A businessman comes to occupied Poland to profit from war — and ends up spending his entire fortune to save the people he once merely exploited. The rescue is almost entirely true.
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Work through the four short activities. Each word is shown in a situation that gives its meaning away — no need to know the film yet. Say your answer out loud first, then reveal.
Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993). This film concerns the Holocaust, and we treat it with the seriousness it deserves. Read each part, try the quick check from memory, then discuss. (There are spoilers ahead — that's the point; we're here to talk about it.)
In 1939, Oskar Schindler — a German businessman and a member of the Nazi Party, chiefly because of the useful connections it brought him — arrives in newly occupied Kraków, Poland. Where others see a city at war, he sees an opportunity: he takes control of an enamelware factory and wins lucrative contracts to supply pots and mess kits to the army. To staff it cheaply, he employs Jewish workers from the city's ghetto, where Jewish families have been forced to live under harsh restrictions. At this point, Schindler treats them as he treats everyone — as a means to an end. He charms and bribes local officials with gifts and lavish parties, and cares, above all, about the factory's profits.
Among the workers is Itzhak Stern, a careful, quietly resourceful Jewish accountant who ends up managing the factory's books. Stern says little, but he steers workers toward jobs that might protect them, and, almost without Schindler noticing, begins to nudge his employer's conscience.
1. Why does Schindler come to Kraków, and how does he first treat the Jewish workers he employs?
2. Who is Itzhak Stern, and what role does he quietly begin to play?
1. He comes to profit from the war, taking over a factory and using cheap forced Jewish labour; at first he sees the workers purely as a business asset.
2. Stern is the Jewish accountant who runs the factory's books; he quietly tries to protect workers and, over time, influences how Schindler sees them.
As the war continues, the situation for Kraków's Jewish community grows steadily worse. The ghetto is violently cleared, and its people are forced into the brutal Płaszów forced-labour camp, run by SS commandant Amon Göth — a man capable of shocking, arbitrary cruelty. Schindler witnesses part of this clearance directly, and for the first time grasps the true scale of what is happening around him. He can no longer see his workers merely as cheap labour.
Quietly, and then more boldly, he begins to act. He bribes Göth and other officials, insisting his Jewish workers are "essential" to the war effort so that they can stay inside his own factory rather than the camp. It is a small, practical form of protection at first — but it grows, and it costs him more and more of his own money and reputation.
1. What happens to Kraków's Jewish community, and who runs the camp many of them are sent to?
2. How does witnessing this change the way Schindler treats his own workers?
1. The ghetto is cleared and many are sent to the Płaszów forced-labour camp, run by the commandant Amon Göth.
2. Schindler begins bribing officials to keep his workers inside his own factory, calling them essential — an early, practical act of protection.
As the Soviet army advances and the camps begin to be emptied — with many prisoners sent onward to Auschwitz — Schindler makes his boldest move. He persuades officials to let him relocate his entire workforce to a new factory far from the front, in Brünnlitz. To do it, he and Stern draw up a careful list of names: the workers to be moved and, in effect, saved. It becomes known simply as "Schindler's list." Getting it approved, and keeping everyone alive once they arrive, costs him nearly everything he owns — spent entirely on bribes, favours and false paperwork.
When Germany surrenders, Schindler — a Nazi Party member and now, in the Allies' eyes, a wanted man — must flee westward with nothing. Before he goes, his workers present him with a ring, made from gold they had pooled together, engraved with a line from Jewish tradition: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Around 1,100 people who had been named on that list survived the war.
1. What does Schindler arrange as the Soviet army approaches, and what does it cost him?
2. What do the workers give Schindler before he flees, and what does its inscription mean?
1. He arranges for his workforce to be moved to a new factory in Brünnlitz, drawing up a list of names to save; it costs him almost his entire fortune.
2. A ring engraved with a Jewish saying meaning that whoever saves even one life has, in effect, saved an entire world.
Schindler's transformation happens in stages, and English has a neat tool for linking two connected ideas into one flowing sentence without repeating the subject: the participle clause. There are three forms, and each carries a slightly different meaning.
Read the meaning in brackets and complete the sentence.
1. (arrive) in Kraków with nothing but ambition, Schindler saw the war as a business opportunity. (happening at the same time as he arrived)
2. (witness) the brutality of the camp with his own eyes, he began to see his workers differently. (completed before the change in him)
3. (choose) for the new factory, a worker's name could mean the difference between life and the camp. (the worker receives the action — passive meaning)
1. Arriving (present participle — simultaneous with the main action)
2. Having witnessed (perfect participle — finished before the change)
3. Chosen (past participle — passive meaning)
Each sentence has the right idea but the wrong participle form. Write the corrected form.
