Schindler’s List: Chapter 36 Summary & Analysis

People like Goeth and Bosch believe that Schindler has some virus-like condition that makes him sympathize with Jews. Sussmuth seems to be one who “caught” Schindler’s disease. Over the winter of 1944 to 1945, they plan to get 3,000 more women out of Auschwitz. They will be sent to factories in Moravia that are harsh but endurable, camps that are perhaps small enough to escape the extermination orders coming to the bigger camps.

Schindler has an almost religious drive to keep doing more, so he applies for 30 metalworkers, partly because the request will help validate this camp. Moshe Henigman is one of the 30. Previously, he was one of 10,000 prisoners at Auschwitz who were marched in the cold to Gröss-Rosen, of which only 1,200 would survive.

Advancing Russians continue to seize more territory. As news of Russian advances comes in, Henigman and the other survivors of the march are taken to an SS compound. There, he is surprised to be put in a railway car with 30 others and even given food for the trip. He is even more amazed when he arrives at Brinnlitz and finds “a camp left where men and women worked together, where there were no beatings, no Kapo.” (Henigman slightly exaggerates: there was still some segregation and rare cases of beatings.) Though Schindler was able to save Henigman and the other 29 tinsmiths, this is only a fragment of the 10,000 originally in Henigman’s group.

Schindler makes another costly deal with the Gestapo about prisoners. One subject of this deal is Benjamin Wrozlawski, who is an inmate at an Auschwitz subsidiary camp called Gliwice. When the threat of an impending Russian attack causes the Nazis to start shipping prisoners out of Gliwice, Wrozlawski and a friend named Roman Wilner jump off a train, managing to escape before being arrested in a small village and taken to the Gestapo offices. A Gestapo officer tells them that nothing bad will happen to them, though they don’t believe it. About two weeks later, they are released and amazed to find themselves at Brinnlitz, feeling just as amazed as Henigman. They are part of 11 escapees that Schindler arranged to take in from the Gestapo, prisoners who otherwise would have been shot.

In 1963, Dr. Steinberg tells the story of another one of Schindler’s wildly generous whims. Steinberg was a doctor in a small Sudeten work camp. He heard a rumor about Brinnlitz and visited the camp to see if he could pick up some supplies to take back. He took food back to his own camp, and his medical opinion is that this extra nutrition helped save 50 lives.

One of Schindler’s most amazing feats involves the prisoners from Goleszów, a quarry and cement plant in Auschwitz. As the various parts of Auschwitz are being disbanded, 120 quarry workers from Goleszów are packed into two cattle cars. Many others in Auschwitz are also being moved around at this time. Dolek Horowitz is shipped away to Mauthausen, though his son Richard will stay and eventually be found by Russians. Henry Rosner and Olek, meanwhile, survive a perilous seven-day trip to Dauchau where half of the people in their car die.

The Goleszów quarry prisoners will face an even worse trip than the Rosners. They stay in their train cars for more than 10 days, with the doors frozen shut, surviving off ice scraped from the inside walls. They are refused at many camps because the biggest killing machines are winding down, and the prisoners have no industrial value. Sometime near the end of January, they are abandoned in Zwittau, where Schindler hears about them from a friend.

On a morning with subzero temperatures, Schindler orders for the two cars of Goleszów prisoners to be taken to Brinnlitz. Pfefferberg gets welding gear to cut open the cattle car doors. Inside, they find a gruesome scene, with a pyramid of frozen corpses and none of the survivors weighing more than 75 pounds.

Liepold doesn’t want to take the survivors and says there’s no way anyone could pretend they’re munitions workers. Schindler admits this is true but asks to pay for their labor, anyway, saying he’ll use them once they recover. Though Liepold still disapproves, he sees an opportunity to please Hassebroeck by getting more labor fees on the book.

Schindler refuses to have any of the corpses burned. In the past, he caused trouble with Liepold over this issue, at one point allowing a prisoner who died of cancer to be buried instead of burned. When the Goleszów cars arrive, Schindler goes a step further by buying a plot for a Jewish cemetery. He even pays a middle-aged SS officer a small sum to keep the burial area well-maintained.

Meanwhile, Emilie Schindler is making her own deals. She procures frostbite medicine and other necessities to help the Goleszów prisoners. After some early deaths, there are no more among the Goleszów people.

That winter, Amon Goeth, released from prison because of his diabetes, comes to see the Schindlers. Even today, it’s unclear exactly what motivated Goeth’s visit. After prison, Goeth is a shell of his old self, and the investigation into him is ongoing.

During Goeth’s visit, he corners his old typist Pemper, having heard the SS officials were interrogating Pemper in relation to his work with Goeth. Pemper refuses to tell Goeth anything, which enrages him, but he has no power to do anything anymore. When Goeth finally leaves, it becomes clear that he’s lost all of his old power, although prisoners will continue to be haunted by him in their dreams, even 30 years later.