Schindler’s List (originally titled Schindler’s Ark) is a 1982 historical novel by Australian author Thomas Keneally. It tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi party who used his position as a German industrialist to save more than 1,200 people’s lives during the war. In protecting as many people as he could from the genocidal Nazi regime, Schindler risked being sent to a concentration camp himself. Keneally wrote the novel with the help of Poldek Pfefferberg, one of the many people whose lives Schindler saved, along with other unnamed survivors as well as documents and photos. Many scenes are factual historical events, though Keneally dramatized some to fill gaps in the historical record, such as the tales of Płaszów survivors and those who lived in the Cracow Jewish ghetto Podgórze. Schindler’s List explores themes of Pragmatic Good and Absolute Evil, Complicity and Guilt, and The Horrors of the Holocaust.

The novel won the 1982 Booker Prize as well as the 1983 LA Times Prize for Fiction. In 1993, American director Steven Spielberg turned the book into a historical drama film titled Schindler’s List. The film’s success immortalized Schindler’s story in the popular imagination, and the novel was retroactively renamed to make it instantly recognizable to fans of the film.

This guide uses the 1993 Simon & Schuster edition of the novel.

Content Warning: Schindler’s List depicts antisemitism, ableism, pogroms, graphic violence, extreme human suffering, substance abuse, racial bias, Nazi imagery, discussion of sexuality, racial and sexual slurs, and anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

Plot Summary

Oskar Schindler is a Sudetendeutsche—a person of German descent born and raised in areas that become part of Czechoslovakia after World War I. In 1936, at age 28, he joins the Abwehr, Nazi Germany’s spy network and, at its behest, moves to Cracow (now Kraków), Poland, to gather information on the city’s resources. When Germany invades Poland in 1939, Schindler joins the Nazi Party (which is outlawed in Czechoslovakia) and becomes a war profiteer, taking over an abandoned Cracow enamel factory named Rekord through his political contacts. He renames the factory Deutsche Emailwarenfabrik (DEF), which the workers nickname “Emalia.” Jewish people owned Rekord before the invasion, but the Germans forced it into bankruptcy. (Jewish people couldn’t own businesses under German occupation.) The German government awards Schindler, as a member of the Nazi party and a faithful spy, lucrative wartime contracts for enamelware, mess kits, and small amounts of ammunition shelling. Schindler initially employs few Jewish people, among them Abraham Bankier, Rekord’s former office manager, and Itzhak Stern, an accountant (who becomes Schindler’s personal accountant and a close friend). The treatment of Jewish people takes a dark turn under the Nazi regime. The Germans begin engaging in Aktion, or violent, sudden raids on Jewish neighborhoods for intimidation, control, and looting. Stern senses Schindler’s empathy toward the plight of Cracow’s Jewish people and begins persuading him to use his position to help others.

As Germany rounds up Cracow’s Jewish people into a ghetto in the Podgórze neighborhood, Schindler—using his huge network of political contacts—begins employing dozens more Jewish people in his factory while maneuvering through Nazi politics to find other sympathizers in the regime. From 1941 to 1942, conditions in the ghetto worsen as the Nazis turn Jewish people against one another. The Nazis liquidate the ghetto in late 1942 and send most residents to Płaszów, a labor camp outside Cracow run by SS Commandant Amon Goeth. The increasing violence toward Jewish people forces Schindler to resort to bribery to ensure his workers’ safety as they travel to and from the ghetto for work. In 1941, Schindler is arrested (for the first of three times) when the Nazi regime suspects that he sympathizes too much with Jewish people. Schindler is nearly sent to a concentration camp for treason but escapes and builds a network of like-minded individuals, including an Austrian dentist named Sedlacek and a Zionist rescue organization based in Budapest. Schindler smuggles the organization’s money into Cracow and distributes it to Jewish contacts for aid and relief in the city, though much of it ends up in the hands of resistance fighters.

The ghetto’s liquidation and the new labor camp Płaszów put the entire Jewish population of Cracow under Goeth’s tyrannical rule. Goeth terrorizes his prisoners daily, executing people in broad daylight for the slightest infraction and pitting prisoners against one another. Schindler despises Goeth yet must bribe him copiously and treat him like a good friend in order to protect his workers and the other prisoners. Having witnessed the slaughter of the ghetto liquidation, Schindler is further radicalized against the Nazi party by his Jewish friends’ accounts of life inside Płaszów. The increasing hostilities there—and the tendency to send prisoners to Auschwitz and other extermination camps—require that Schindler spend most of his fortune to protect his workers. Goeth’s extreme tyranny and the conditions at Płaszów push Schindler to create a sub-Płaszów camp at DEF. He convinces Goeth to agree under the guise of producing secret weapon parts for the German military. Schindler uses the DEF camp to protect his workers, even refusing to allow the SS guards to enter the camp or harass them. By this point, most DEF workers are Jewish, and renting their labor from the SS costs Schindler most of his money. He becomes a black-market afficionado, placating SS officials and bureaucrats with rare goods to keep them away.

By 1944, Germany is losing the war as the Soviets begin to crush German occupation in Poland. Goeth, increasingly paranoid about an uprising in Płaszów, becomes more violent and unpredictable. The Nazi bureaucracy converts Płaszów into a concentration camp, which forces Goeth to conduct executions more formally by first applying for them, giving the prisoners the slightest breathing room. The change also means, however, that prisoners are sent to the gas chambers at a moment’s notice—and industry at the camp is terminated: The German government orders DEF’s closure and sends its prisoners back to the main camp. Jewish people are no longer allowed to work anywhere in Cracow.

With Stern’s help, Schindler compiles a list of some 1,200 workers in Płaszów essential to DEF’s functioning. Instead of giving up, he moves his factory to Moravia at Brinnlitz and uses the list to extract people under the guise that they’re skilled workers essential to the war’s success. Schindler spends the last of his fortune to extract these people from Płaszów and relocate them to the new factory. He extracts and moves the 800 or so men on the list without difficulty. However, the SS purposely sends the women to Auschwitz and torments them. Schindler recovers these women and nurses them back to health. He exhausts his contacts’ favors and black-market connections to keep his people safe at Brinnlitz as Russia advances on Germany. Schindler arms the Jewish people at his camp, fearing the worst. When the war ends on May 8, Schindler flees to avoid execution by the Russians as a German war profiteer. Americans discover Schindler and the small group of people that left with him, and, with a letter signed by the Jewish people of his camp, he explains his story and they escape safely. The Brinnlitz prisoners slowly filter out into the world after the war, many heading for America or the portion of Palestine that would become Israel.

After the war, Schindler provides key information to convict Nazi war criminals and faces harassment in postwar Germany for being a “race traitor.” He spends the rest of his life in relative obscurity, though the Israeli government honors him, naming him Righteous Among the Nations, an honorific for non-Jews who saved Jewish people at great peril during the Holocaust. Schindler’s subsequent business ventures fail repeatedly. He relies on the grace of Jewish friends and the Israeli government to support him at the end of his life. Schindler dies of liver failure at age 66 in 1974.