1. Understand the risk he was taking, Schindler nevertheless kept bribing officials.
2. Have spent almost everything he owned, Schindler left the war a poor man.
3. Protect by Schindler's factory, hundreds of workers avoided the camps altogether.
1. Understanding (present participle)
2. Having spent (perfect participle)
3. Protected (past participle)
Fill each gap with a present, perfect or past participle. Read it aloud when you're done.
(arrive) in occupied Poland, Schindler first saw only profit in the chaos around him. (grow) close to his Jewish workers over the following years, he slowly began to change. (horrify) by what he had seen at Płaszów, he started spending his own money to protect them. By 1944, (draw up) a list of almost 1,100 names, he had turned his factory into a place of safety. The workers (save) by that list would call themselves the Schindlerjuden for the rest of their lives.
Having arrived · Growing · Horrified · having drawn up · saved
Notice the pattern: an action finished before another uses having + past participle; an action happening alongside another uses the -ing form; and a subject receiving an action uses the past participle.
Carry these into the Speak tab — Schindler's whole story can be told as a chain of participle clauses, one change leading quietly into the next.
Schindler's List is based on real people and real, documented events. The film is adapted from Thomas Keneally's 1982 historical novel Schindler's Ark (published in the United States, and later everywhere, as Schindler's List), which Keneally wrote after a chance meeting with a Schindler survivor, Leopold "Poldek" Pfefferberg, in Los Angeles. The book won the Booker Prize.
Oskar Schindler really did run an enamelware factory, "Emalia," in Kraków, and really did employ Jewish forced labourers — a workforce that grew from around 150 in 1940 to roughly 1,100 by 1944. As conditions worsened, he really did bribe officials to move his workers to a new factory in Brünnlitz rather than let them be sent to Auschwitz, and a real list of names was drawn up to make that move possible. Around 1,100 Jews were saved this way; they came to be known as the Schindlerjuden — the "Schindler Jews."
It is worth being honest about who Schindler really was: not a natural hero, but a flawed man — a war profiteer, a heavy drinker, and, yes, a member of the Nazi Party, who came to Poland purely to get rich. That he nonetheless risked his life and spent his entire fortune protecting others makes the rescue more remarkable, not less.
Amon Göth, the SS commandant of the Płaszów camp shown in the film, was a real person. After the war, he was tried by the Supreme National Tribunal of Poland in Kraków in 1946, convicted of the atrocities committed under his command, and executed by hanging in September 1946 — at a prison in the same city where his crimes took place.
Spielberg shot almost the entire film in black-and-white, deliberately echoing the look of historical newsreel and documentary footage from the period. The one famous exception is a small girl in a red coat, glimpsed briefly during the ghetto's clearance — filmed in colour and then treated frame-by-frame so that only her coat keeps its colour. She marks the moment the film's makers intend as Schindler's true turning point: a single, visible individual amid mass suffering, impossible to look away from.
The ring given to Schindler by his workers, inscribed with the line "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire," is a real Talmudic saying (from the Mishnah), and reflects genuine gratitude from survivors. In 1993, Yad Vashem — Israel's official Holocaust remembrance authority — formally recognised Oskar and his wife Emilie Schindler as "Righteous Among the Nations," its highest honour for non-Jews who risked themselves to save Jewish lives. Schindler died in poverty in 1974; at his own request, he is buried in Jerusalem, the only former Nazi Party member laid to rest there.
This is the heart of the lesson — do it all out loud. The timer keeps you going; fill the time with detail, and treat the subject with the seriousness it deserves.
Tell the story of Schindler's List in your own words, as if to someone who has never seen it. Move through the arc: a businessman arrives to profit from war → he witnesses the horror of the ghetto's clearance and the Płaszów camp → he begins bribing officials to protect his workers → he spends his whole fortune drawing up "the list" and moving them to safety → he flees, and around 1,100 people survive.
Work in at least five key words (profiteer, coerce, plight, testimony, ruthless, liberation, atrocity, unscrupulous, redemption, reckoning), and use at least one participle clause of each type when you reach the turning points of the story.
Schindler began purely out of self-interest and ended up risking everything to save others. Build an argument: does it matter why someone does good, as long as the outcome is real — or is help that begins selfishly somehow less admirable than help that was always selfless? Bring in other examples you know of people, companies or governments whose motives were mixed.
Very few people in Schindler's position acted as he did; most looked away. What do you think allows some ordinary people to take enormous personal risks to help others, while most do not?
Stuck for an idea? Pick one of these and run with it: