Schindler's List (1993) on Netflix
R19933h 15mBiographyDramaHistory
Oskar Schindler comes to German-occupied Kraków to make his fortune. He acquires an enamelware factory and hires Itzhak Stern, who has Jewish workers classed as vital to the war effort.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb9.0/101,603,443 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes98%
Trailer
Plot summary
In German-occupied Kraków, the Nazis force the city's Polish Jews into an overcrowded ghetto. Oskar Schindler, a German businessman and Nazi Party member from Czechoslovakia, reaches the city with plans to build a fortune. He pays off Wehrmacht and SS officials and takes over a factory that makes enamelware. Itzhak Stern, a Jewish official with ties to the black market and the Jewish business community, runs the administration and helps raise the money. Stern makes sure as many Jewish employees as possible are counted as vital to the German war effort, which keeps the SS from seizing them for the camps. Schindler stays on good terms with the occupation authorities and lives well as an industrialist. Then SS officer Amon Göth arrives to supervise the building of the Płaszów camp.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Schindler's List (1993)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Sid Sheinberg greenlit the film on condition that Spielberg made Jurassic Park first. Spielberg later said: "He knew that once I had directed Schindler I wouldn't be able to do Jurassic Park."
- Spielberg tried to pass the project to director Roman Polanski, whose mother was killed at Auschwitz and who had lived in and survived the Kraków Ghetto, but Polanski refused the offer.
- John Williams was amazed by the film and felt it would be too challenging, telling Spielberg, "You need a better composer than I am for this film." Spielberg responded, "I know. But they're all dead!"
- Fiennes looked so much like Göth in costume that when Holocaust survivor Mila Pfefferberg met him, she trembled with fear.
- The Itzhak Stern played by Ben Kingsley is a composite of the accountant Stern, factory manager Abraham Bankier and Göth's personal secretary Mietek Pemper; Dustin Hoffman was offered the role but he refused it.
- Polish authorities gave permission to film on the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, but after the World Jewish Congress objected to filming within the actual death camp the crew constructed a replica of a portion of it just outside the entrance of Birkenau.
- Spielberg asked Oliwia Dąbrowska, three years old at the time of filming, not to watch the film until she was eighteen; she watched it when she was eleven and says she was "horrified", though seeing it again as an adult she was proud of the role she played.
- Antisemitic symbols were scrawled on billboards near shooting locations, and Kingsley nearly entered a brawl with an elderly German-speaking businessman who insulted the Israeli actor Michael Schneider.
