Schindler's List
Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.
When I was in college, I took a cinematography class, and we were assigned a project where we had to film a room. The example my teacher used was the getting ready scene at the beginning of Schindler's List. Still, despite knowing it's a critically acclaimed movie, I only watched it for the first time this week for this newsletter. I almost backed out when I saw it was over 3 hours long, but I'm glad I followed through because now I understand why many consider it to be one of the best movies ever made.
Was Oskar Schindler A Hero?
While Schindler’s List is in black and white, Oskar Schindler himself wasn’t such a black-and-white person. What I mean by this is that watching him throughout the film, it’s hard to really pinpoint whether he was good or bad, but I feel as though that was the point. Schindler moved to Kraków to open a factory, knowing Jewish people were cheap labor. He turned a blind eye to the horrors of the Kraków ghettos in order to build his fortune, which isn’t so much the actions of a hero.
From this description, he seems like any other self-serving businessman. But Schindler had a moral compass that the other Nazis lacked. Whether he was taking advantage of vulnerable Jewish people or not is up for debate, but he treated them respectfully, and his reactions to the horrors around him represent the goodness that was within him the whole time. Still, Schindler was a member of the Nazi party, and he remained friendly with the other Nazis, even the worst of them, Amon Göth.
“After six long years of murder, victims are being mourned throughout the world. We’ve survived,”-Oskar Schindler, Schindler’s List.
This raises some ethical questions. Can you be a good person if you surround yourself with bad people? And in this case, I am talking about a very extreme example. Can you be a good person if your friend is out in the streets murdering others without remorse? Ralph Fiennes’ performance as Göth was one of the most sinister I have ever seen in any film. Göth was proud to commit his crimes. He held his head high each time he shot an innocent Jewish person in the head and seemed to absorb more power as he watched them bleed out.
So, could Schindler really be a good person if he was friends with Göth? The answer lies in the choices he would make. Schindler had many opportunities to do the right thing, and he didn’t. He was right at the end of the film when he broke down crying, knowing he could have helped more people. However, the reason Schindler is generally painted in a positive light is that even if he waited longer than he should have, he ultimately decided to help. It’s never too late to do the right thing, or so they say.
Schindler saw the true horrors of what was going on around him when he witnessed the massacre in the ghetto. From on top of his horse, outside the walls, he watched over as Jewish people were lined up and shot in the head. This initially seems like the breaking point for him as a look of horror overtakes his face. He’s especially drawn to a significant aspect of the film, a little girl in a red coat. His secretary, who he’s also having an affair with, is horrified by the scene and wants to leave, but Schindler seems to be in a trance. He can’t look away from the disaster because he understands his role in it. By idly standing by, doing nothing but using these people to build his fortune, he’s perpetuating their murder.
Unfortunately, Schindler’s complacency doesn’t end. There’s even a scene where Schindler is furious when Regina Pearlman comes to his factory, calling it a haven and begging for him to employ her parents and save their lives. He takes his anger out on his accountant, Itzhak Stern. He doesn’t like the idea of people seeing him as someone who is going to save everyone because, as he tells Stern, “it’s dangerous to me” because “me” is all Schindler ever thinks about.
In the same scene, he defends Göth for being under enormous pressure. It’s disturbing watching Schindler try to justify his friend’s actions to a Jewish man who, if he weren’t working for Schindler, would be out in the streets getting shot to death, too. In the end, Schindler tells Stern to have one of the officers bring Pearlman’s parents over.
“I’m a member of the Nazi party. I’m a munitions manufacturer. I’m a profiteer of slave labor. I am a criminal. At midnight, you will be free, and I’ll be hunted.”-Oskar Schindler, Schindler’s List.
Schindler has his moments of doing good even if he’s in fear; this might be the best argument for why he is a good person. People don’t typically act in rational ways when they’re afraid. After all, Schindler tried to claim Göth was acting out of fear. So when he admits his fear in the scene with Stern but then helps Pearlman’s parents anyway, we see that he is capable of good. However, it isn’t until a later scene, when the red coat reappears, that he takes sufficient action. In the earlier scene, we saw how Schindler was moved by the young girl in the red coat. So, when he sees her lifeless body being wheeled out of the camps, we know by the look on his face that he can no longer stand idly by.
He makes it his mission to start saving Jewish people from the camps, bribing the SS officers to let them come work for him. By the end, right as the war ends and the Jewish people are liberated, Schindler has used up all the money he set out to make when he got to Krakow on saving the Jewish people from the camps. He went from only thinking of himself and his fortune to sacrificing what he built to help others.
Despite his past, that is a sign of courage and good faith. Schindler isn’t sure by the end of the movie if he’s a good guy or not, but his Jewish workers are. Stern presents him with a formal statement signed by all his workers, urging authorities to let Schindler off the hook for his Nazi association because of all the good he did. They also present him with a ring with a special phrase engraved on it.
“It is Hebrew from the Talmud. It says, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire”-Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s List.
