Schindler's List as an Educational Tool

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The scenes of the movie focus primarily on the Krakow Ghetto. However, the Warsaw Ghetto was the largest ghetto in Poland. This lesson plan will help students understand the dire situation of Jews living in ghettos, and discuss some of the dilemmas that various Jewish communal leaders faced at that time. Through this, they will gain additional insight about how man's inhumanity towards man can be combated by man's humanity towards his fellow man.  

For more information on this specific topic, click here.

2. Children in the Holocaust

There are many scenes in the movie that depict the suffering and the heroism of children during the Holocaust. For example, the young girl in the red coat, Danka and her mother; the young boy, Olek, who searches for a hiding place and is not allowed in by other children; the child who tries to help by suggesting that the dead man is the one who stole a chicken. The Nazis considered all Jews, including Jewish children, as their enemies. The Nazis murdered one-and-a-half million Jewish children. How did Jewish children grow up under Nazi rule?

For more information on this specific topic, click here.

3. Bystanders and Rescuers

Schindler's List exposes us to the concept of the role of those people who were neither victims nor perpetrators but rather bystanders. In this activity, students will learn more about various forms of assistance and motivations of non-Jewish rescuers in their efforts to help Jews during the Holocaust.

For a classroom activity on this topic, click here.

4. Oskar Schindler

We will examine the motivations of Oskar Schindler to help Jews survive and identify the process of change that Schindler underwent from being a Nazi businessman to a rescuer of Jews during the Holocaust.

For the lesson plan on Oskar Schindler, click here.

5. Little Girl in the Red Coat

We often refer to the Holocaust in collective terminology, i.e. the destruction of European Jewry, or the six million. As a result, we sometimes forget that, first and foremost, these are individual, human stories. There are many stories, yet each and every victim is a world of his or her own. The following activity will introduce the students to the way in which Yad Vashem commemorates each and every victim.

For the activity, click here.

6. Righteous Among the Nations

Schindler's List is based on the story of one individual’s transition from perpetrator/bystander to that of an altruistic savior. Who were other Righteous among the Nations? What was this legacy of goodness, and why did they risk their lives during this period?
In the following activity, we focus on the criteria for awarding Righteous among the Nations and their individual stories.

“He who saves one life, it is as though he has saved the entire world”- The Talmud

In 1963, Yad Vashem embarked upon a worldwide project to grant the title of  Righteous Among the Nations to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. This title is awarded to those who did acts of kindness without asking in advance for money or knowing that they would benefit from the act of their actions.
This project is the only one of its kind in the world that honors, using set criteria, and the actions of those individuals who rescued Jews during the Holocaust.

To read various stories of Righteous among the Nations divided by country, click here.

Discussion Questions:

1. Who was the savior and who was saved?
2. Why did this person feel obligated to save Jews?
3. What were the risks involved in saving the lives of Jews in this particular story?

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