All The World's A Stage - The Work of Ralph Fiennes

[Mary Frances]

http://www.answers.com/topic/schindler-s-list

Schindler's List

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Steven Zaillian (Screenplay)
Based on Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally
Starring Liam Neeson,
Ben Kingsley,
Ralph Fiennes
Produced by Steven Spielberg,
Branko Lustig,
Gerald R. Molen
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release date December 15, 1993 (USA)
Runtime 195 min
Language English
Budget $25,000,000 USD (estimated)
IMDb page (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/)


Schindler's List is a 1993 movie based on the book Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally (the book was later renamed Schindler's List as well). The movie, directed by Steven Spielberg, relates the tale of Oskar Schindler, a German entrepreneur who was instrumental in saving the lives of over one thousand Polish Jews during the Holocaust. The title refers to a list of the names of 1,200 Jews whom Schindler hired to work in his factory and kept from being sent to the concentration camps.

Plot Summary
Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

The movie begins with a depiction of a Jewish prayer.

The German Army Invades Poland

The Polish Army has been defeated by the German Army in the initiating event of World War II in Europe. Jews living in occupied Poland are ordered to relocate to population centers. The film's action starts with crowds of Jews from all over the country, hasidic, assimilated, rich, and poor, detraining in Krakow, and submitting their names to German officials waiting on the station platforms with typewriters and lists.

As this is happening, a newcomer has arrived in Krakow; his name is Oskar Schindler. Schindler, a heretofore unsuccessful businessman from Germany, has come to Poland with the hope of using the now abundant slave labor force of Jews and Poles to manufacture goods for the German Army. Schindler makes a very good impression with the occupation authorities early on, being a member of the Nazi Party and lavishing gifts and bribes upon the army and SS officials now running southern Poland. He becomes a friend to the SS and Police Leader of Krakow, Julian Scherner, and quickly calls in favors as Schindler begins to establish himself as a businessman in the Krakow region.

Schindler's Factory

With his military sponsors in his back pocket, he sets out to acquire a factory for the production of enamelware, mainly cookery. He hasn't the money to buy it, and his administrative skills are dubious at best, but he finds through his contact Itzhak Stern, a functionary in the local judenrat (Jewish Council) who in turn has contacts with the now underground Jewish business community. Schindler makes the Jewish businessmen a deal they cannot refuse: they will loan him the money for the factory, and he will give them a small share of the pots and pans produced. He takes particular pleasure in telling them that they must take him at his word, and that no court would ever uphold a contract between a German and a Jew.

Schindler gets his money and starts the factory; he keeps the Nazis happy and enjoys his new-found wealth, while Stern actually operates the factory and uses his position to help his fellow Jews, who have now been confined to a ghetto within Krakow. Workers in Schindler's factory are allowed outside the ghetto, and are certified as "essential workers," guaranteeing that they will not be rounded up at night by the Gestapo. This last point is key, and Stern uses his considerable skills to make sure as many people as possible are deemed "essential" by the Nazi bureacracy, even children, the elderly, and the infirm - people who would otherwise be rounded up and sent away. Schindler becomes aware of what is going on, and seems embarrassed by the whole arrangement, but takes no action to stop it.

Where exactly the "unessential" people are sent is a matter of rumor among the Jews; a few suggest that they are taken off to concentration camps, but people hearing this reject the idea as ridiculous. One old woman exclaims, "We are their work force! Why would they want to kill their own work force?"

The Razing of the Ghetto

At this point, an SS officer named Amon Goeth arrives in Krakow to initiate construction of a labor camp, Plaszow, and to take over control of the Ghetto. In one of the most sickening scenes in the film, a Jewish engineer explains that a foundation has been improperly laid, and for this he has her shot in the head. He then, in the next breath, orders that everything she requested be done. Goeth is the focus of the film's depiction of Nazi sadism and inhumanity, not only taking pleasure in murder and torture, but considering it an integral part of his job, a matter of duty. In one scene, he decides not to shoot a young boy for not properly cleaning his bathtub, but then, after reflecting, decides that he must be firm, and shoots him in the back as he walks away.

In due course, Goeth razes the Krakow ghetto, sending in hundreds of troops to clear the cramped rooms and shooting anyone who refuses or cannot leave. Schindler watches the massacre from the hills overlooking the ghetto, and is profoundly affected. But, he now faces the more immediate problem of how to run his factory without his workers. He meets Goeth, befriends him, and convinces him to let him keep his workers for considerable bribes and payoffs. Schindler is now, though reluctantly, sheltering people who have very few skills in his factory.

It is during the clearing out of the ghetto that Spielberg introduces a character known as "the girl in red": a young girl wearing a red coat. The color of the coat stands out, because it is the only object that appears in color throughout the entire film (except for two instances of a candle flame); the rest of the movie is filmed in black-and-white, except for the final present-day coda. Film critics and scholars have suggested the appearance of the girl in the red coat is a "marker" used by Spielberg to denote the transformation of Schindler's personality. The first time she appears, Schindler changes from a cold-hearted businessman interested only in profit into a person struggling to do the right thing; he makes his first attempts to covertly assist his workers and save them from persecution and death afterwards. With the second appearance of the girl in red, Schindler makes a further transformation into an altruistic angel whose primary motive is not profit, but rather to save the lives of his workers.

The List

To Amon Goeth's considerable consternation, and to Schindler's horror, an order arrives from Berlin commanding Goeth to exhume and destroy all bodies of those killed in the ghetto razing, to dismantle the Plaszow, and to ship the whole population to Auschwitz. Goeth remarks sarcastically, "It will take about four weeks for me to do the paperwork -- that ought to be fun." Schindler prevails upon Goeth to let him keep his workers, so that he can move them to a factory in his old home of Zwittau-Brunnlitz, Czechoslovakia, away from the Holocaust - now fully underway in Poland. Goeth acquiesces, for a payoff in the order of millions of Reichsmarks. So that his workers can be kept off the trains to the killing centers, Schindler, with Stern, assembles a list of his workers.

This list of "skilled" inmates was Schindler's List, and for many of the inmates of Plaszow camp, being on the list meant the difference between life and death. Except for a railway mishap, in which one of the trains carrying women was accidentally redirected to Auschwitz, all the people on Schindler's list arrive safely at the new site. Those who went to Auschwitz were soon returned by a train which was sent to Schindler's camp, after Schindler bribes another Nazi official. Once the workers arrive in Czechoslovakia, Schindler institutes firm controls on the Nazi guards assigned to the factory, permits the Jews to observe the sabbath, and spends the rest of his fortune bribing Nazi officials. He runs out of money just as the war in Europe comes to an end.

As a German, a Nazi, and a "profiteer of slave labor" (his words), Schindler must flee the oncoming Soviet Army. He packs a car in the night, and bids farewell to his workers. They give him a letter, explaining to others that he is not a criminal, and they also give him a ring, engraved with the Talmudic quotation, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire." Schindler is wracked with guilt, seeing his car, and realizing he could have bribed ten more people from Goeth for it. He pulls the Nazi Party pin from his lapel, and cries, "This is gold. I could have gotten one more person for this. He would have given me one... One more person." He then leaves. The next morning, a Russian dragoon arrives, and announces to the Jews, "You have been liberated by the Soviet Army!"

The Coda

The film ends in Israel, at the grave of Oskar Schindler, in the present day. The actors portraying the major characters in the film pass by the grave, and place stones on it, while the actual persons they portrayed walk beside them doing the same. The camera pans, revealing a long line of people.

In a final shot, a man places a flower on the grave, and stands contemplatively over it. Though many believe it to be Director Steven Spielberg, it is actually the shadow of Liam Neeson who portrayed Oskar Schindler in the film. (www.imdb.com)

Tagline: Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

The Movie

The girl in red

The movie was directed by famed director Steven Spielberg, who later spoke of the making of the movie as affecting him deeply. It was produced almost entirely in black and white (with a color prologue and epilogue, a red coat in two scenes, and color candle flames in another). It starred Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler, Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern, and Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth. Its tagline was simply, "Whoever saves one life saves the world entire" a quote from the Talmud. Critically acclaimed, the film won praise for depicting—often in exceptional, graphic detail—the horrible brutality of the Holocaust.

Nominated for twelve Academy Awards, this movie won seven, including the coveted Best Picture and Best Director awards for Spielberg, which many of his supporters felt he had been unfairly denied for prior productions, although he had previously received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award.

In the years since its release, Schindler's List has risen in status to be considered one of the greatest movies of the 1990s, if not of all time. It is also considered to be Steven Spielberg's greatest directorial accomplishment by many viewers and critics; the former vote it consistently among the top ten (#6) movies on the Internet Movie Database Top 250, while the latter voted it #9 in the American Film Institute's 100 Greatest Movies series.

