Schindler's List Trivia
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49 free Schindler's List trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Schindler's List won seven Academy Awards, was shot in black and white in Kraków in 72 days, and remains the film Steven Spielberg took a decade to feel ready to make. This Schindler's List trivia quiz has 49 free questions with answers about the film and the true story behind it: Oskar Schindler and his enamelware factory, Itzhak Stern, Amon Göth and the Płaszów camp, the list of 1,100 names, and the ring inscribed with a line from the Talmud. It also covers how the film got made: the survivor who spent thirty years pushing for it, the directors Spielberg tried to hand it to, why Liam Neeson got the part over bigger stars, how the red coat was colored, who played the violin theme, and the awards, bans and controversies that followed. Some questions are for anyone who has seen the film; the harder ones are for people who have read about it too. Every answer was checked against the film's Wikipedia entry, which cites the production histories and contemporary reporting, and each question links to the page that establishes it.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Under what title did Thomas Keneally first publish the 1982 novel that became Schindler's List?
Schindler's Ark
Schindler's Ark won Britain's Booker Prize as fiction, though Keneally had built the book from the testimony of the people Schindler saved.
Q 02Who plays Oskar Schindler?
Liam Neeson
Liam Neeson won the part after Spielberg saw him on Broadway in Anna Christie. The director wanted an actor without movie-star baggage, so an interested Mel Gibson was passed over.
Q 03Who plays the SS officer Amon Göth?
Ralph Fiennes
Ralph Fiennes prepared by talking to survivors and reading their testimony about Göth, which he remembered as full of the physical fear people felt at the mere sight of the man.
Q 04In Schindler's List, what job does Ben Kingsley's Itzhak Stern do for Oskar Schindler?
His accountant
His accountant: Schindler showed the real Stern the balance sheet of a run-down factory, took his shrewd advice to buy it, and the business made him a fortune.
Q 05What does Schindler's Kraków factory produce at the start of the film?
Enamelware
Enamelware: pots and pans for the German army. Schindler listed unskilled workers, even children, as expert metalworkers essential to the war effort, which kept the SS from deporting them.
Q 06In the closing scene of Schindler's List, what do the real survivors place on Oskar Schindler's grave?
Stones
Stones, a Jewish sign of respect for the dead. Spielberg flew 128 of the people Schindler saved to Jerusalem and filmed them beside the actors who played them, to show the story was true.
Q 07Schindler grew up in the Sudetenland, part of which country between the world wars?
Czechoslovakia
Czechoslovakia jailed Schindler in 1938 for spying on it for German military intelligence; he walked free that October, when the Munich Agreement handed the Sudetenland to Germany.
Q 08What concentration camp does Amon Göth arrive to build and command?
Płaszów
Płaszów was laid out over two Jewish cemeteries on the edge of Kraków, and it filled in March 1943, when the SS emptied the city's ghetto and marched those fit for work into the camp.
Q 09What does Göth do from the balcony of his villa?
Shoots prisoners at random
Shoots prisoners at random: the scene is history, not invention. Holocaust museums record that the real Göth often fired from the balcony of his villa at inmates working in the camp.
Q 10Who plays Göth's maid, Helen Hirsch?
Embeth Davidtz
Embeth Davidtz met the real Helen Hirsch, "this tiny firecracker", when the people Schindler saved gathered in Jerusalem to film the closing scene.
Q 11In Schindler's List, to which town near his birthplace does Schindler move his factory and workers in 1944?
Brünnlitz
Brünnlitz, today's Brněnec, was a textile mill the Nazis had stolen from its Jewish owners. In May 2025 the derelict site opened as the Museum of Survivors.
Q 12In Schindler's List, which camp commandant does Schindler bribe to free the women sent to Birkenau by mistake?
Rudolf Höss
Rudolf Höss takes a pouch of diamonds in the film, but the real rescue was done at arm's length: Schindler sent his secretary to Auschwitz to bargain for the 300 women.
Q 13In Schindler's List, why does Schindler's munitions factory make no usable shells?
Deliberate sabotage
Q 21Who wrote the final screenplay for Schindler's List?
