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Schindler's List
TRAIN WHEELS grinding against track, slowing. FOLDING TABLE
LEGS scissoring open. The LEVER of a train door being pulled.
NAMES on lists on clipboards held by clerks moving alongside
the tracks.
CLERKS (V.O.)
...Rossen... Lieberman... Wachsberg...
BEWILDERED RURAL FACES coming down off the passenger train.
FORMS being set out on the folding tables. HANDS straightening
pens and pencils and ink pads and stamps.
CLERKS (V.O.)
...When your name is called go over
there... take this over to that
table...
TYPEWRITER KEYS rapping a name onto a list. A FACE. KEYS
typing another name. Another FACE.
CLERKS (V.O.)
...you’re in the wrong line, wait
over there... you, come over here...
A MAN is taken from one long line and led to the back of
another. A HAND hammers a rubber stamp at a form. Tight on a
FACE. KEYS type another NAME. Another FACE. Another NAME.
CLERKS (V.O.)
...Biberman... Steinberg...
Chilowitz...
As a hand comes down stamping a GRAY STRIPE across a
registration card, there is absolute silence... then MUSIC,
the Hungarian love song, "Gloomy Sunday," distant... and the
stripe bleeds into COLOR, into BRIGHT YELLOW INK.
INT. HOTEL ROOM - CRACOW, POLAND - NIGHT
The song plays from a radio on a rust-stained sink.
The light in the room is dismal, the furniture cheap. The
curtains are faded, the wallpaper peeling... but the clothes
laid out across the single bed are beautiful.
The hands of a man button the shirt, belt the slacks. He
slips into the double-breasted jacket, knots the silk tie,
folds a handkerchief and tucks it into the jacket pocket,
all with great deliberation.
A bureau. Some currency, cigarettes, liquor, passport. And
an elaborate gold-on-black enamel Hakenkreuz (or swastika)
which the gentleman pins to the lapel of his elegant dinner
jacket.
He steps back to consider his reflection in the mirror. He
likes what he sees: Oskar Schindler -- salesman from Zwittau --
looking almost reputable in his one nice suit.
Even in this awful room.
INT. NIGHTCLUB - CRACOW, POLAND - NIGHT
A spotlight slicing across a crowded smoke-choked club to a
small stage where a cabaret performer sings.
It’s September, 1939. General Sigmund List's armored
divisions, driving north from the Sudetenland, have taken
Cracow, and now, in this club, drinking, socializing,
conducting business, is a strange clientele: SS officers and
Polish cops, gangsters and girls and entrepreneurs, thrown
together by the circumstance of war.
Oskar Schindler, drinking alone, slowly scans the room, the
faces, stripping away all that’s unimportant to him, settling
only on details that are: the rank of this man, the higher
rank of that one, money being slipped into a hand.
in front of the SS officer who took the money. A lieutenant,
he’s at a table with his girlfriend and a lower-ranking
officer.
WAITER:
From the gentleman.
The waiter is gesturing to a table across the room where
Schindler, seemingly unaware of the SS men, drinks with the
best-looking woman in the place.
LIEUTENANT:
Do I know him?
His sergeant doesn’t. His girlfriend doesn't.
LIEUTENANT:
Find out who he is.
The sergeant makes his way over to Schindler's table.
There's a handshake and introductions before -- and the
lieutenant, watching, can't believe it -- his guy accepts
the chair Schindler's dragging over.
The lieutenant waits, but his man doesn't come back; he's
forgotten already he went there for a reason. Finally, and
it irritates the SS man, he has to get up and go over there.
LIEUTENANT:
Stay here.
His girlfriend watches him cross toward Schindler's table.
Before he even arrives, Schindler is up and berating him for
leaving his date way over there across the room, waving at
the girl to come join them, motioning to waiter to slide
some tables together.
WAITERS ARRIVE WITH PLATES OF CAVIAR
and another round of drinks. The lieutenant makes a
halfhearted move for his wallet.
LIEUTENANT:
Let me get this one.
SCHINDLER:
No, put it away, put it away.
Schindler's already got his money out. Even as he's paying,
his eyes are working the room, settling on a table where a
girl is declining the advances of two more high-ranking SS
men.
A TABLECLOTH BILLOWS
as a waiter lays it down on another table that's been added
to the others. Schindler seats the SS officers on either
side of his own "date" --
SCHINDLER:
What are you drinking, gin?
He motions to a waiter to refill the men's drinks, and,
returning to the head of the table(s), sweeps the room again
with his eyes.
ROAR OF LAUGHTER
erupts from Schindler's party in the corner. Nobody's having
a better time than those people over there. His guests have
swelled to ten or twelve -- SS men, Polish cops, girls --
and he moves among them like the great entertainer he is,
making sure everybody's got enough to eat and drink.
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"Schindler's List" Scripts.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 6 Sep. 2024. <https://www.scripts.com/script/schindler's_list_135>.
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