I think most of us want to believe that every person is salvageable, but I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe people like Schindler were just born with different morals than people like Göth. Maybe Schindler had it in him to change directions and become a hero, and Göth was too far gone to ever turn back around. It’s interesting to think about, but I don’t know if we’ll ever find the answer. In the epilogue, we learn Göth was hanged for his crimes, and despite him being a vicious murderer himself, I still find the scene hard to watch.
I don’t get a thrill out of watching his fate; maybe some people do, and that would be understandable. But I think true empathy is feeling disturbed by the idea of murder in any capacity, even if I know Göth had it coming. Our world has justified murder in many ways throughout history. We see this firsthand in Schindler’s List. All these years learning about the Holocaust, I always wondered how people were capable of being so evil, but when I was watching Schindler’s List, it was easier to find an answer.
Most people are very easily influenced and manipulated, and I know this from my own experience in school. We were always told this group of people is good, this group is bad. This person was a hero, but this person was a villain. If you can convince enough people to fear and view a specific group as dangerous, you can strip one group of their compassion and strip the other group of their humanity. As I said, when people are in fear, they rarely act rationally.
I’m not excusing the horrors that people committed, but I’m saying when you think of how this world has always operated, it’s not hard to understand how horrible things happen. That’s what makes what Schindler did so honorable. Choosing good in the face of these circumstances is a heroic act. I don’t know if Göth could have made that choice, but Schindler did.
An Analysis Of Power
The most prominent scene in Schindler’s List is one where Schindler and Göth are having a conversation about power and have two vastly different definitions of the word. This connects back to what I wrote earlier. These two characters have vastly different morals, and I’m not sure Göth was capable of change. The scene acts to emphasize the stark contrast between the two. They may both be Nazis, and they both are guilty in their own ways, but Schindler is not evil. Göth equates power to his violent crimes. He thinks murdering the Jewish people is power. Schindler equates power to the opposite. He thinks power is when you have every right to kill someone but choose not to.
“Power is when we have every justification to kill and we don’t,”-Oskar Schindler, Schindler’s List.
Göth seems irritated by Schindler’s definition and even insulted. He was having fun laughing and thinking of himself as the most powerful man in the world. Schindler’s definition burst his bubble because what Schindler said suggests Göth has no power at all. What he really possesses is a deep weakness disguised as power.
The Girl In Red
I wanted to do a brief dive into the symbolism of the girl in red who I mentioned earlier. Steven Spielberg, the film’s director, said the girl was meant to symbolize how the US Government did nothing to stop what was happening to Jewish people in Europe. He explained that the horrific events were as obvious as a girl in a red coat, but nothing was done to stop them. My personal interpretation was that, for unknown reasons, Schindler felt connected to this young girl. Maybe it was because she was a child, or maybe she reminded him of someone he once knew.
Maybe he saw her as a daughter, or maybe that’s what his wife looked like when she was a child. Whatever the reason, Schindler’s List needed something that would push Schindler to finally do the right thing. He’s drawn to this girl, but he shakes the feeling off and goes on with his life. When she dies, the feelings strengthen, now he’s riddled with guilt, and he can’t turn a blind eye anymore. Maybe he even thinks of her at the end when he insists he could have saved more people. Whatever the case, the young girl represents all the lives lost but also Schindler’s humanity.
Schindler’s List: The Visuals
There’s also a lot of power in the silent scenes. As it's often suggested in writing, show, don’t tell. A scene when the Jewish people are packing up their belongings, leaving their homes behind, no one has to say a word and we can understand how much fear and sorrow they are experiencing. Another powerful visual element is the close-ups of blood. Since the film is in black and white, all the blood appears black. It looks like a tar-like substance, like a poison injected by the Nazis, bleeding out to show them what they’ve done. There are a few other scenes I liked too. Like when Schindler and his mistress are literally up on their high horses watching the massacres happen. Or the look on Schindler’s face when he sees the girl in red has died.
He slowly removes a cloth from his mouth, which is now wide open like it’s hitting him all at once, what he’s been ignoring this whole time. I also like when Göth’s girlfriend puts the pillow over her head at the sound of gunshots. She two is capable of drowning out the crimes she doesn’t want to face. Then, there’s the shower scene. At the camps, a group is led into the showers where they fear they will actually be showered with poisonous gas. It turns out, it really was just water. Watching mostly adults go from terrified to relieved reminded me of a child or a lost animal. I bring this up because it represents how they had been so stripped of their humanity they’d resorted to uncivilized behavior.
“First, they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the jews, and I did not speak out because I was not a jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to speak for me,”-Martin Niemöller, a quote from the United States Holocaust Memorial.
Germany is one of the many countries I would like to visit but have not gotten to go to yet. What I’ve always admired about Germany is they do not deny their history. They don’t rewrite the facts, they don’t pretend that what happened wasn’t a tragedy, and they do not, under any circumstances, pretend the Nazis were not as awful as they were. Even in Schindler’s List we are presented with evidence of Schindler’s wrongdoings because to tell only one side of history is to not tell history at all.
In Modern Germany, the use of swastikas, the SS symbol, and even the Nazi salute are punishable by a fine or prison sentence. There are exceptions for educational purposes or if they are used to condemn Nazism. But Germany wants to make one thing clear: they will not let history repeat itself, and I think that’s a pretty powerful intention.