Steven Zaillian
Steven Zaillian stayed on through years of drafts and won the Oscar for it. Spielberg pushed him to widen a script centred on Schindler alone into a story of the people he saved.
Q 22Which studio financed Schindler's List?
Universal
Universal put up about $20 million and expected little back, since Holocaust dramas rarely earned. The film took in more than $320 million worldwide.
Q 23What did Spielberg do with his salary for Schindler's List?
He refused to take one
He refused to take one: being paid to tell the story of the Holocaust, he said, would have been "blood money".
Deliberate sabotage: in the film he buys shells elsewhere to pass off as his own. The real plant turned out almost nothing usable either.
Q 14In Schindler's List, what gift do the workers give Schindler as he flees at the war's end?
A gold ring
A gold ring, cast from a worker's dental gold and engraved with a line from the Talmud: "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire."
Q 15In Schindler's List, how does the epilogue say Amon Göth died?
Hanged as a war criminal
Hanged as a war criminal: Göth was executed in Kraków for crimes against humanity. He had been arrested while a patient in a sanatorium at Bad Tölz in Bavaria.
Q 16Which Schindler survivor, credited on the film as Leopold Page, spent decades pushing to get the story told?
Poldek Pfefferberg
Poldek Pfefferberg got MGM to commission a script from a Casablanca writer in 1963, and the deal died. Years later he pitched a customer in his Beverly Hills leather goods shop: the novelist Thomas Keneally.
Q 17What did executive Sid Sheinberg send Spielberg that sparked Schindler's List?
A book review
A book review: Sheinberg had read it in The New York Times and sent it over. Spielberg, astonished by the tale of a Nazi who saved Jews, asked, "Is it true?"
Q 18Which blockbuster did his studio make Spielberg direct before it would back Schindler's List?
Jurassic Park
Jurassic Park followed him to Poland: two or three times a week he used a crude satellite link to California to approve its effects shots, a chore he said filled him with resentment.
Q 19Which director, a survivor of the Kraków Ghetto, turned down Spielberg's offer to direct Schindler's List?
Roman Polanski
Roman Polanski, whose mother was killed at Auschwitz, said no. In 2002 he made his own Holocaust film, The Pianist.
Q 20Which director traded Schindler's List back to Spielberg in exchange for the Cape Fear remake?
Martin Scorsese
Martin Scorsese was talked into the swap with a carrot: Cape Fear was a film he could make with Robert De Niro. Spielberg had come to regret giving the story away.
Q 24Which star read for Oskar Schindler but struck Spielberg as too much the movie star?
Warren Beatty
Warren Beatty took part in a script reading, but Spielberg feared his movie-star baggage: the result would be Oskar Schindler as Warren Beatty rather than the other way round.
Q 25What title has Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust memorial, given Oskar Schindler and his wife Emilie?
Righteous Among the Nations
Righteous Among the Nations honours non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews. Emilie earned it too: in the war's last winter she took in a trainload of Jewish prisoners sealed in frozen wagons and nursed the survivors.
Q 26How was the ghetto liquidation in Schindler's List filmed?
Handheld cameras
Handheld cameras: Spielberg left his cranes at home and worked without storyboards, stripping away what he called his safety net of fancy shots.
Q 27For Schindler's List, why were Birkenau's barracks rebuilt just outside the real camp's gate?
The World Jewish Congress objected
The World Jewish Congress objected to a drama being staged inside the death camp, so Spielberg offered a compromise: keep the real gatehouse in shot and build his barracks just outside it.
Q 28Which comedian phoned Spielberg every week during the Schindler's List shoot to cheer him up?
Robin Williams
Robin Williams knew how hard the shoot was, so once a week he rang Spielberg in Poland and performed a stand-up routine down the phone.
Q 29In its colour opening scene, what is a Jewish family doing as Schindler's List begins?
Lighting Sabbath candles
Lighting Sabbath candles: as the last flame gutters the colour fades out and its smoke becomes the steam of a train. Colour returns to a candle flame only when Schindler's workers keep the Sabbath again.
Q 30Which cinematographer won his first Oscar for Schindler's List?
Janusz Kamiński
Janusz Kamiński caught Spielberg's eye with a television film called Wildflower. Schindler's List was their first feature together, and he has shot every Spielberg film since.