Schindler’s List Quotes

“Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“The principle was, death should not be entered like some snug harbor. It should be an unambiguous refusal to surrender.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“It is not too fantastic to say that he desired them with some of the absolute passion that characterised the exposed and flaming heart of Jesus which hung on Emilie’s wall. Since this narrative has tried to avoid the canonisation of the Herr Direktor, the idea of the sensual Oskar as the desirer of souls has to be proved.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“He was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“The List is Life.", Schindler's List”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Vina e un vis, mila e singura realitate.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Oskar knew people would catch that trolley anyhow. Doors closed, no stops, machine guns on walls—it wouldn’t matter. 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. People responded to any slim chance, even if it was an outside one, its doors locked shut, moving fast between mute walls.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Quien salva una sola vida, salva al mundo entero.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Don’t kill yourself on the fence, Clara,” the woman urged her. “If you do that, you’ll never know what happened to you.” It has always been the most powerful of answers to give to the intending suicide. Kill yourself and you’ll never find out how the plot ends. Clara did not have any vivid interest in the plot. But somehow the answer was adequate. She turned around. When she got back to her barracks, she felt more troubled than when she’d set out to look for the fence. But her Cracow friend had—by her reply—somehow cut her off from suicide as an option.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“It was a morning of gruesome cold — minus 30 degrees Celsius (minus 22 degrees Fahrenheit) says Stern. Even the exact Biberstein says that it was at least minus 20 degrees (minus 4 degrees Fahrenheit). Poldek Pfefferberg was summoned from his bunk, fetched his welding gear, and went out to the snowy siding to cut open the doors iced hard as iron. He too heard the unearthly complaints from within.
It is hard to describe what they saw when the doors were at last opened. In each car, a pyramid of frozen corpses, their limbs madly contorted, occupied the centre of the floor. The hundred or more still living stank awesomely, were seared black by the cold, were skeletal. Not one of them would be found to weigh more than 34 kilos.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“It was a great gift which the National Socialist Party had given to the men of the SS, that they could go into battle without physical risk, that they could achieve honor without the contingencies that plagued the whole business of being shot at.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“Righteous Person, this title being a peculiarly Israeli honor based on an ancient tribal assumption that in the mass of Gentiles, the God of Israel would always provide a leavening of just men.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“Blancke's concept of "health" was as eccentric as that of any doctor in the SS. He had rid the prison clinic of the chronically ill by injecting benzine into their bloodstreams. These injections could not by anyone's definition be called mercy killings. The patient was seized by convulsions which ended in a choking death after a quarter of an hour.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“He [Rabbi Menasha Levartov] was one of those men who, even in the years of peace, would have advised his congregation that while God may well be honored by the inflexibility of the pious, he might also be honored by the flexibility of the sensible.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Years later, one woman from those lines, remembering the morning, would face a German television crew and attempt to explain it. “He was our father, he was our mother, he was our only faith. He never let us down.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“Principle is principle, of course, and terror on a gray morning is another thing.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Schindler shook his head, and she thought it was too glib an encouragement to her to hope. Suddenly, the good cloth and the pampered flesh of Herr Schindler were a provocation. "For God's sake, Herr Direktor, I see things. We were up on the roof on Monday, chipping off the ice, me and young Lisiek. And we saw the Herr Commandant come out of the front door and down the steps by the patio, right below us. And, there on the steps, he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing. A woman carrying a bundle. Through the throat. Just a woman on her way somewhere. You know. She didn't seem fatter or thinner or slower or faster than anyone else. I couldn't guess what she'd done. The more you see of the Herr Commandant, the more you see that there's no set of rules you can keep to. You can't say to yourself, If I allow these rules, I'll be safe. . . .”