The Dawn of Krakow

If sadness, as the poet Kahlil Gibran writes, “is like a wall between two gardens”, we can only try to imagine the bleak and disheartened life of the thousands of Jews confined within the Krakow ghetto, surrounded by a three-meter-high fortification ending in a series of solid arches, a mocking and sinister allusion to the matzevah, the typical Jewish tombstones.

On March 13 and 14, 1943, the Nazis definitively liquidated the ghetto, deporting the detainees able to work to concentration camps and shooting on the spot around a thousand people, mostly the sick, the elderly, women, and children. Unexpectedly illuminating the darkness of this horror is Oskar Schindler, a former Nazi spy, a wealthy and rather unruly thirty-year-old, owner in Krakow of a cookware factory. The young entrepreneur recruited almost all of his staff from within the ghetto and, after 1943, managed to have many Jews interned in concentration camps transferred to his factory. In 1944 Schindler moved the factory to Moravia, drafting a list of Jewish employees to take with him and saving about a thousand of them from certain death.

His courage is honored in the film Schindler’s List, directed in 1993 by Spielberg and winner of 7 Academy Awards, including Best Original Score, considered by many John Williams’ most accomplished work.

The composer worked side by side with the Israeli violinist Itzak Perlman, whose violin solos give a heartbreaking echo to the pain of the persecuted Jews. The opening music, the famous Theme for Schindler’s List, is the beating heart of the entire soundtrack. The main theme, dramatic and moving, is entrusted to Perlman’s violin, first played in D minor and then a fifth above, in A minor. According to the Talmud “Whoever saves a life saves the entire world”: thus for the track titled Oyf’n Pripetshok / Nacht Aktion, Williams chose a popular Yiddish song, whose title means “On the heart”, to signify that Schindler’s list saved not just individual souls but an entire culture.

In Auschwitz-Birkenau the protagonist is again Perlman’s violin, this time dissonant like the horror of the extermination camps: it is perhaps the most moving melody of the entire soundtrack, which ends with another Yiddish choral song, Jerusalem of Gold, a final opening toward hope. John Williams creates a powerful emotional resonance chamber for the black-and-white images of this cinematic masterpiece, which today more than ever shakes our conscience, for the memory of Nazi crimes, in the face of the atrocities perpetrated every day in Gaza, burns like salt on an open wound.

Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote: “Not force, but beauty—true beauty—will save the world.” And so our hope is that the violence taking place in Palestine will soon be overcome by beauty, the same beauty that rises eternal from the notes of John Williams and that, traveling on the strings of Perlman’s violin, can put an end to the deafening silence of the international community, protecting the heart of all of us from the frost of indifference.


NP August – September 2025
Mauro Tabasso