residence in Los Angeles in the 1950s, he told anyone who would listen about Schindler and the lives he saved. With his prime location in Beverly Hills, that meant he could bend the ear of a lot of people in the movie business.

He almost got Fritz Lang onboard in 1951. The German master filmmaker would have been a great choice to direct, having fled his home country in 1933 after Joseph Goebbels tried to secure his services. In the following decade, Pfefferberg nearly got a film into production again with Howard Koch, the blacklisted playwright who worked on Orson Welles’ The War of the Worlds, on screenwriting duty. Unfortunately, both potential projects fell through, but Pfefferberg persisted until he met Thomas Keneally.

When Thomas sat down to write the book, the story of the Holocaust was not as widely known as it is today and many survivors were reluctant to revisit their horrific experiences. He knew the novel had to be as historically accurate as possible so it could never be debunked or dismissed. Pfefferberg helped him secure many testimonies, encouraging people who had lived through the nightmare to speak frankly with the author.

Pfefferberg (standing) with Schindler in 1964 ( United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of the Leopold Page Photographic Collection)

After Schindler’s Ark was published to glowing reviews in 1982, it came to the attention of Steven Spielberg. Spielberg was riding high in Hollywood after the blockbusting success of Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, both of which were nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. Despite his Jewish heritage, he wasn’t aware of Schindler’s story and couldn’t believe it was true at first. His interest encouraged Universal Pictures to buy the rights to the novel, but Spielberg didn’t feel he was mature enough to direct an adaptation yet. In a meeting with Pfefferberg, he said it would be ten years before he would be ready to start on the project.

True to form, Pfefferberg persevered. According to Thomas, the leather goods merchant was loud and amusing while his wife Ludmila, whom he married in 1941 and survived the ordeal with him, was quiet and eloquent. Pfefferberg treated Spielberg like a “promising nephew” and phoned him almost daily to ask when he was going to start making the movie.

Spielberg delayed the project for a long while and even offered Schindler’s List to other directors. One was Roman Polanski, who survived the Krakow Ghetto as a child and whose mother was murdered at Auschwitz. Veteran Billy Wilder was also interested at one point – born to a Polish Jewish family in central Europe, Wilder relocated to America before the war but several of his relatives, including his mother, were also victims of the Third Reich. 

Brian De Palma was offered the project but refused, and Martin Scorsese was attached to direct after completing The Last Temptation of Christ. Yet Spielberg felt guilty about giving up a film that meant so much to him and his family personally. He swapped movies with Scorsese, who directed a remake of Cape Fear instead while Spielberg finally committed to Schindler’s List, sparked into action by the rise of Holocaust denial and Neo-Nazi groups after the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Despite his unbelievable clout in Hollywood, Spielberg still needed the studio to greenlight the film and give him some money to make it. To grease the wheels, he agreed to make a dinosaur flick called Jurassic Park first. Once that deal was done, Schindler’s List was a go picture. 

Although Thomas Keneally originally adapted his novel into a screenplay, Steven Zaillian, first hired by Scorsese, wrote a new script. Spielberg wanted to place more focus on the Schindler Jews and asked Zailian to extend the screenplay, making the ghetto liquidation sequence a focal point. This choice emphasised the terror and hopelessness of the Jewish community’s situation and provided Oskar Schindler with a plausible change of heart.

Key to this was the inclusion of one of the film’s few sparks of colour, the famous little girl in the red coat. In one of the film’s most captivating and heartbreaking moments, he watches the child wandering through the mayhem before hiding under a bed, only for Schindler to see her dead on a cartload of corpses later in the story.

Casting was a challenge with over 100 speaking parts and thousands of extras. For the central role of Oskar Schindler, some big names were considered including Warren Beatty, Mel Gibson, and Kevin Costner. Spielberg was keen to avoid a leading man with too much star baggage and instead settled on Liam Neeson, who at that point was perhaps best known for Sam Raimi’s superhero movie Darkman. It was a good choice – Neeson embodied Schindler as a conniving and debonair chancer with just the right kind of charisma and bonhomie to make us believe that he was capable of manipulating the Nazis to his own ends.