Following the critical and box office success of Schindler's List, Spielberg founded and continues to finance the Shoah Project, a non-profit organization with the goal of providing an archive for the filmed testimony of as many survivors of the Holocaust as possible, so that their stories will not be lost in the future.

However, the Holocaust historian David M. Crowe has questioned in a new book the authenticity of the facts portrayed in the movie. "Schindler had nothing to do with the list," the author writes in the new biography of the German businessman. Oskar Schindler was in jail for bribing the Secret Service commander Amon Goeth when the famous list was being drawn up and had little involvement in it, according to a New York Times report. From the total of nine lists, four were drawn up primarily by Marcel Goldberg, a corrupt Jewish assistant to the SS officer in charge of transporting Jews, Crowe wrote.

Credits

Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall
Writing credits: Thomas Keneally (novel), Steven Zaillian (screenplay)
Composer: John Williams
Editor: Michael Kahn
Producer: Branko Lustig, Gerald R. Molen, Steven Spielberg for Amblin Entertainment / Universal Pictures.

1997 TV controversy

In February of 1997, the film was shown on television in the United States, being carried by NBC in two parts, on consecutive Sunday and Wednesday evenings (February 23 and 26). The telecast was the first ever to receive a TV-M (now TV-MA) rating under the TV Parental Guidelines that had been established at the beginning of that year, and many fundamentalist and evangelical Christian groups stridently objected to the film's being shown on network television at all, due to scenes of nudity and the use of vulgar language which were not edited out of the TV production.

[Mary Frances]

Rolling Stone

Schindler's List

By Peter Travers
Rolling Stone
December 8, 2000

Allow me to speak heresy: Steven Spielberg's E.T. is just as award worthy a movie as Schindler's List. So is Close Encounters of the Third Kind, with Jaws and Raiders of the Lost Ark not far behind. Still, Oscar the snob would rather rust than honor these alleged popcorn flicks, no matter how plainly they reveal Spielberg's genius for humane fantasy. For 20 years, Oscar has ostracized the filmmaker who's built a name to rival Disney's. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Biases kisses up to films that wear serious credentials on their sleeves, where doddering Oscar voters can't miss them. Look for Schindler's List, the three-hour, black-and-white Holocaust drama that scored 12 nominations, to cover Spielberg in glory on the March 21 Oscarcast.

There's no shame in that. Schindler's List, despite blatant compromises, is a rending historical document. But the film's near-certain victory is based less on merit than on the marketing of its ambitious intentions. The academy doesn't judge movies, it weighs them by subject matter. On that basis, Spielberg's epic tips the scales. Oskar Schindler, the German war profiteer played by Best Actor nominee Liam Neeson, saved more than 1,200 Jews by giving them jobs in his factory in Poland. That makes Schindler a saint, and saints are tough competition.

Of course, awards shouldn't be confused with canonization. And size, except in terms of talent, shouldn't be confused with art. But Oscar just doesn't get it. Long and lofty suckers win this golden boy every time. Academy voters traditionally side with the noble gesture over disreputable behavior or liberating wit. So it's Dances With Wolves over GoodFellas in the '90s, Driving Miss Daisy over Do the Right Thing in the '80s, Patton over M*A*S*H in the '70s, A Man for All Seasons over Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? in the '60s, Ben-Hur over Some Like It Hot in the '50s, Going My Way over Double Indemnity in the '40s, Cavalcade over King Kong in the '30s and Wings over Metropolis in the '20s.

Nobody knows these facts of Oscar life better than Spielberg. In 1982, the year of E.T., he lost to Richard Attenborough's pompous Gandhi. Now it's Spielberg's turn to go the virtuous-artist route. Though his Jurassic Park is on its way to a worldwide gross of $1 billion and the top of the box-office heap, Spielberg plays straight to the academy's prejudices: "Jurassic Park didn't challenge me a 10th as much as Schindler's List did," he says. "I can't look at movies the same way."

To insiders, this is harmless promotion. What isn't so harmless is the manipulating Spielberg does within the movie. In a much criticized climactic scene, Spielberg distorts the facts to show Schindler breaking down in a speech to the Jewish factory workers. The episode never happened. Schindler was not a man to wear his emotions openly. Though the scene rings shockingly false, it fills what Spielberg discerns as the need for a big heroic moment.

Will academy voters care about Spielberg's lapse into fraudulent melodrama or Frank Rich's New York Times criticism that Spielberg has made the Jewish characters as "generic" and "forgettable" as "the chorus in a touring company of Fiddler on the Roof"? Don't bet on it. Oscar, Hollywood's top PR point man, is expert at putting on blinders. Spielberg has given the academy a movie that confers dignity and importance on the industry. He's playing the game the academy's way. That earns him sentiment -- a close second to nobility on the academy's preferred qualifications list. In 1985, Spielberg's glossy Color Purple received II nominations but none for the man who directed it. The snub was crushing; so were two later box-office disappointments -- the gooey Always and the god-awful Hook. In short, Spielberg has donned the hair shirt and paid his dues. It's time for Hollywood to embrace its prodigal son.

Schindler's List is such a juggernaut that academy members needn't bother to see the film to vote for it. Since Spielberg hasn't made videotapes of Schindler's List available, as is the current custom, academy pods may find the vote-on-faith method preferable to actually dragging their asses out to a screening. The attitude is, Spielberg's been ignored long enough -- what's the problem?

The problem is there were better movies than Schindler's List released in 1993, and some of them have even been nominated. Take The Piano, a low-budget, independent film about a mute Scottish mail-order bride (Holly Hunter) transported to the wilds of New Zealand. Written and directed by Jane Campion, The Piano has already won Campion directing prizes from the New York and Los Angeles film critics. She's Spielberg's chief competition. But he can rest easy. Campion is a woman director, something the academy has been dodging throughout its 66-year history, except for the surprising nomination of Italy's Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties) in 1976. Even those in the academy boys' club who might still resent Spielberg would be loath to vote for, yikes, a female!

The Piano has something more damaging working against it -- originality. It's not history like Schindler's List or biography like In the Name of the Father, which details the efforts of Northern Ireland's Gerry Conlon (Daniel Day-Lewis) to prove himself innocent of an IRA bombing. It's not based on an acclaimed novel like The Remains of the Day, with Anthony Hopkins as a repressed butler blindly serving a politically naive master against a backdrop of war. And it doesn't have the cachet of a hit TV series like The Fugitive, with Harrison Ford chasing the one-armed man who killed his wife. The Piano is a product of Campion's vibrant imagination.

Academy voters can't figure what to make of this raw little movie. They're not alone. Even President Clinton has weighed in: "I don't know what the fuss is about," he said. "The Piano was just OK." And this from a White House that urged every American to see Schindler's List.

The message is clear: Make movies larger than life. What gets lost in the process are brave, questing movies that tackle reality on a nonheroic scale. When Robert Altman gets nominated for directing Short Cuts, but the film is ignored, the implication is that the academy doesn't want to see fallible human beings struggling to understand themselves and the world they live in. When Mike Leigh's incendiary Naked, with a career-making performance from David Thewlis as a homeless Londoner, is ignored, the implication is that the academy doesn't want to be confronted with the waste of intelligent life we see every day on our streets. When the Hughes brothers' Menace II Society, a look at violence in an L.A. hood, is ignored, the implication is that the academy doesn't want to face social problems unless they are comfortably set in the past with villains vanquished and solutions found.

In my opinion, these films -- each done without compromise -- are at least the equal of Schindler's List. That the academy disregards them is not just a slight; it's a disturbing sign of things to come. Oscar nominations are just what these small films need to survive. My annual rant isn't meant as vindictive sniping; it's a wake-up call to the academy: Use your power to, give voice to the mavericks who celebrate challenge instead of complacency.

Oscar rates a few cheers this year. For the first time in ages, the Best Picture category doesn't contain one laughable embarrassment. There's no Scent of a Woman or Prince of Tides or Gbost or Field of Dreams or Fatal Attraction. Kenneth Branagh's Shakespearean hamathon, Much Ado About Nothing, was justly ignored. Oscar even opened the door to rock in the Best Song category by nominating the music of Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young for Philadelphia. Now that Oscar has caught up with the '70s, there might be a chance for Kurt Cobain or Dr. Dre by the time of Home Alone II.

It's hard letting Oscar completely off the hook. Where's raging bull Martin Scorsese, who dropped the f word and the violence and practically got into a corset to direct the rapturous Age of Innocence? His radiant star Michelle Pfeiffer, whose performance ranks with her best work, was also snubbed. And for what? Debra Winger repeating her Terms of Endearment deathbed scene in Shadowlands? Shame.

