Schindler's List Quotes
"He who saves the life of one man saves the entire world."
"In times like these, it must be hard for the churches to go on telling people that their Heavenly Father cared about the death of even a single sparrow."
"A Jew is still permitted to read German newspapers."
"I have witnessed terrible things in the past; little chauffeurs and Gauleiters have profited so much from these transactions that they now have about half a million."
"Destiny was not a limitless rope. It was a piece of elastic. The harder you went forward, the more fiercely you were jerked back to your starting point."
"The situation would settle; the race would survive by petitioning, by buying off the authorities—it was the old method, it had been working since the Roman Empire, it would work again."
"You will find you are restricted in the people you’ll be allowed to employ. ..."
"I would like some latitude. I am a capitalist by temperament and I don’t like being regulated."
"I thought you might have instituted an accounting procedure to deal with just this situation. It must be happening a great deal in Cracow just now."
"It isn’t just uniforms. The Polish domestic market itself is large enough and inflated enough to support us all."
"The best thing, therefore, may be to begin with a tentative instance of Herr Schindler’s strange virtue."
"In the high rhetoric of their leaders, the Einsatz soldiers knew, a struggle for national existence meant race warfare."
"For Oskar would never be a surreptitious lover. He had a childlike sexual frankness."
"To suggest as some have that any woman would be pleased with partial possession of Oskar is to demean the women involved."
"Whoever lays a hand on me, he promised himself, I’ll have him sent to Russia."
"Humans were incurable that way. People would try to get off it, someone’s loyal Polish maid with a parcel of sausage."
"And people would try to get on, some fast-moving athletic young man like Leopold Pfefferberg with a pocketful of diamonds or Occupation złoty or a message in code for the partisans."
"In boom times the cost of labor was beside the point."
"It was because of this shift of power—the SS becoming not simply the arm of policy but the makers of it as well—that beneath the high June sun the OD was taking on a new nature."
"If ever they did shoot her, she would probably stand there protesting, 'But the Herr Direktor said this couldn’t happen.'"
"To honest men, the OD would become a corrupter. To crooks it was an opportunity."
"You couldn’t keep a Jewish child in the countryside anymore. The municipal authorities—never mind the SS—were offering sums of 500 zł. and upward for every Jew betrayed."
"My God, there were areas where the peasants went out hunting Jews with scythes and sickles."
"She accepted whatever endearments the women sharing the kitchen happened to utter."
"Mrs. Dresner noticed how strangely guarded the child was in all her answers."
"Red. She sat there in red cap, red coat, small red boots. The peasants had indulged her passion."
"The child nodded, but it didn’t seem to be shyness that kept her quiet."
"Oskar Schindler, industrialist, was celebrating the general succulence of life."
"His ledgers might stand up to scrutiny, but no one could deny he was a 'Jew-kisser.'"
"It’s as stupid as kissing a Jewess, said Philip."
"There was an intimacy, like that of medieval siege paintings, about the way you could look down over the ghetto’s southern wall."
"The ghetto’s map was revealed, and you could see, as you passed them, what was happening in the streets below."
"Each tenant, has his own world of secrets and mysteries."
"Children suddenly stopped talking at a creaking in the stairwell."
"Adults woke from dreams of exile and dispossession to find themselves exiled and dispossessed."
"In the corner of Plac Zgody stood an Apotheke run by Tadeus Pankiewicz."
"The square in front of Pankiewicz’ pharmacy became in those first days of June a marshaling yard."
"In spite of the screams and wailing of those related to the victims, some people seemed almost unaware of the heap of corpses."
"The manner of his arrest seemed more professional than the last."
"On the morning of the 29th, a Mercedes blocked the factory entrance and two Gestapo men, seeming somehow surer of their ground than the last two, met him crossing the factory yard."
"What was in favor of the labor camps was that they lacked the technical apparatus for methodical slaughter."
"The Vernichtungslagers also used people as labor for a time, but their ultimate industry was death."
"In the midst of explaining the distinction between extermination camps and those for forced labor, Schindler suddenly stepped toward the door."
"The forced-labor camps would be run by men appointed for their severity and efficiency in clearing the ghettos."
"In my experience, there isn't one of them who isn't corruptible."
"Their resources seemed minute now that they knew what they were set against."
"I don’t want a damned percentage. I don’t want to be offered one."
"They would be grateful for the barracks of Płaszów. Even those with Aryan papers would come crawling in here."
