Schindler's List
March 10, 2004
The epilogue to Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” is one of the most moving final five minutes in film history. For nearly three hours, the film has vividly recreated the holocaust in Poland as filtered through the story of a German industrialist and Nazi sympathizer, Oskar Schindler, who, after witnessing the atrocities of the Krakow ghetto liquidation, pooled together his considerable resources to save 1,100 Jews from an almost certain death at Auschwitz, to work in his malfunctioning munitions plant in Czechoslovakia. The conventional, black and white, and satisfying narrative ends with the allied victory, but Spielberg adds a final moment of great warmth and power; a gathering at the tombstone of Schindler on Mount Zion in Jerusalem of the still living “Schindlerjuden” and the actors who portrayed them in the film. In a procession of remembrance, the survivors place stones on the grave marker, and a man in silhouette drops a solitary rose, and suddenly we are no longer in a movie. The brilliance of the scene, a true real-life moment of incredible emotion, and ultimately, to the power of the film, which has been released on DVD this week, is that in a way, it puts the human value of the holocaust into shattering perspective. From the 1,100 Schindler Jews, the final title card reads, 6,000 have since been descended, two, maybe three full generations; the stones and the rose at the end of the film act as an ultimate symbol of love and thanks to a man who literally bankrupted himself for the sake of others, an unlikely hero.
With “Schindler’s List”, originally released in mid December 1993, Spielberg was able to document the horrors of the holocaust, but desensitize it with a compelling narrative; the film is as entertaining and tightly wound as any of his popcorn movies. The scenes of the labor camps, concentration camps, ghetto roundups, and the Krakow liquidation on March 13, 1943 are painstakingly recreated, often with a flowing handheld camera to give a cinema verite impression of ‘it really happened this way’, and they are arguably the best representation outside of actual documentary footage, but what makes the film so special is that the struggle and the deaths are humanized through fleshed out characters, from both sides of the war. Spielberg detractors like to point out that two of the most important characters, and the two best performances of the film, are Germans, Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, and the Nazi Commandant Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), but even so, the best films can present an ideology or document a period with the large onus on the historically evil –in Goeth’s case anyway- aspects and still come out with a story complete from every possibly side, emotionally and realistically.
It doesn’t matter so much, in the end, that Oskar Schindler was a certified member of the Nazi party, many wealthy men of influence were, or that, until he witnessed first hand the massacre at the Krakow ghetto, he was something of a self-promoting, money hungry, womanizing egotist, who fraternized with the S.S. brass, Goeth in particular, and made millions from the war effort, what matters is that he eventually realized what was really happening, and did everything (which wasn’t enough in his mind) one man could possibly do to save the lives of 1,100 people the Nazi’s deemed so expendable. German or not, his is as good a story as any to center the holocaust around, and Spielberg being the consummate storyteller that he is, realizes it from the moment we see him, dressing with high airs for a Nazi party, to the final, wrenching scene on the train tracks outside of the factory, after the liberation, where he breaks down, realizing that anything, everything he had, could have been enough for one more spared soul. “Whoever saves one life, saves the world,” is the inscription on the ring the workers present Schindler before he flees. Certainly, the 6,000 descendents can attest to that.
Spielberg’s three-plus hour opus is arguably the most violent film ever to win Best Picture. But its violence, not unlike the recent firestorm over the scourging scenes in “The Passion of the Christ” serves a purpose; not only does it accurately depict the senselessness in which the S.S. took innocent lives, it shocks the audience into personally identifying with the loss. Take for instance the first murder, which doesn’t actually occur for 45 minutes into the film, but prepares us for what lies ahead. Nearing the end of the first act, Schindler’s accountant and conscious Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), brings the director a one-armed worker who wishes to expresses his gratitude. Schindler, still in his early, selfish phase, awkwardly accepts the mans thanks, but questions the use of an elderly one-armed man on the production line, “This is not a charity, it’s a factory.”
The importance here is not that Schindler is less than hospitable, but that we’ve clearly identified with the old man, who finds himself lucky to be alive, so, not three minutes later, when Amon Goeth pulls the old man out of a shoveling detail and similarly, yet hate-filled states, “A one-armed Jew, twice as useless,” and summarily executes the man, the head wound blackening the snow, we realize that the film is going to pull no punches in sparing the audience the heartbreak of feeling for a character directly before said character is killed; if the real participants weren’t spared such luxuries of non-acquaintanceship, than why should we? The more we know about a person, the harder it is to accept their unnecessary demise, which is exactly the point, and exactly why, knowing the fate awaiting his workers, and his friend, Itzhak Stern, Oskar Schindler gave his fortune to Amon Goeth in exchange for their lives. Of the titular document, which gathered every saved name for transport from Auschwitz, Stern famously says, “The list is an absolute good…the list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf,” which was, undeniably, one of the worst chapters of modern civilization.
“Schindler’s List” had a long gestation period before Spielberg finally was able to get into the kind of mindset one needs to show such unheralded and bleak horror and violence on screen. Spielberg was approached with the project shortly after Thomas Keneally’s bestseller was printed in ’82, but he passed, feeling he wasn’t ready yet. It was attached, at one point, to everyone from Billy Wilder, and Martin Scorsese (the penultimate director, before Spielberg accepted), to Roman Polanski, who eventually made his own Oscar-winning holocaust saga, “The Pianist”, a decade later, but finally, with a workable, polished script by Steve Zaillian, Spielberg was ready, and while still in post-production on “Jurassic Park”, went to Krakow, Auschwitz and other authentic sites to film his most personal masterpiece.
Having accrued some $250 million personally from the “Jurassic Park” profits, the director forgo a salary, “bloody money” he called it, and with the collaboration of his famed cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, a slew of standout performances, from Kingsley’s sympathetic accountant and Neeson’s towering hero, to Fiennes' brilliantly wicked Commandant, and with an understated Oscar and Grammy-winning score by John Williams, featuring heartbreaking violin solos by Itzak Perelman, Spielberg completed his labor of love; a torturous epic filled with death, sacrifice, symbolism, and hope. The winner of seven Academy Awards, and easily one of the best American films of all time, “Schindler’s List” stands beside “Shoah” and “Night and Fog” as an essential examination of an atrocity which cost the lives of over six million innocent Jews, but through the actions of one Nazi sympathizer, enabled the futures of thousands. “They won’t soon forget the name Schindler,” he prophetically says to a bored S.S. soldier, “he did something extraordinary.” He sure did.
by Adam Suraf
The “Schindler’s List” DVD, with a feature length documentary on the surviving “Schindlerjuden” is available to rent at Blockbuster Video.