Comedy got bagged, as usual, including Bill Murray in the ingenious Groundbog Day and Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in the intriguing Manhattan Murder Mystery. Robin Williams even dolled up in drag for Mrs. Doubtfire to no avail.

Other glaring omissions include Denzel Washington, whose performance in Philadelphia is at least the equal of that of his nominated co-star, Tom Hanks. Jeff Bridges, superb in Fearless, confirmed his rep as America's most unappreciated actor. And where are last year's victors? Unforgiven winner Clint Eastwood got the brush for directing A Perfect World and for giving what is arguably his best performance in In the Line of Fire (his striking costar Rene Russo was also snubbed). Scent of a Woman winner Al Pacino made no headway with Carlito's Way (his scene-stealing costar Sean Penn didn't, either).

New faces had it worse. No notice was taken of Ashley Judd's auspicious debut in Ruby in Paradise or David Thewlis' career breakthrough in Naked. Ditto Embeth Davidtz (Schindler's List), Chazz Palminteri (A Bronx Tale) and Gwyneth Paltrow (Flesh and Bone). And while we're talking rejection, how about the entire casts of Short Cuts and The Joy Luck Club?

The list goes on. There's no mention of Michael Ballhaus' cinematography for The Age of Innocence or Geraldine Peroni's editing of Short Cuts or Michael Nyman's original score for The Piano. Schindler's List, natch, is nominated in all those categories.

Oscar removes the blinkers only when another chance arises to play noble. That means a likely Best Actor win for Tom Hanks, portraying an AIDS patient in Jonathan Demme's simplistically earnest Philadelphia. Though Hopkins and Day-Lewis gave superior performances, the academy can hardly resist showing off its social awareness. Otherwise, look for Schindler's to dominate Oscar's list. Even academy court jester Billy Crystal will be replaced as host by a star Spielberg made in The Color Purple: Whoopi Goldberg. It's not known yet whether Goldberg will follow Crystal's lead in doing song parodies of the nominated films. But one tune truly fits the occasion as the 66th Academy Awards turns into Spielberg's pay-back time: "I Only Have Eyes for You."

[Mary Frances]

Making history. Steven Spielberg's movie 'Schindler's List'

(Cover Story)

By Anne Thompson
Entertainment Weekly
January 21, 1994

The cold could snap bones. And for the actors filming the Auschaitz-Birkenau concentration camp scenes during their first weeks on location in Poland, the work itself was a chilling business that tore them out of their own place and time and engulfed them in nightmarish history. In one horrific scene, 300 naked actresses in shorn wigs crowded into an Auschwitz shower and were told to stare up at the menacing nozzles. As Jewish prisoners just transferred into the death camp, they were supposed to appear unsure if the fixtures would produce water or gas - if they were meant for cleansing or for killing.

Their tears were real. Israeli actress Miri Fabian held a young girl close. She herself had been born in a concentration camp and had not yet told her mother that she had taken the role. The tension was unbearable. She ha(i trouble breathing, then began hyperventilating, and was barely able to finish filming the sequence.

Other Auschwitz scenes played out against similarly haunting visions of hell. One member of the company recalls guard dogs going mad everywhere, huge burly guards with whips, chaos, blinding snow, a red haze coming from the chimney stacks." And this was just the beginning. For the next 2 1/2, months, Steven Spielberg, directing with precise, singular vision, led the cast and crew of Schindler's List to the heart of the Holocaust's horror. "I said to myself, How can I bring truth to these impossible images?"' Spielberg admits. "There wasn't even an attempt to alleviate the sadness. Constantly, every week, somebody would lose it."

Miraculously, the finished work brings audiences to the same awful place, securing Spielberg's position as perhaps the nation's preeminent filmmaker. He is a front-runner, alongside The Piano's Jane Campion, for the Best Director Oscar, an honor that the Academy has begrudged him so far, placating him only with 1986's Irving G. Thalberg Award for his work as, ironically, a producer. Schindler's very existence is a victory against astounding odds. It took a decade to adapt journalist Thomas Keneally's sprawling 1982 novel for the screen - and the film's tight schedule required Spielberg to edit his other 1993 triumph, Jurassic Park, from Poland early last year. This month, Schindler's, which has made an impressive $10 million in limited release, opens in more than 250 theaters, with more to come - a heartfelt monument to an event so ghastly that it stands oceans away from the reaches of art. This is the story of how Spielberg, an entertainer until now associated with soaring flights of fancy, hunkered down and bridged that gulf.

Steven Spielberg, 46 and known to brood on occasion, has lately been cheery in a way that befits a director who has new critical esteem to go with four of the 10 biggest movies in history - Jaws (1975), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), E.T (1982), and Jurassic Park (1993) Standing outside his Amblin Entertainment office at Universal Studios in jeans and sneakers, his salt-and-pepper. beard matching long hair unfettered by his usual baseball cap, he greets Marvin Levy Amblin's marketing consultant, who offers glad tidings. The National Society of Film Critics has just given Schindler's Best Picture and Spielberg his first Best Director honor this year; other groups had chosen Campion. "Great! Wonderful! This means we've swept all five critics groups!" Spielberg says with a grin.

When Schindler's List was published, Spielberg had recently finished E.T, mining his boyish nightmares and fantasies to great effect but earning a reputation as the Peter Pan of film-making. MCA president Sidney Sheinberg brought the novel to Spielberg's attention. The story, a moving record of what happened to 1,100 Polish Jews - the Schindlerjuden - whose lives were saved when German war profiteer Oskar Schindler "bought" them as factory workers to spare them from the death camps, intrigued Spielberg. After scanning one review, he recalls saying to Sheinberg: "It'll make a helluva story. Is it true?"

Keneally himself had been talked into waiting the book while standing in a Beverly Hills leather-goods store, waiting for a credit-card authorization from the proprietor, Schindler survivor Leopold Page (born Poldek Pfefferberg). Page had first helped sell Schindler's story to MGM in the 1960s. The studio hired Casablanca coscreenwriter Howard Koch to work on the film, but the dubious character of Oskar Schindler - a womanizing, boozing bear of a man who profited from the war by employing Jews - may have made his story a difficult sell. The project was dropped and lay dormant for years before Spielberg decided to take it on.

Page, 80, insists that from their first meeting, Spielberg knew he would do the movie. "When I met him," he recalls in thickly accented English, "I asked him, 'Please, when are you starting?' He said, Ten years from now.'" But as those years passed, Page worried that he wouldn't live to see the film.

Schindler's was on my guilty con-science," says Spielberg. "Page was heaping on the fact that he was going to die."

Like Schindler's motivation for saving his employees, Spielberg's reluctance to take on the project was both spiritual and pragynatic. He gave the project to two other directors, Sydney Pollack and Martin Scorsese, before tackling it himself. "He didn't think he was ready," explains the film's screenwriter, Steven Zaillian (Awakenings, Searching for Bobby Fischer). "He didn't have kids yet. He had to come to terms with his Jewishness. He kept putting it off."

Spielberg wasn't the only one who doubted his abilities. Australian director Fred Schepisi (Six Degrees of Separation) implored him not to do it, warning him that his big-studio gloss would be the film's downfall. "Give it to me," he told Spielberg. "I don't think you have the courage to not use the crane and dolly."

"Survivors would come up to me in Poland and say, Mat a strange choice,'" recalls Spielberg, "and I'd have a sinking feeling in my heart, [worrying that] the world wouldn't accept Schindler's List from me." Now, as he sits cross-legged in a soft armchair in his office, the fear has fallen away. Spielberg leans forward and boasts: "There is not one crane shot!"

While Spielberg was making other films, the Schindler's script was proving no easier to crack than it had been two decades earlier. Keneally himself took the first pass, writing a 220-page tome that was more miniseries than movie. "In my draft, Schindler had relationships with a whole range of people," he says. "I didn't coalesce the stories enough."

Unhappy with Keneally's lack of focus, Spielberg next hired ex-journalist Kurt Luedtke, who had won an Oscar for Out of Africa. Luedtke labored for 3 1/2 years before giving up, unable to conquer his own doubt about the heroism of Schindler, who had begun his Moses-like mission merely as a want to make a buck. "As a reporter," says Spielberg, "he had some journalistic conflicts about not believing the story."

Spielberg then handed the project to Scorsese. "I thought Marty would do a great job with it," explains Spielberg. "He wouldn't back down from truth or violence. But the minute I gave it to Marty, I missed it. I'd given away a chance to do something for my children and family about the Holocaust." So the two directors worked out a trade in which Spielberg handed Scorsese a project he'd been developing - Cape Fear - and reclaimed Schindler's for himself.