"Oskar could speak to Amon the administrator, Amon the speculator, but knew at the same time that nine-tenths of the Commandant’s being lay beyond the normal rational processes of humans."
"Everyone wanted to be here today, for today was history. There had been for more than seven centuries a Jewish Cracow, and by this evening those seven centuries would have become a rumor."
"The question arose, as it had in Krakusa Street: What could embarrass the SS? What could embarrass Amon?"
"There was suicide, yes. But there was euthanasia as well. The concept terrified H."
"Everyone had still hoped at that stage that things might improve."
"Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing."
"He would keep off the streets, moving through the network of holes that connected one building with another."
"He feared that more than the easy oblivion of cyanide."
"It was no easy decision, though—the bemused crowds, barely guarded by the SS, now making for the south gate and the barbed-wire factories of Płaszów were an indication of where most people, probably quite correctly, considered that long-term safety lay."
"It’s no use complaining to the police chiefs, said the engineer. They’re not involved in the same war we are."
"Oskar, they said, kept the small SS garrison of the Emalia factory well liquored and happy with their lot."
"The solid rumors about Emalia were that such precocious methods weren’t necessary there."
"Except for inspection by senior SS men, the prisoners who worked at DEF rarely got a close view of their guards."
"Therefore, though the SS may have set the limits to the life people led in Emalia, Oskar set its tone."
"The soup and the bread were better and more plentiful than in Płaszów—about 2,000 calories a day."
"No one collapsed and died of overwork, beatings, or hunger in Emalia."
"Long afterward, Emalia people would call the Schindler camp a paradise."
"What it inspired in its people was a sense of almost surreal deliverance, something preposterous."
"For her, hot water was Emalia’s first beneficence."
"To manage an enduring heaven, you needed someone both more authoritative and more mysterious."
"I have to tell you, Herr Schindler, I’m not a Polish Aryan. My real name is Perlman."
"Oskar put down his drink and stood up. You want to make a secret arrangement? I don’t make secret arrangements."
"Disappear!" Grün yelled at the wheelbarrow man. "You may collect the bottle," said Oskar, "from my office at the end of the inspection."
"And like the prisoners, sundry officials could also ferret Oskar’s passion out."
"In the midst of the snows that year, Płaszów underwent a change of status adverse to all lovers inside the wire."
"Applications from Camp Commandants for punishment by flogging in cases of sabotage by prisoners in the war production industries are increasing."
"A more careful man, a man with an accountant’s mind, might reasonably have repaid himself for his trouble from the money Sedlacek brought from Budapest."
"When in the summer of ‘43 Sedlacek arrived in Cracow with 50,000 RM., the Zionists inside Płaszów to whom Oskar offered the cash feared it might be a setup."
"Raimund Titsch, appalled, believed that Amon was about to go down to the trolley line looking for a prisoner to chastise for his—for Raimund Titsch’s—minor victory at chess."
"She had seen them, on the Appellplatz, tear the flesh of engineer Karp."
""That’s in case you ever nick me," he told her."
"It was, in fact, under Amon’s roof that they first managed a proper embrace."
"The absence of daily fear, the fuller ration of daily bread made for a little less frenzy."
"Each couple devised a tune, whistling it among the crowds, straining to pick up the answering refrain amid a forest of sibilance."
"But when Amon walked past him, not noticing him, not objecting to his standing there with an idle ruler in his hands, Josef Bau concluded that it meant some kind of guarantee."
"Marriage was, of course, the most emphatic act of all."
"A prison is a prison. I have a life sentence anyhow."
"The list is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its cramped margins lies the gulf."
"It was blasphemously close to creating people anew just by thinking of them."
"He poured another glass of cognac each, then pushed the bottle across the desk, opening his cigarette box."
"The price of illegal bread reached a level it would be hard to express in złoty."
"It suited Goldberg to keep everyone in the dark about the list."
"The list was vulnerable, however, through the personnel clerk, Marcel Goldberg."
"In the midst of Oskar’s negotiations, Amon Goeth was arrested."
"You have nothing more to worry about. You're with me now."
"He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down."
"We were grateful to be there. There was nowhere else to be."
"Oskar? Why would Oskar cut his rations? He was the Herr Direktor."
"We knew you were coming. When you go inside the building, you'll find soup and bread waiting for you."
"It's my machine that's broken. I'm the one who'll preside."
"Don’t thank me for your survival. Thank your people who worked day and night to save you from extermination."
"Prove yourselves worthy of the millions of victims among you and refrain from any individual acts of revenge and terror."