Ben Kingsley took the important role of Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s modest but wily accountant, after Dustin Hoffman turned it down. Like several of the characters in the film, Stern was a composite, necessary due to the sheer amount of people involved in the complex real story of the Schindler Jews. Neeson and Kingsley have a nice chemistry, developing almost a buddy duo dynamic that brings some much-needed moments of camaraderie and humour. Indeed, for a film that tackles such an immensely harrowing topic, it is mercifully amusing at times. Not rolling-in-the-aisles laffs, but enough to give us a breather occasionally by alleviating the horror with some well-timed moments of levity.

The third crucial role, that of Płaszów Camp Commandant Amon Goeth, went to a virtual unknown. Ralph Fiennes was a RADA trained actor who had enjoyed a successful stage career but only had two screen credits to his name at that point. He was a revelation in the role of the cruel and capricious war criminal who lords it over the camp from his hilltop villa, terrorising the inmates by randomly picking them off with his hunting rifle. Goeth was pure evil but Fiennes found complexity in the role, particularly in the scenes with his abused Jewish housemaid Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz), towards whom the screenplay suggests he had amorous feelings that he could only express through violence.

For the rest of the cast, Spielberg largely chose unknown actors, mainly Polish and Israelis who he felt looked suitably Eastern European for the parts. Meanwhile, some of the German actors chosen to play SS soldiers weren’t initially keen to wear the uniform, but later told Spielberg that they found it a good way of confronting their country’s terrible past.

Schindler’s List began filming on March 1st 1993 on location in Krakow. Spielberg refused to take a fee for his work, which he felt would constitute “blood money.” Ever involved, Leopold Pfefferberg also travelled to Poland to serve as an advisor and show the director around some of the important sites. He received credit in the film as a consultant under the name Leopold Page. 

Wherever possible, Spielberg shot in or near real locations. Wisely and tactfully, he took note of objections to film in Auschwitz-Birkenau itself, building a replica close by the gates of the latter. Eschewing his usual filmmaking methods, Schindler shot in black and white and often with handheld cameras to capture a documentary-like feel. Paring back the style also enabled him to wrap the huge project in just 75 days, which was a mercy. 

The shoot was tough for everyone involved, and Spielberg found himself extremely emotional throughout the production, confronted with the enormity of the atrocity buried in his family’s heritage. For the film’s mournful score, Spielberg turned to his regular collaborator, John Williams. The composer provided one of his most achingly beautiful pieces of work, capturing the full sorrow of the Holocaust in a main theme arranged for violin and sensitively played by Itzhak Perlman.

Schindler’s List was released In December 1993, six months after Jurassic Park. The two films culminated in one of the most critically and commercially successful years in Steven Spielberg’s career. Together, they took over $1.3 billion at the box office — Schindler proved far more successful than the director ever dreamed. Notices for the Holocaust drama were overwhelmingly positive and it was equally successful at the Academy Awards. The film was nominated for 12 Oscars and won seven – Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Original Score, Film Editing, Cinematography, and Art Direction. Jurassic Park picked up a further three awards – Sound Effects Editing, Sound, and Visual Effects. It was one of those rare years in Oscar history where nobody could really complain about the result, although Fiennes perhaps should have won Best Supporting Actor over Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive.

More important than the accolades, glowing reviews, and box office success, Schindler’s List enabled Spielberg to start the USC Shoah Foundation and managed the incredible feat of making the Holocaust accessible to the widest audience possible. Prior to Spielberg’s triumph, there just weren't that many mainstream films about the plight of the Jews during World War II – you had The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), The Pawnbroker (1964), and Sophie’s Choice (1982) and that was about it. Claude Lantzmann’s Shoah (1985) may be regarded as the definitive film document about the Holocaust, but who has the courage or fortitude to sit through nine hours of testimonies? 

The genius of Keneally’s book and Spielberg’s adaptation is they both make the story so compelling and approachable, identifying a note of hope amid the unimaginable despair. Schindler’s List has some tough scenes to watch, but it’s never gruelling enough to make the viewer shy away completely. Compared to two great works about the horrors of war that I’ll never watch again, Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) or Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Schindler’s List is a film that I willingly return to every few years. It’s far from popcorn entertainment but it’s important to have a “popular” Holocaust movie, especially when an increasing number of young people aren’t aware of what happened to Jewish people and other minorities during World War II.