Back on the film, Spielberg read the script Scorsese had commissioned from Zaillian. At 115 pages, it was strong but "too contained" and without enough Jewish faces, says Spielberg. "I didn't tell the story from the survivors'point of view," says Zaillian, "but from Schindler's. I wanted it clear that he didn't do what he did out of friendship. He didn't feel sorry for them. He did it because it was the right thing to do."

Spielberg kept asking Zaillian to add more material and treated him to a field trip to Poland for inspiration. "By the time we were done, we had 195 pages," says Zaillian, who originally penned the savage liquidation of the Jews in the Krakow ghetto - some of the film's most brutal scenes - at only two pages. Spielberg insisted on stretching the evacuation into a grueling episode that ultimately took three weeks to film.

"He thought I had lost my mind," recalls Spielberg. "But really, I felt very strongly that the sequence had to be almost unwatchable."

While some critics have faulted Schindler's List for tell its tale from the Germans'point of view, Spielberg knew how he wanted to present the story. "I said, Look, I don't want to go all the way into The Diary of Anne Frank, where we're telling a detailed portraiture of a family in hiding. It wasn't the story of eight Jews from Krakow who survived - it was a conscious decision to represent the 6 million who died and the several hundred thousand who did survive with just sort of a scent of characters and faces we follow all through the story."

As he developed the script, Spielberg waged a quiet battle with Universal. The studio was concerned that he was making an apparently uncommercial project even more difficult. He knew he wanted to shoot the movie in documentary-style black and white with Polish emigre Janusz Kaminski (The Adventures of Huck Finn) as his director of photography. Universal chairman Tom Pollock begged Spielberg at least to shoot in color and then transfer to black and white, so the studio could eventually release color videocassettes. The director refused. "It would have looked like pink and white," he says.

Disputes over how to tell Schindler's story were just as intense. "The studio, of course, wanted me to spell everything out," says Spielberg. "I got into a lot of arguments with people saying we need that big Hollywood catharsis where Schindler falls to his knees and says, 'Yes, I know what I'm doing - now I must do it!' and goes full steam ahead. that was the last thing I wanted. I did not want to bring in a Camille moment, some kind of explosive catharsis that would turn this into The Great Escape."

Finally, MCA's Sheinberg gave Schindler's List the green light on one condition: Spielberg had to film Jurassic Park first. "He knew that once I had directed Schindler's I wouldn't be able to do Jurassic Park, "says Spielberg. (He does plan to produce, but not direct, a Jurassic sequel.)

As casting began, Spielberg first focused on the character of Itzhak Stern, a composite of several of the men who ran Schindler's enamel-ware company while the boss pursued women and good relations with the Nazis. "Stern whispered in Schindler's ear," says Spielberg. "He's the unsung hero." The role went to Ben Kingsley, the Oscar winner for 1982's Gandhi and the biggest name in a non-American, nonstar lineup. As Nazi commandant Amon Goeth, the film's emblem of evil, Spielberg cast Ralph Fiennes (pronounced Rafe Fines), whom he had seen as Heathcliff in a little-seen remake of Wuthering Heights. South African actress Embeth Davidtz was handed the role of Helen Hirsch, the reluctant recipient of both Goeth's and Schindler's odd affections. Spielberg cast Israelis, many of them children of survivors, for the key Jewish speaking roles and used local Catholic Poles for the remaining Jewish faces.

While Spielberg had tested Irish actor Liam Neeson (see following story) at the start of the casting process and had spurned interest from Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson, it wasn't until December 1992 that he firmed up his choice. After seeing Neeson on Broadway in Anna Christie, Spielberg went backstage with his wife, Kate Capshaw, and her mother. Overcome by the performance, Spielberg's mother-in-law met Neeson, who put a comforting arm around her. As they were leaving, Capshaw turned to Spielberg and said, "That's what Schindler would have done."

When the Schindler's company arrived in Krakow in February, the punishing Polish winter welcomed them with temperatures of 15 below. "Nobody complained about how we were suffering from the cold," says cinematographer Kaminski, 34, who hadn't returned to Poland since he left 12 years ago, "because our suffering was so little compared with what the actual prisoners were subjected to." But their reception was cold in other ways. A clash with the World Jewish Congress over Spielberg's request to film inside Auschwitz - Birkenau wasn't resolved until Spielberg proposed an ingenious compromise: A train would be backed into the camp and then be shot emerging into a mirror replica of Auschwitz's interior that had been built just outside the actual camp. And during their stay in Krakow, the filmmakers were welcomed with anti-Semitic symbols scrawled on local billboards. One night, Kingsley and a friend were unwinding at the bar in the Hotel Forum, a hangout for the cast and crew. "Good night, Jew," a middle-aged German businessman said to Kingsley's friend. Kingsley lost his temper, screaming at the man until crew members hustled the offender off the premises.

Meanwhile, Spielberg was fighting his own shooting schedule. Some days, he and Kaminski filmed as many as 55 setups, often with a handheld camera. Screenwriter Zaillian, a novice director who had just completed his first film, Searching for Bobby Fischer, recalls the process with amazement. "They were shooting fast, with a cool, unsentimental, matter-of-fact approach. On one shot, the camera pans over to catch something. The first three times it didn't quite catch the action completely." Spielberg simply decided to continue, imperfections and all. "Okay," he said, "let's move on to the next one."

"Actually," says Neeson, "Steven's direction on Schindler was a bit like Woody Allen. We didn't know how he was going to shoot a scene. You just had to be prepared in not being prepared." In fact, many of the film's most important shots were mapped out at the last minute. Just before filming the pivotal scene in which Schindler persuades Goeth to let him remove 1,100 of his prisoners to safety, Spielberg shouted to Neeson, "I know how to do it! You're going to be outside, and I'm going to be, inside with the camera on you, and I'm going just keep the camera steady and you walk into the shot and walk out again. The scene is so important I'm going to throw it away.

"He wanted it to not be perfect," say's Zaillian. "It was a catch-what-you-can style of filming, which is just as hard to do as to plan out every shot."

If the crowning achievement of Schindler's List is its authenticity, credit may belong to the Schindler Jews who offered their own experiences to the filmmakers. Page, who accompanied the cast and crew, recalled masquerading as a recruit when he realized that the Germans were shooting every Jew they caught hiding during the Krakow ghetto annihilation: "I told them I had been ordered to clear the road. They started to laugh. An order is an order. They had time to kill me later. I was among the last 40 to get out of the ghetto alive."

Among the other survivors who lent their memories was Nuisa Horowitz, who as an 11-year-old factory worker was kissed by Schindler - an offense that briefly landed him in jail. Horowitzs story became the basis of a scene in which a family presses its diamonds into bread and then eats them during the liquidation of the ghetto. And Page pointed out the actual bluff from which Schindler, on horseback, watched the SS officers attack the ghetto. "There's only one place that Schindler could have parked his horse to watch," Spielberg says with visible enthusiasm. "A lot of it I just got from witnesses who came back: 'Oh, this didn't happen over here, this happened over there!"'

Another survivor told of the Plaszow prisoners pricking their own fingers and coloring their cheeks with blood during a horrifying endurance test in which prisoners were forced to run naked to prove their health - and sent to death camps if they were judged too sickly to work. Spielberg pushed verisimilitude to an obsessive level when he asked for volunteers to prick their fingers; two agreed to do it. For the health sequence, he paid all the extras who were required to run naked double the California - extra day rate of $65 - more, than the average monthly salary in Krakow.

To give the audience one last dose of realism, Spielberg decided to fly 128 surviving Schindlerjuden to Jerusalem to appear in the film's final sequence, in which, following Jewish tradition, they place stones on Schindler's grave. Since the idea for the sequence came to Spielberg midway through filming, his production team scrambled to import the survivors.

The night before Spielberg filmed the coda, the actors met their real-life counterparts at a party at the King David Hotel. "We had such a time that night," says Neeson. "It was wonderful to hear all these anecdotes from all these people, little gems of stories about what somebody did for somebody one day, nothing horrific." Former prisoner Henry Rosner, who had once played his violin at Goeth's villa, played once again, and Spielberg sat surrounded by Holocaust survivors. "He was so exhausted he wasn't sure he'd get through the evening," says Caroline Goodall, who plays Schindler's wife. But I've never seen him look so happy."

On cue, Spielberg can rattle off the number of shooting days for all of his films. (E.T: 60; Hook: 125). Schindler's List, with its 126 speaking parts and 30,000 extras, came in at 71 days - about the same as Jurassic Park - and $23 million, about a third of Jurassic's cost.

This was the good news. The bad news - at least to Universal - was that the film originally ran close to four hours. Cutting the film to a just-releasable 3 hours, 14 minutes became an ordeal. Kaminski and producer Gerald Molen miss the gruesome delivery of a boxcar fan of frozen corpses to Brinnlitz, Czechoslovalda. "It was a striking visual," says Molen. And Neeson lost his favorite scene: a game of 21 between him and Goeth for Goeth's maid, Helen Hirsch, that is only implied in the final cut. "We did this amazing game," says Neeson, "and he shot it wonderfully, turning over the cards. As Ralph studies the cards, I'm looking at him with loathing. It shows the lie that Oskar has been living."

