SCHINDLER’S LIST
With Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagalle, and Embeth Davidtz.
A small but significant part of my reaction can probably be traced to personal factors: as the grandson of Polish Jews, I am one of those who might have been saved (or not saved) from the gas ovens by Oskar Schindler if my father’s father hadn’t immigrated to the States when he was eight. My grandfather, a self-made businessman, also resembled the non-Jewish Schindler in certain respects–he was a hedonistic bon vivant whose successful business tactics, including bribery when it seemed necessary, filled him with such guilt that he became a leading philanthropist in the same community where he made his fortune.
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(4) The film’s success at conveying some of the enormity of the Holocaust, as well as some of its banal details, in a fully accessible manner, at a time when much of our collective memory and understanding of it is rapidly slipping away. Much of the time it accomplishes this less through graphic portrayals than through appeals to our imaginations. Another film that took on this task and performed it more responsibly and comprehensively–if less accessibly–is Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985). But Shoah is a documentary and explicitly a Jewish film, and with an eight-hour running time to boot it clearly can’t address as wide an audience. Despite both the subject matter and the fact that Spielberg himself is Jewish, Schindler’s List is anything but a Jewish film. Indeed, as I hope to show, even Jews who see this film are implicitly transformed by the narrative structure into gentile viewers.
The character of Amon Goeth, the Nazi director of the forced labor camp and the main villain in book and movie alike, is likewise simplified–played by Fiennes as a classically foppish German decadent with Caligula-like flourishes. While Spielberg takes much of this character’s monstrous behavior–such as his shooting of Jews arbitrarily or for minor offenses–straight from the book, he chooses to minimize Goeth’s growing obesity. And while he takes the trouble of flashing forward to show him being hung in 1946, he omits entirely an unforgettable scene from the book in which Goeth, now lean and diabetic, having been imprisoned and then released by the Nazis for his aberrant behavior, visits Schindler’s factory in Moravia a defeated man.