That isn’t to say there hasn’t been some backlash against Schindler’s List. The enduring popular appeal has caused derision in some quarters; Schindler’s Jews were just 1,200 lucky survivors whereas 6 million others weren’t so fortunate. While it is true that other figures risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust, the overwhelming experience for the vast majority was one of persecution, terror, starvation, torture, grief, and death. Critic J. Hoberman went so far as to call it “a feel-good movie about the ultimate feel-bad experience,” and others took issue with the film’s perceived “happy” ending, in particular the modern-day colour epilogue at Oskar Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem.

Other criticisms levelled against Schindler’s List include pushing a “good German” narrative, perpetuating Jewish stereotypes, and sexualising the ordeal of Jewish people, most notably in the scene when Helen Hirsch’s breasts are visible through a wet shirt as Amon Goethe interrupts her washing. On a more personal and malicious note, some even suggested that Spielberg only made the film to win an Oscar, something he vehemently and quite reasonably denied.

The Meeting Brno organisers of the Q&A with Thomas Keneally and Daniel Löw-Beer had a special surprise for both the author and the audience. At the end of the talk, a Polish actor named Oliwia Dabrowska was introduced. A dark-haired woman in her early thirties took the stage. It was clear from the polite applause that most, if not all, of the people in the room had no idea who she was. Then she put on a long red coat and there was a little gasp from the audience: Here was the defining image of Schindler’s List, in person and all grown up!

Taking her seat next to the author, Dabrowska spoke about her experiences on the film. Understandably, her memories were vague because she was only three years old when she played the unforgettable role. She joked that half of Krakow auditioned and she only got the part because, out of all the other young girls trying out, she didn't really care about it. She thinks her nonchalance got her the part because it was necessary for her to wander through the chaos of the ghetto liquidation as if she hardly noticed what was going on. The scale of the set piece was a one-shot deal and her one word in the script, "Father," was cut. It was a good decision because it made the girl a symbol rather than a character.

She claims that she had one little piece of input on Spielberg's direction. At the conclusion of the scene, we see the girl hide under a bed. The director initially wanted Dabrowska to crawl in head first. She was worried about spiders and insisted on scooting in backward instead. That choice caps the scene: we get to see the girl’s face in close up, making it all the more devastating when Schindler later spots her body with the other victims.

Understandably, her parents wouldn’t let her watch Schindler’s List until she was older and she didn’t fully appreciate it until she was in her twenties. She is now very proud of her role and has leveraged her profile to help others. She has volunteered on the Polish border with Ukraine to assist refugees and used her image as a toddler to highlight the situation. There is an edited version of a photo of her from the film, switching out red and monochrome to the blue and yellow of the Ukrainian flag. It draws a parallel between the victims of the Holocaust and the imperilled families and children of Russia’s war in the country. She says that she saw the little girl in the red coat in every child she has helped.

Visiting Schindler’s factory and meeting Thomas, Daniel, and Oliwia has been an incredibly insightful experience. It is 31 years since Schindler’s List swept the Oscars and, while Spielberg’s film continues to keep the memory of the Holocaust from fading, people like them are still working hard to ensure that the story of the Schindlerjuden continues to raise awareness today. This is especially important at a time when the horrors of the Holocaust find disturbing echoes in the events in Ukraine, Palestine, and other parts of the modern world.

Daniel Löw-Beer and the Arks Foundation aim to open a Museum of Survivors at the renovated factory site in 2025 - you can find out more about the project here. You can also read about Oliwia Dabrowska’s volunteer work with Ukrainian refugees in this article and catch up with her on Instagram. As for Thomas Keneally, he is still writing and hopes to return to the factory for the opening of the museum.

The Arks Foundation's vision

So there you have it, our retrospective on a monumental film and a little about how the legacy of Schindler’s List is still doing good to this day. Please feel free to share your thoughts with us!