Spielberg, however, dismisses the scene as "too Hollywood. It was The Cincinnati Kid. Everything that reminded me of another movie I cut out of Schindler's List because I made a career of reverberating my past in my films, if not flagrantly, then subtly. I knew by the fourth setup that the scene was too entertaining and it would be cut, I did not," he adds, "want this to be a Hollywood story in any way."

At Wometco's Shadowood 12 theater in Boca Raton, Fla., manager Morrie Zryl, a child of Holocaust survivors, tells each audience not to be surprised if some among them cry and sing during the movie, and that anyone whose relatives were victims or survivors of the Holocaust should sign the scroll in the lobby. There are now 18,000 names. They are being sent to Spielberg.

"I was relieved to find that survivors seemed to like it," says Keneally. "They find it cathartic." Although the movie has won almost unanimously admiring reviews, there are notable voices of dissent; a review in the Forward, an influential Jewish newspaper, lambasted Spielberg for hailing a Nazi hero while depicting Jews as ineffectual victims.

Still others, including Keneally, have been put off by the apocryphal climactic scene in which Schindler breaks down before making his getaway at the end of the war, crying for the Jews he could have saved if he had tried harder. In fact, Schindler disappeared quietly into the night, his car packed with jewels. "It was absolutely necessary," insists Spielberg. "He's not speaking for himself, he's speaking for all of us, what we might do someday."

These days, Spielberg is spending time with his wife and their five kids (one each from their first marriages, two together, and one adopted), overseeing the production of three Amblin film as unlike Schindler's List as possible - The Flintstones, The Little Roscals, and Casper, the Friendly Ghost - and weighing what to direct next. Going back to making conventionally commercial pictures may prove difficult - while Schindler's may have been liberating for Spielberg, it did require him to change. "The whole idea was that if I made a real good chair the same way all my life and everyone feels comfortable sitting in it, it's kind of tough to suddenly build a car," Spielberg explains. "My intuition led me to conventional choices, so I used a lot of mind over instinct."

At least one instinct paid off: The first scene in Schindler's List came to Spielberg toward the end of filming, when he was shooting a Sabbath prayer sequence at Blinnlitz. It is a tight shot, in color, of two candle flames. "That gave me the idea to start the film with the candles being lit," he recalls. "I thought it would be a rich book-end, to start the film with a normal Shabbes service before the juggernaut against the Jews begins." When the color fades out in the film's opening moments, it gives way to a movie in which black-and-white tendrills of smoke convey unspeakable horror as they curl from the ovens into the stark sky. Only at the end do the images of candle fire regain their warm luster. They represent "just a glint of color," says Spielberg, "and a glimmer of hope."

[Mary Frances]

Stanley Kauffmann on films: a predicament

By Stanley Kauffmann
The New Republic
December 11, 1995

The making of any film dealing with the subject of the Holocaust is open to any number of difficulties inherent in its grave matter. Any film that attempts to recreate the Holocaust can come dangerously close to obscenity in its portrayals of the various victims and victimizers.

The following is the text of a talk given at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington on November 9 in a discussion of the use of the Holocaust on stage and screen.

When people question the propriety of the Holocaust as a subject for art, they are rarely concerned with painting or music or poetry or fiction: they mean theater or film. No one, as far as I know, has ever questioned the fitness of Anselm Kiefer's paintings or Arnold Schoenberg's music or Nelly Sachs's poetry or Piotr Rawicz's fiction on this subject. It is the practice of enactment that disturbs, and even then, the disturbance comes more from film than from theater.

Here is a paragraph that can serve as a text. It comes from a recent book called Flickers by the English critic Gilbert Adair. Says Adair:

A few shameless miscalculations aside ... Schindler's List was not at all the disgrace one had every right to expect. It was still, however, a monstrosity. It was, after all, a Hollywood film like any other film (the first words one saw on the screen were 'Amblin Entertainment') and it was shot like any other Hollywood film. It had ... a cast, probably, of thousands. And what I see when I watch the film, what, hard as I try, I cannot prevent myself from seeing, is that cast being put through its paces on some foggy, nocturnal location, put through its paces by the boyishly handsome director in his snazzy windcheater, his red N.Y. Yankees baseball cap, his granny glasses and his beard.

This paragraph--I've condensed it: there's more in the same vein--is well worth examining.

First, it's about Schindler's List. If one is to discuss the proprieties, aesthetic, social, moral, of making fictional films about the Holocaust, this is the prime instance because it looms so large in the filmgoing experience of so many and because it has drawn more attention than any other fictional film on the subject. Schindler's List emphasizes strongly some difficulties that a fictional Holocaust film faces.

Second, Adair is frank about the surprise involved. I went to the film prepared for offense and was disarmed within two minutes. John Gross, who wrote the most intelligent favorable review of the film that I have read, in The New York Review of Books, spent the first six paragraphs of his long critique adjusting to the fact that he had liked it. It had come bearing the stigma of Spielberg's previous success.

Third, the provenance was Hollywood. If we can fantasize that this film, exactly as it is, frame by frame, had arrived from another source, I believe that its reception would have been more cordial in certain resistant quarters. If the opening credit had said Film Polski or Sacis or some other foreign brand name instead of Amblin Entertainment, it's a fair guess that fewer nerves would have been grated right at the start. I can't remember that any European film, of the dozens that have been made about the Holocaust, has aroused much opposition. It's also interesting to note that, when a book on the Holocaust comes from a publisher who has made millions on lesser books about lesser subjects, few literary critics are offended because the name of that publisher is on the book.

I don't understand what Adair means when he says that Schindler's List was shot like any other film. If he means that its techniques and visual values were crassly commercial, the point is severely arguable, beginning with the fact that, in an age insistent on color, Spielberg shot the film in black and white. Then there is the recurrent image in Adair's mind of Spielberg dressed as he usually dresses when working. This, of course, is a response to the fact that the film was made by a personality famous in popular culture. It makes me wonder whether Adair and similar critics would have liked Schindler's List better if, before shooting started, publicity photos had been distributed of Spielberg dressed somberly for work.

But it is Adair's comment on the cast that, I believe, is the base of all that troubles him and commentators like him. All his complaints rest ultimately on the issue that the film, though basically factual, was re-created by actors. Claude Lanzmann, who made Shoah, believes that re-creating the Holocaust is impermissible, 'is tantamount to fabricating archives.' I note that Marcel Ophuls, who made The Sorrow and the Pity, disagrees vehemently with Lanzmann; still, despite this welcome reassurance, let's investigate what I take to be the root causes underlying both Lanzmann's and Adair's views: causes that are present in all fictional Holocaust films but which, in a large-scale, lavishly promoted film--in what Adair says is 'after all, a Hollywood film'--become most apparent and most abrasive: causes with a vivid history.

That history begins many centuries ago, with the first appearance in Western culture of a practice sufficiently formalized to be called acting, the profession of the actor. The earliest recorded criticism was adverse. Twenty-four hundred years ago Plato opined that mimesis, impersonation, was a danger to the state; and he has had many supporters in subsequent centuries. All through the chronicle of the theater, periods recurred when, under a political or religious or social aegis, the theater was attacked as a breeder of troubles. In a distinguished book called The Anti-theatrical Prejudice, Jonas Barish articulates the long record of this prejudice in the Western world. Let's content ourselves here with just one example, a famous one: in the eighteenth century, Rousseau, who had already achieved success as a playwright, turned bitterly against the theater as a source of moral imbalance.

Surely, what underlies this prejudice to a great degree is a factor that is not always emphasized: the power of the actor himself. Usually the objections focus on the contents of plays, sometimes on the very existence of the theater as an institution. Discernible throughout, however, even when the plays are pablum, is some fear of the art of acting.

In a penetrating study titled The Actor's Freedom, Michael Goldman says:

Any playwright, actor, or director knows that aggression is an essential ingredient of drama. But not perhaps for the reasons familiarly proposed [conflict in the text of the play].... Rather, the importance of aggression has more to do with the aggression the actor himself must use to assume his role and maintain contact with his audience. The effort to set actors loose, to harness and encourage their terrific energies, requires ... an aggression that must be felt in every turn of dialogue, in every corner of the play.

If this thesis is credible, as I take it to be, such aggression is amplified in film, by technological and other means, to a degree that would have made Rousseau's hair curl.

