by Eric Schwitzgebel
Today I’m thinking about Schindler’s truck and what it suggests about the moral psychology of one of the great heroes of the Holocaust.
Here’s a portrayal of the truck, in the background of a famous scene from Schindler’s List:
Oskar Schindler, as you probably know, saved over a thousand Jews from death under the Nazis by spending vast sums of money to hire them in his factories, where they were protected. Near the end of Spielberg’s movie about him, the script suggests that Schindler is broke — that he has spent the last of his wartime slave-labor profits to save his Jewish workers, just on the very eve of German surrender:
Stern: Do you have any money hidden away someplace that I don’t know about?
Schindler: No. Am I broke?
Stern: Uh, well…
Then there’s the surrender, Schindler’s speech to the factory workers, and preparations for Schindler’s escape (as a hunted profiteer of slave labor).
Seeing the film, you might briefly think, what’s with the truck that caravans off with Schindler? But the truck gets no emphasis in the film.
Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book Schindler’s Ark (on which Spielberg’s 1993 film was based) tells us more about the truck:
Emilie, Oskar, and a driver were meant to occupy the Mercedes. [Seven] others would follow in a truck loaded with food and cigarettes and liquor for barter (p. 375).
Also,
In one of the factory garages that afternoon, two prisoners were engaged in removing the upholstery from the ceiling and inner doors of Oskar’s Mercedes, inserting small sacks of the Herr Direktor‘s diamonds… (p. 368).
So, on Keneally’s telling, Schindler drove off with a truck full of barter goods and small sacks of diamonds hidden in the upholstery — hardly broke. On reflection, too, you might think the timing is too cinematic, the story suspiciously tidy, if Schindler goes broke just at the moment of German surrender.
Part of me wants Schindler to have gone broke, or at least not to have driven off with sacks of diamonds. A fully thoughtful Schindler would have realized, perhaps, that he was in fact a profiteer of slave labor, despite the admiration he rightly deserves for the risks he took and his enormous expenditures of (most of!) his ill-gotten profits. On this way of thinking, the wealth generated by Schindler’s factories more rightly belonged to the Jews than to Schindler. I picture an alternative Schindler who realizes that and who thus retains only enough money to ensure his escape.
But another part of me thinks this is too much to hope for, that the thought “Of course I deserve to keep some of these diamonds” is so natural that no merely human Schindler would fail to have it; that in wanting Schindler not to have that thought, I am wanting an angel rather than a person.
We don’t really know, though, what Schindler fled with. David M. Crowe writes:
It is hard to imagine that he still had a collection of diamonds so large that it would fill the door and ceiling cavities of a Mercedes. [N.B.: This is an uncharitable reading of Keneally’s version] Emilie [Schindler’s wife] totally discounted the idea that the two of them left Bruennlitz with a “fortune in diamonds,” though she later admitted that Oskar did have a “huge diamond” hidden in the glove compartment (2004, p. 455).
By all accounts, Schindler’s remaining wealth was gone, probably stolen, by the time he surrendered to the Americans.
Still another part of me thinks: If anyone deserves diamonds, it’s Schindler. It would have been justice served, not a failing, for him to keep a portion of his wealth.
These three parts of me are still at war.
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7 responses to “Schindler’s Truck”
Good post. I’m not sure I think he deserves the diamonds. But I also definitely think the first picture is too unrealistic. The security that a small bag of diamonds would have provided at such an incredibly uncertain time would have been too much for anyone to let go of. You don’t necessarily have to see him as greedy for having held onto that. Just wanting a measure of security.
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Thanks, Eric. Kind of a compromise between my options 1 & 2 — seems in the ballpark of reasonable. But part of me is still fighting between the hardline option 1 and the gracious (?) option 3!
