Schindler's List

Stephen Spielberg’s Schindler’s List has had a profound effect in my understanding of an important historical event. It also illustrated for me the triumph of the human spirit in one of the darkest moments of the human journey. In his portraits of both the powerful and the powerless and is his transcendent final scene, Spielberg defines for us a very personal vision of the Holocaust.

Oscar Schindler appears for the first time in the film as an opportunistic entrepreneur mingling with the Nazi elite in an attempt to procure an inexpensive labor supply for his factories. Schindler uses money and compromising photographs to convince those in power to agree to meet his quotas. One’s first impression of Schindler is that he is a war profiteer; despite what happens later, Schindler did not begin his association with the Jews for altrustic purposes.

Then Schindler begins to employ the Jews in his factories and slowly begins to understand the Nazi movement towards the Final Solution. The human being emerges from Schindler’s materialistic shell as he recognizes the individual humanity of his employees. When he discovers that “imperfect” workers are being exterminated, he makes a list of essential workers which includes many of the handicapped in a desperate attempt to rescue them from death. Spielberg emphasizes the ruthless nature of the Nazi agenda in the scene where a crippled man who works for Schindler is murdered by Nazi soldiers while on a work detail. The blood of the victim splatters the snow as the indifferent soldiers move on.

The mad concentration camp commandant provides an excellent foil to Schindler in the film. Just as Schindler discovers and develops his own decency in an atmosphere of grotesque indecency, the commandant discovers the euphoria which stems from absolute power. The commandant’s favorite game is sitting on his porch and shooting Jewish prisoners at random. In the spiritually dead world of the camps, those in power suffer no consequences for moral choices, correct or incorrect. They practice random acts of kindness and of brutality. What occurs is moral anarchy. Though the commandant is as repugnant as Schindler is heroic, he is also a victim of the Holocaust; he has lost his moral center and descended into madness.

Although Spielberg focuses most of the film on Schindler’s moral journey and the analysis of the Nazi brutality, the most moving figure in the film is the little girl in the red coast. She is the only spot of color in the body of the black and white film. The camera follows her frantic flight from the Nazis as they surround the ghetto and search house to house for any who have managed to elude them. After they evacuate the houses, they riddle them with bullets to destroy those in hiding. Spielberg allows his audience to hope that by some desperate miracle the little girl escapes her pursuers. The hope is a vain one, though; toward the end of the film, her body encased in its red coat, lies in a massive pile of corpses.

Watching Schindler’s List drains one emotionally and spiritually. The audience experiences the entire range of human possibility; human beings show their most heroic and their most debased forms. Spielberg only had to tap history; he had no need to borrow from myth or legend or the heroes and villains of his own imagination. The prologue of the film is a transcendent vision of what one person can do to save a small part of the world by choosing good over evil, action over indifference. Schindler’s Jews and their descendants pay tribute to the man who made a list and fought to maintain it despite its danger and despite the lures of profit and power. I admire Oscar Schindler and am glad that Spielberg used his genius to show him to me.