Indeed, the arrival of film in this century, its emplacement in human consciousness to such overwhelming effect, has greatly reduced the power of the theater actor's aggression--comparatively, at any rate. I am not arguing the superiority of one art, as such, over another: I don't accept such hierarchies. But in sheer numerical terms, let alone psychological or social ones, the sway of film has increased at the expense of the theater's sovereignty. Actors in the theater these days rarely achieve the mystical powers of many film actors, powers that are not necessarily identical with talent. The theater actor in our time is, in Goldman's sense, much less aggressive. Consequently, and I believe it is consequent, objections to plays about the Holocaust are rare.

When the Holocaust is the subject of a film, a re-created film, this resident power of the screen actor is even more disturbing than usual. The innate aggressiveness of the actor, which we might see as an emotional invasion for the purpose of conquest, seems even more invasive when it succeeds. To be moved by an actor practicing his or her profession by portraying a Holocaust victim can seem--before, during or after the event--obscene.

I underscore that I am not castigating Schindler's List. My opinion of the film is close to Lawrence L. Langer's. He notes that 'some relics of Hollywood infiltrate' the film, but he says, 'Schindler's List, like all serious art, invites us to join in the creative process by speculating about the riddle of human nature without expecting simple answers, or perhaps any answers at all.' I am here trying to investigate not any 'relics of Hollywood' in the film, but an inescapable component of Schindler's List, a component that, recognized or not, has been, I believe, a major factor in much of the reproof it received. Plato would have recognized that factor: impersonation.

When we read a novel or a poem, no one obtrudes between what the author presents and what our response makes of it. In a film, much more imperially these days than in the theater, someone has learned words and rehearsed actions in order to enthrall us. In a Holocaust film, even if it is as close to fact as Spielberg's, someone is devising strategies for his or her own creative purposes. Elsewhere, in the general course of cinematic events, that can be an enrichment. Kenneth Branagh did more for the character of Henry V than most of us can do for ourselves by reading the play. But this enrichment can seem out of place in Holocaust material.

Further, there is our awareness of careers. When we see Actor A in a Holocaust film, unless he or she is a newcomer, we can see the performance as

an event in Actor A's career, which would be normal and possibly pleasant in other roles but here can seem exploitative. When Ralph Fiennes appeared as the Nazi commandant in Schindler's List, he was completely unknown in the United States. For us, Fiennes began and ended with the Nazi commandant, thus--territorially, we might say--he seemed different from the other two leading actors. To see the film again now, after Fiennes has appeared in other pictures, is in some measure to see him in changed perspective.

The ideal in this regard is Falconetti as Joan of Arc in Dreyer's great film of 1927. Though she had been a working actress in the Paris theater, this was her first film, so world audiences had no mundane Falconetti appearances as background. She never made another film, thus Falconetti is fixed forever as martyr and saint, unsullied by career.

Compare that fact with what we know and knew about Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley in Spielberg's film. Both of them had appeared in lesser films and most certainly have appeared in lesser films since. We may have admired their performances in Schindler's List, as I certainly did, but we couldn't help seeing them move ahead in the lives of Neeson and Kingsley. At the least, we laid on them, consciously or not, an obligation never to appear in any film of lesser seriousness than this one. When they did, as inevitably they had to, some of the public took it as a kind of betrayal, as a confirmation of the opportunism that they suspected in Spielberg's picture.

Thus it is, I believe, that in the paragraph cited earlier, Gilbert Adair finds Schindler's List, though better than he expected, nonetheless monstrous. The ancient discomfort with the actor's powers, the intrusiveness of impersonation, the use of the film as a professional stepping-stone for its makers, all these matters bother Adair--and others. Does this mean that there can never be a totally accepted fictional film--from Hollywood or some other famously commercial source--about the Holocaust? That it will be resisted whatever its quality? I think that this will probably be the case during the lifetimes of those who were contemporaries of the Holocaust or those whose close relatives and friends were involved in it.

I have to hope that no one will ever be able to look at the Holocaust with complete objectivity, but it will take several generations before audiences can confront re-creations of it as they confront a film on any profoundly grave subject. At such a time, the aggression of the actor in a Holocaust film will operate no more disturbingly than it usually does, without the immediate resentment and hurt that must so often intervene today.

[Mary Frances]

Schindler's List

By Philip Simpson
St. James Encyclopedia of Pop Culture
January 29, 2002

The highly anticipated film Schindler's List, directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a 1982 historical novel entitled Schindler's Ark by Australian writer Thomas Keneally, premiered in December of 1993. In a year that had also seen the opening of the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C., the film quickly became a cultural event. The public and many critics praised the harrowing but inspirational tale of individual decency in response to the horrors of genocide. The $23 million film was also a box-office success, eventually earning more than $300 million worldwide, in spite of its black-and-white photography and three-hour-plus running time--normally considered audience deterrents. Given the epic film's high public profile and cross-cultural praise, it was not surprising that Schindler's List would go on to garner seven Academy Awards in 1994, winning for best picture and giving Spielberg his first-ever best director honors from the Academy. It should be noted that a great many academic critics are troubled by certain aspects of Spielberg's treatment of such sensitive subject matter, particularly in regard to the film's sentimentalized conclusion, the portrayal of Jews as passive victims, and the perhaps-inevitable trivializing of the Holocaust through traditional Hollywood narrative technique. However, even with the shortcomings, the film was generally acknowledged to be Spielberg's most mature, visually striking, and well-crafted work to date. Not even Saving Private Ryan, another Spielberg-directed World War II epic that opened to another round of general praise during the summer of 1998, has come close to capturing the cultural impact of Schindler's List.

The film and novel differ in dramatic emphasis and characterization but are both reasonably faithful to the details of the real-life story of a Catholic-German entrepreneur named Oskar Schindler, who saved more than one thousand Polish Jews from the Nazi death camps during World War II. As detailed in the novel, Schindler was born in 1908 in the Sudetenland, in an area that would later become Czechoslovakia. As he grew to manhood, Schindler quickly developed a reputation as a carouser and playboy--a reputation founded in reckless actions that even his early marriage in 1927 to a devoutly religious woman named Emilie did not stop. His parents were prosperous in their hometown of Zwittau until the family business, a farm implement factory, went bankrupt in 1935. At this point, the elder Schindler left his wife, and Oskar was forced to seek his living elsewhere. As a salesman and a member of both the Nazi Party and German military intelligence, Oskar traveled alone to Krakow after the German military occupation of Poland in 1939. (This is the point at which Spielberg's adaptation of the novel begins.) In Krakow, Schindler bought an enamel factory that he then staffed with Jewish workers.

Shortly thereafter, the Germans forced the Jews of Krakow to move to a ghetto within the city and also built a forced labor camp named Plaszow outside the city. The extermination camp of Auschwitz began receiving Plaszow inmates during 1942. Throughout the escalating levels of Nazi persecution and brutality directed against Jews, Schindler was able to keep his well-treated Jewish workforce more or less intact, even after the Krakow ghetto was closed in 1943 and all Jews were forced into Plaszow, commanded by a ruthless man named Amon Goeth. Goeth and Schindler formed an unusual relationship: each exploiting the other for personal advantage but nevertheless reluctantly sharing some similarities of taste and lifestyle. (Spielberg emphasizes their duality of character throughout the middle portion of the film.)

Schindler's employees were able to work in his factory by day until 1944, when orders came to send all of Plaszow's Jews to Auschwitz. Through his close contacts with Goeth and others in the German military hierarchy, Schindler somehow managed to receive permission to relocate one thousand Jewish workers to another camp in the relative safety of Czechoslovakia. In one of the most amazing episodes of the Schindler legend, he even retrieved a group of his female employees from Auschwitz, where their train had been mistakenly diverted. At the Czechoslovakian camp, Schindler provided a haven for another two hundred or so escaped Jewish refugees. With the European war's end in May of 1945, the "Nazi war profiteer" Schindler and his wife were forced to flee the camp ahead of its Russian liberators.

After the war, Schindler moved from Austria to Argentina to West Germany, eventually leaving Emilie. He proved consistently unable to make any kind of living and in the end had to rely for daily survival on the financial largesse of the Jews he had so protected during the war. He also visited Israel yearly, all expenses paid by Jewish organizations and individuals. The Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, Yad Vashem, recognized Schindler as a Righteous Gentile in 1962. He died, perhaps predictably given his lifestyle, of liver failure in 1974 and was buried in a Catholic cemetery in Jerusalem.

The story of Oskar Schindler remained in relative obscurity until the early 1980s, when author Thomas Keneally published Schindler's Ark. The historical novel had its origins in a 1980 visit by Keneally to a luggage store in Los Angeles, where Keneally met the storeowner--a Jew who had been rescued by Schindler. Intrigued by the owner's dramatic tale of the long-ago events, Keneally interviewed dozens of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews) in several different countries and researched the relevant documents in Israel and Poland. After Keneally's book was published as Schindler's List in America, Universal Studios acquired it for development. Director Steven Spielberg, about to achieve yet another spectacular box-office success with E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, read the book and was determined that he, too, when he felt he was a mature-enough filmmaker, would someday tell the story of Oskar Schindler.

