Oskar Schindler's Evolution

Schindler's List is a fictionalized account of a man named Oskar Schindler who lived in German occupied Poland and saved the lives of thousands of Jews. However most people that have read the book agree that the main character doesn’t start out being quite the hero that he ends up as. The simplistic view of his evolution is that he begins his journey as a stereotypical businessman, someone who cares only for himself and about making money, but then when he sees the horrible murders of Jews in the ghetto he instantly decides to do all he can to save them. However, there were plenty of other times prior to that event where the SS did nasty things, like when the police kicked the Nussbaum family out of their home in order to give Schindler a nice apartment, so why did this specific event prompt Oskar to change his mind? A deeper reading of the book suggests a more interesting and subtle change in Schindler’s character, starting with the passage in Chapter 3 where Oskar compensates the Nussbaum’s for getting kicked out of their home. From that moment, his personality begins to gradually evolve between scenes, until in Chapter 15, he sees a little girl watching the cruel murder of a mother and her son. This moment signifies a turning point after which Schindler is fully resolved to help the Jews and defeat the Nazis in any way that he can. There were bound to be many other people, even other businessmen, who knew the terrible things Nazis were doing, so why was Oskar the only one who decided to help the Jews, and why did it take him so long to act?

For a reader focusing on the simplistic view, the main character’s actions don’t seem like something a stereotypical, selfish businessman would do freely. Later in this paragraph, it explains that some of his friends would say that “generosity was a disease in Oskar, a frantic thing”. This is like an excuse that the book makes for the inconsistency with the simple theory. The text explains that this is a special circumstance, that what Schindler did was considered something bad for him, a disease, and that he wouldn’t have done it normally, if he was in “good health”. However a deeper reader might notice that as an entrepreneur, Schindler seems to care about things being fair. This is why, when the SS demonstrates the saying “nothing personal, it’s just business” by kicking the Nussbaum family out of their apartment to make room for Oskar, he feels that it’s his responsibility to balance the involuntary “deal” by repaying the Nussbaums himself. When it says in the text that “[Oskar] thought the Reich housing authorities were unjust”, we are first shown evidence for the sophisticated view, that at the beginning of the book Schindler thinks about the government’s actions with terms like “unjust”, so, as someone with a businessman’s morals, he resolves to make things fair by compensating the Nussbaum