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He would have earned the money from the Nazis. It is not a problem to take money from them. Indeed doing other than charging the going rate would arouse suspicion. I am not aware that he could have done more by way of helping Jews escape. The only question therefore is whether he should have given away more of it. Who should he have given it to? Well whilst operating the factory the priority was helping Jews escape, and having a supply of money and valuables could be useful to cope with problems and threats – the factory needing repairing, officials needing bribing etc. So he should not have given the diamonds etc away before the surrender. What about after the surrender. Should he have given it to the Jews he left behind? But at that moment they were safe, and he was not. He could not know how much he would have to pay in bribes etc to secure his freedom and safety. Was he to be the only one not given the opportunity for freedom and safety?
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Interesting points, Dan. I do think that it’s better to think of Schindler’s money as profits from slave labor than as something he squeezed from the Nazis, though in a sense of course it was both. (If I employed slave labor, for example, to sell overpriced items to rich people, it wouldn’t be justified for me to keep it since it was only money I got from the rich.) So it’s not clear the the money was rightly Schindler’s to dispose of. Would the Jews have freely agreed to let him keep it? Maybe so, but hard to know. Whether Schindler or the Jews were safer after German surrender is also not entirely clear, especially if we assume that Schindler would have kept the letter from his workers and some moderate amount of money for bribes and travel. It was a chaotic period — lots of people died after the war, and the Schindler Jews were mostly homeless and impoverished, in an environment with still much anti-Semitism.
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My impression was that Schindler could save the Jews he saved only if he employed them as nominal slave labor. (Had he simply freed them, everyone would’ve been caught.) What was involved in ‘nominal slave labor’? Making something that could be sold, but would not aid, the Nazi regime. Under this interpretation, it’s hard to see how Schindler’s factories could’ve been unprofitable without arousing the sort of suspicion that would’ve revealed that the Jews were not in fact slaves, but nominal slaves.
Admittedly, these are my memories of the film, which inspires a different sort of interest in this question entirely. For one, why did Spielberg include Schindler’s truck in that iconic shot? Historical accuracy perhaps, but I’m sure he took other liberties with the source text’s account in crafting the narrative of the film. If he’d intended to portray Schindler as angel rather than human, he could’ve easily depicted Schindler as penniless as he fled. By reminding us that Schindler is not completely financially impoverished in that last scene, Spielberg calls attention to the very different attitudes towards salvation emphasized by Stern’s (and the other Jews’) love and forgiveness in spite of the fact that Schindler might’ve done more, and Schindler’s own continued sense of guilt.
Another important aspect of the film involves the degree to which salvation (the Jews’ lives and Schindler’s character) comes about by these characters ‘playing a role’. In the beginning, Schindler is de facto Herr Direktor and the Jews are de facto slaves. It is only by coming to play the role of Director and play the role of slaves, in an act of ‘production’ designed to fool the Nazis, that Schindler and the Jews are able to save themselves. The meta-level to this film can be fleshed out with other details as well (think of how ‘lists’ work in this film, and how they are similar to credits at the end of the film), but for point about Schindler’s penury, I’m trying to point out that the ruse of production won’t succeed unless Schindler turns some kind of profit and as able to plausibly maintain that he is the ‘Direktor’ of ‘slaves’.
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Aaron: Thanks for your thoughtful comment! I agree that profit was probably necessary in Krakow. Bruennlitz was highly unprofitable. But the question I was hoping to focus on was how Schindler should have thought about that money he had at the end — whether to take it or redistribute it back to the workers. I think the natural reading of the film is that Schindler leaves not as wholly penniless (he has a fancy car and a gold pin) but also not as carting away trade-goods and sacks of diamonds. Oskar and Emilie are shown jamming clothes into suitcases, as though these were their last belongings, rather than organizing goods to take with them. The truck, if one even notices it, is somewhat confusing — a remnant of the Keneally version that was kept, I think, despite the fact that it doesn’t quite fit with the Spielberg version.
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Think about Schindler’s predicament…he probably knew this would happen…only, that’s just how the system worked. He could only save the parents…the government would assume he had no need for masses of children in his factories, and if he tried too hard he risked blowing the cover that allowed him to save so many others.
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