Ten years passed, during which Spielberg alternated between taking on the project and passing it to others. Finally, in 1992, Spielberg believed the time was personally and historically right to begin active production on the film. He made several important and risky artistic decisions: to use black-and-white film, to shoot on location in Europe, to rely heavily on handheld cameras, to select European extras, and to cast nonstars in the key roles (Liam Neeson as Schindler, Ben Kingsley as Schindler's Jewish accountant Stern, and Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth). In spite of Spielberg's determination to use authentic locations, some were unavailable: Spielberg had to painstakingly reconstruct the Plaszow camp; and when his request to film inside Auschwitz was denied by the World Jewish Congress, he and production designer Allan Starski built a chillingly convincing replica directly outside the grounds. After principal photography was finished, Michael Kahn edited the film to its three-and-a-half-hour running length, and longtime Spielberg collaborator John Williams composed the musical score.

The final result, released to theaters at the end of 1993, was generally well received and capped one of Spielberg's most personally and financially successful years ever. (Earlier that summer, his film Jurassic Park had earned nearly $360 million domestically.) Many critics reevaluated their previous dismissal of Spielberg as a skilled but trivial filmmaker. But more significantly for history, with the profits from Schindler's List, Spielberg established two organizations: The Righteous Persons Foundation, dedicated to memorializing Gentile rescuers of Jews during World War II, and the Shoah Visual History Foundation, set up to record the first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors before the passage of time silences their voices.

[Mary Frances]

'Schindler's List' in novel and film: exponential conversion

By Daniel Mark Fogel
Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television
August, 1994

Rarely has a film more fully deserved the importance attributed by commentators to Stephen Spielberg's version of Thomas Keneally's historical novel Schindler's List. Without wishing to compound some of the outlandish hyperbole lavished on the film--for example, the prediction of Jeffrey Katzenberg, head of the Walt Disney film studios, that Schindler's List "will bring peace on earth, good will to men" and "will actually set the course of world affairs"--I would hazard a prediction that in the perspective of time, say 50 or 75 years hence, Schindler's List will be widely judged to be one of a handful of genuinely important and durable works in the first century of cinema. I make this prediction not because the film represents a highwater mark of artistry and seriousness attained by the most commercially successful of all Hollywood directors, not merely because it is in and of itself a very fine movie dramatically and aesthetically, nor even because of its quasi-documentary value in plausibly recreating scenes of which there are no motion picture records (such as the final Nazi Aktion in the Cracow ghetto), but because it combines these and other virtues with the most ambitious attempt in dramatic filmmaking to encompass the largely successful campaign of Hitler's Germany to eradicate the Jews of Europe: Schindler's List is likely to stand as the film about the defining event of our century, the single, vast and horribly protracted episode that most deeply challenges the social, political and ethical foundations of humanity and of the modem world.

That the challenge is actual and not merely theoretical, that it is present and not merely historical, has been brought home by the spectacle of "ethnic cleansing" in the former Yugoslavia. In Louisiana, it was brought home also by the farcical but profoundly disturbing spectacle of David Duke's having made, two and a half years ago, the two-man run-off in the gubernatorial election. Formally disavowing his Nazi and Ku Klux Klan affiliations, but with his racist demagoguery intact despite a cosmetic change of clothing from white sheet to business suit, Duke's candidacy was boosted by the disrepute in which his opponent, former governor Edwin Edwards, was widely held by Louisianians of virtually all political persuasions. Duke was defeated by a far wider margin than the polls had predicted; Duke's poor showing was due in large part to the intensive efforts of a broad-based alliance, which included the ad hoc Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, a movement powered by the financial contributions of the state's small population of Jews (about 20,000 in all, less than one-half of 1 per cent of the total) and by the votes of the substantial African-American population (1,300,000, about 31 per cent of the total). Even so, six out of 10 white male Louisianians voted for David Duke. Duke's showing was sufficiently frightening to ensure a continuing life for the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism [2). Since some readers of the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television may have seen the film without having read the book, I want to begin with the paradoxical observation that while Keneally's book Schindler's List is by many measures superior to Spielberg's film Schindler's List, the film ranks far higher among films than does the novel among novels. Both works of course have a great deal in common. Keneally was intent on authenticity, as he says in his author's note: "I have attempted ... to avoid all fiction, since fiction would debase the record, and to distinguish between the reality and the myths which are likely to attach themselves to a man of Oskar's stature. It has sometimes been necessary to make reasonable constructs of conversations of which Oskar and others have left only the briefest record. But most exchanges and conversations, and all events, are based on the detailed recollections of the Schindlerjuden (Schindler Jews), of Schindler himself, and of other witnesses to Oskar's acts of outrageous rescue". Spielberg, too, was intent on eschewing fiction along with the many devices of cinematic fabulation that have so enchanted viewers of Jaws, ET: The Extraterrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the Indiana Jones trilogy and Jurassic Park: "The authenticity of the story was too important to fall back on the commercial techniques that had gotten me a certain reputation in the area of craft and polish" [3]. Except for Schindler's final speech in the film, in which Schindler weeps over his failure to have saved more Jews, Spielberg's Schindler's List contains very few significant details and episodes not drawn in some fashion from Keneally's text.

Yet Spielberg's departures from Keneally, principally in the form of omissions, are striking. Many of the changes Spielberg introduced can of course be accounted for by the inevitability of compression and selection in reducing a 400-page novel dense with detail to a film, even a film that runs for more than 3 hours. For example, Spielberg takes several of Keneally's characters and collapses them into the figure of Itzhak Stem. One might illustrate the composite nature of Spielberg's Stem with the scene in which Stem and Schindler complete Schindler's list itself, the inventory of people Oskar Schindler saved from almost certain death at Auschwitz by moving them from Cracow, in Poland, to Brinnlitz, near Schindler's hometown in the Sudetanland. While every scene in the film but one is drawn, as I have said, in some fashion from Keneally's text, the final additions to the list were made not by Schindler and the Jewish prisoner Stem but by Schindler and a humane fellow-German, Raimund Titsch, the manager of the uniform factory run by Julius Madritsch [4]. Here Spielberg's replacement of Titsch with Stem serves the filmmaker's need to compress and simplify.

It serves a thematic purpose as well. For the requirements of selection and compression cannot in the end account for many of Spielberg's alterations of Keneally. As I inventoried the discrepancies with my students in a course on the literary response to the Holocaust, our puzzlement grew. We began to discern some curious patterns. Most striking was a critical change in chronology abetted by the omission of some of Oskar Schindler's most memorable actions in opposition to the Nazi genocide. Whereas Spielberg does not show Schindler as fully opposing the persecution and murder of Jews until after the monumental scene of the destruction of the Cracow ghetto, Keneally states that before the ghetto Aktion Schindler travelled from Cracow to Budapest in a boxcar (so that his movements could not be traced) in order to be debriefed by Zionist agents about the plight of the Jews of Eastern Europe. This subversive action, surely a capital offence had the Gestapo detected it, bespeaks Schindler's commitment significantly earlier than Spielberg allows it to develop. In Spielberg, Schindler does not unequivocally become a rescuer till after he and his mistress look down from horseback on Amon Goeth's destruction of the ghetto, and Schindler already has, in the film, a well-developed relationship with Goeth, the character brilliantly acted by Ralph Fiennes. In Keneally, however, we read that "Even as Oskar Schindler returned by freight car from Budapest, where he'd predicted [to the Zionist operatives) that the ghetto would soon be closed, an SS Untersturmfuhrer named Amon Goeth was on his way from Lublin to bring about that liquidation, and to take command of the resultant Forced Labor Camp (Zwangsarbeitslager) at Plpaszow" (p. 159).