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Much later, in terms uncharacteristic of jovial Herr Schindler, Cracow’s favorite party guest, Zablocie’s big spender, in terms, that is, which showed—behind the playboy facade—an implacable judge, Oskar would lay special weight on this day. “Beyond this day,” he would claim, “no thinking person could fail to see what would happen. I was now resolved to do everything in my power to defeat the system.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“Even among Sedlacek's own small cell, his Viennese anti-Nazi club, it was not imagined that the pursuit of the Jews had grown quite so systematic. Not only was the story Schindler told him startling simply in moral terms: one was asked to believe that in the midst of a desperate battle, the National Socialists would devote thousands of men, the resources of precious railroads, and enormous cubic footage of cargo space, expensive techniques of engineering, a fatal margin of their research-and-development scientists, a substantial bureaucracy, whole arsenals of automatic weapons, whole magazines of ammunition, all to an extermination which had no military or economic meaning but merely a psychological one.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Now, even if he and Dr B made their decision, D didn't know if he had the rigour to feed the cyanide to the ill, or to watch someone else do it and maintain a professional disposition. It was absurdley like the argument in one's youth, about whether you should approach a girl you were infatuated with. And when you'd decide, it still counted for nothing. The act still had to be faced.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Tout le monde voulait être dans le coup ce jour-là. Car, ce jour-là, on allait écrire l'Histoire avec un grand H. Il y avait eu un ghetto à Cracovie pendant plus de sept siècles, et voici qu'à la fin de la journée, ou au plus tard le lendemein, ces sept siècles ne seraient plus qu'une rumeur, et Cracovie serait enfin fiduciare (débarrassée des juifs).”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“If Frau Rasch, in the last and fullest days of her husband’s power in Brno, had idly—during a party, say; a musical recital at the castle—gazed into the core of the diamond that had come to her from Oskar Schindler, she would have seen reflected there the worst incubus from her own dreams and her Führer’s. An armed Marxist Jew.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Oskar has made it his business to know the full face of the system, the rabid face behind the veil of bureaucratic decency.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“His wife, Emilie, still lived, without any financial help from him, in her little house in San Vicente, south of Buenos Aires. She lives there at the time of the writing of this book. As she was in Brinnlitz, she is a figure of quiet dignity. In a documentary made by German television in 1973, she spoke—without any of the abandoned wife’s bitterness or sense of grievance—about Oskar and Brinnlitz, about her own behavior in Brinnlitz. Perceptively, she remarked that Oskar had done nothing astounding before the war and had been unexceptional since. He was fortunate, therefore, that in that short fierce era between 1939 and 1945 he had met people who summoned forth his deeper talents.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“The more orthodox of the ghetto had a slogan - 'An hour of life is still life'.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“Herr Bosch was purple nosed; the oxygen which by rights belonged to the veins of his face had for years gone to feed the sharp blue flame of all that liquor.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“Aue sent an office boy with a message to the company’s original accountant, a Polish Jew named Itzhak Stern, who was at home with influenza. Aue was a political appointee with little accounting experience. He wanted Stern to come into the office and resolve the impasse over the bolts of linen. He had just sent the message off to Stern’s house in Podgórze when his secretary came into the office and announced that a Herr Oskar Schindler was waiting outside, claiming to have an appointment. Aue went into the outer room and saw a tall young man, placid as a large dog, tranquilly smoking. The two had met at a party the night before. Oskar had been there with a Sudeten German girl named Ingrid, Treuhänder, or supervisor, of a Jewish hardware company, just as Aue was Treuhänder of Buchheister’s. They were a glamorous couple, Oskar and this Ingrid, frankly in love, stylish, with lots of friends in the Abwehr.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler's List

“Съдбата, казваше хер Шиндлер старши, не е въже без край. Това е парче ластик. Колкото повече дърпаш напред, толкова по–силно то те дърпа към изходната ти точка.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List

“The moral universe had not so much decayed here. It had been inverted, like some black hole, under the pressure of all the Earth’s malice - a place where tribes and histories were sucked in and vaporized, and language flew inside out.”
― Thomas Keneally, Schindler’s List