Spielberg omits a number of other incidents and details that also testify to the earliness of Schindler's commitment. Spielberg gives us the scene very near the end of the film in which the Schindlerjuden present Schindler with a gold ring, but he does not convey the information, prominent in Keneally's text, that Itzhak Stem shared the Talmudic dictum engraved on it--"He who saves a single life saves the world entire"--with Oskar Schindler in their very first conversation, in late October of 1939 (three and a half year before the final Cracow ghetto Aktion in the spring of 1943): according to Keneally, Stem "always believed that it was at that moment that he had dropped the right seed in the furrow". Only a few weeks later, in December 1939, Schindler passed on to Stern, at their very next meeting, advance warning of a Nazi pogrom, the first Aktion in Cracow, in Kazimierz, the site of the old ghetto. Schindler felt, Keneally reports, that "he had passed on hard news at some risk", and Keneally also observes that his "leaking of the news to Stem ... goes some way toward proving" (p. 57) his very early disaffection from the racist and genocidal enterprise of the Nazi New Order. In the years leading up to the destruction of the ghetto, Keneally's chronicle makes abundantly clear the depth of Schindler's commitment to providing a haven for as many Jews as possible, as well as the seemingly careless sangfroid of his defiance of Nazi "propriety"--witness, for instance, the incident that led to his first arrest by the Gestapo, his kissing one of the Jewish girls who made a presentation to him on his birthday in April 1942. The point, again, is that Schindler was fully embarked on the path of the rescuer long before the turning-point portrayed by Spielberg in 1943 [5).

Spielberg also omits some notable examples of Schindler's resistance to genocide after the destruction of the Cracow ghetto. He does not show us, for example, what Keneally reports, that Schindler armed the Shindlerjuden at Brinnlitz with automatic weapons, so that the Jews were able to organize several commando squads prepared to resist any order that might have come down to the SS to murder them before falling back before the advance of the Red Army. Spielberg also leaves out the several thousand Jews in addition to his own slave labourers that Schindler contrived to save late in the war. As Keneally reports, "Oskar and Stissmuth [another German] connived over the winter of 1944-45 to get a further 3,000 women out of Auschwitz in groups of 300 to 500 at a time into small camps in Moravia"; while these small camps were "never paradise ... such tiny, almost countrified establishments would for the most part escape the extermination orders that would come to the bigger camps in the spring" (pp. 349-50). The rescue of these additional thousands underlies Keneally's statement in the closing pages of the novel that the plaque in the Park of Heroes in Tel Aviv that lauds Schindler as "savior of 1,200" "understates numerically the extent of his rescue" (p. 394).

In addition to downplaying the extent of Schindler's rescue, obscuring the earliness of his commitment to saving Jews, and omitting entirely any reference to such salient anti-Nazi acts as the covert Budapest rendezvous with the Zionists and the arming of the Brinnlitz prisoners, Spielberg at the same time glosses over some of the baser aspects of his protagonist. The film Schindler's List does, it is true, show us a Schindler who is openly unfaithful to his wife, but it omits such distasteful details as the episode Keneally describes very late in the narrative, at the Brinnlitz camp, when two of the Schindlerjuden, seeking the coolness of a water tank high above the workshop floor, found the tub already occupied by the naked Oskar and an equally naked blond SS girl--this while his wife Emilie laboured below to nurse sick prisoners back to health! Nor does Spielberg (or Keneally for that matter) tell us what we learn from historical sources, that Schindler later confessed, shamelessly as ever, to having sold the "He who saves a single life" ring for schnapps] [6] There is a thematic purpose when Spielberg folds into the character of Itzhak Stem the role of Raimund Titsch in completing Schindler's list. The manoeuvre is one of many whereby Spielberg gives emphasis to the Stem-Schindier-Goeth triangle. The Jew Stem and the Nazi Goeth are, in the film, the angel and the devil, good and evil, that vie for the soul of an ordinary man who, in the wake of the spiritual and moral trauma of witnessing the final ghetto Aktion of March, 1943, commits himself unequivocally to goodness. It is not only the chronology of the film that is false to the Keneally text. For while Spielberg shows a deep secret sympathy between Goeth and Schindler (Goeth defending Schindler after Schindler's arrest for the birthday kiss, and Schindler defending Goeth as well with the argument that in circumstances other than wartime Goeth would have been a good man), Keneally makes clear from first to last that Schindler always loathed Goeth. Thus, in the prologue to the novel, Keneally says that "Herr Schindler approached tonight's dinner at Commandant Goeth's more with loathing than with anticipation. There had never been a time when to sit and drink with Amon had not been a repellent business" (p. 15); and, toward the end of the novel, Keneally writes, "Amon himself would never understand that Oskar despised him" (p. 315).

The fact is that Keneally's Schindler is much closer to the historical figure than Spielberg's. Schindler was not an ordinary man. He was both baser and more heroic than the character portrayed by Liam Neeson in Spielberg's film. (Whether the historical Schindler was quite as glamorous as Neeson's Schindler we cannot say. Moshe Bejski, a Schindler Jew who became a distinguished justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, provides a telling summary of the historical Schindler's complex character:

Schindler was a drunkard, Schindler was a womanizer. His relations with his wife were rather bad. Each time he had not one but several girlfriends ... A group of survivors in Israel raised some money for him when he was hard up.

If we sent $3,000-4,000, he spent it within two or three weeks, then phoned to say he didn't have a penny ... So, I am aware of who Schindler was, but without Schindler most of those 1,200 Jews would not have remained alive ...

You had to take him as he was. Schindler was a very complex person.
Schindler was a good human being. He was against evil. He acted spontaneously. He was adventurous, someone who took risks, but I'm not sure he enjoyed taking them ... He was very, very sensitive. If Schindler had been a normal man, he would not have done what he did.[7]

Schindler was so abnormal, in fact, that no other German citizen of the Reich comes close to rivalling his feats of rescue, so abnormal, moreover, that no accounting of his motives seems adequate. "At some point in any discussion of Schindler", writes Keneally, "the surviving friends of the Herr Direktor will shake their heads ... For one of the commonest sentiments of Schindler Jews is still `I don't know why he did it'". Keneally then offers a series of plausible yet only partial explanations, concluding that "none of this, jotted down, added up, explains" (p. 281).

Pressed to provide an explanation for Spielberg's alterations of Keneally's Schindler's List, I would note that of course the filmmaker had to select and compress. But then I would add that in the effort to convert Keneally's historical novel about an extraordinary man whose goodness is finally inexplicable into a film about the understandable conversion to heroism of an ethically ordinary (albeit an unusually glamorous) man, Spielberg smooths the character out on both extremes, effacing some of his baseness and suppressing some of his heroism as well. Had Spielberg shown Schindler riding that freight car to Budapest in 1942 to meet with Zionist investigators of the fate of the Ostjuden, or had Spielberg shown Schindler purchasing automatic weapons from the SS to distribute them to his Jewish slave labourers, the director might have created a movie hero too close for his purposes to James Bond or to Rambo.

The climactic experience for Spielberg's Schindler is the Aktion in the ghetto. The sequence is the longest sustained episode in the film. In the original script, it was "about two or three pages", but, as the writer Steve Zaillian reports, once "Spielberg got involved" the scene was expanded to "about thirty pages". The filmgoer, observing the horrors of the liquidation of the ghetto through Oskar Schindler's eyes, is pressed to identify with Schindler, who becomes at this point a cinematic everyman, responding as a decent human being should to the panorama of brutish cruelty unfolding in the city below the hill. Spielberg does not show Schindler as committed from the start to rescue because Spielberg wants to give us the vicarious experience of choosing goodness, wants us to participate in Schindler's conversion, to recapitulate within our own hearts and minds the transforming experience that his Schindler (unlike Keneally's) undergoes.

This is a laudable aim, one in which I believe that Spielberg succeeds, and it is a purpose that may be said to justify the filmmaker's departure from the novelist's more veridical record. Although following Keneally both in broad outline and in many specific incidents and details, Spielberg (in collaboration with Zaillian) transforms Schindler's List from historical novel to historical fable, a fable about choosing goodness and heroism with which the audience is invited to identify. Working for the moral improvement of the viewer, Spielberg creates a film that, despite its horrific subject-matter, is predominantly affirmative and uplifting. We leave the theatre not dispirited but inspired. Conversions multiply upon each other: the conversion of history into novel, of novel into film, of the ordinary Schindler into the extraordinary hero, and, through imaginative sympathy, of the viewer into a potential rescuer like the great Oskar Schindler himself.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the members of my undergraduate special topics course on the Literary response to the Holocaust, Spring 1994, for suggestions regarding Schindler's List as novel and film. Virgil LeJeune located helpful information about the historic figure of Schindler.

Correspondence: Daniel Mark Fogel, Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, 146 Thomas Boyd Hall, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, Louisiana 70803 USA. FAX (504) 388-5980.

NOTES

[1] Mr Katzenberg is quoted by Stephen Schiff in "Behind the Camera: Seriously Spielberg", the New Yorker, 21 March 1994, p. 98. The comparison with other films may strike some readers as invidious. But surely it is fair to say that despite its historical basis Schindler's List, as a dramatic film, is of a different kind and order--and will find a far wider popular audience--than such major documentary efforts as Alain Resnais' Night and Fog and Claude Lanzmann's Shoah; as for other dramatic films on the Holocaust, many of them quite successful (I think here especially of Agnieszka Holland's Europa, Europa, Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties, Louis Malle's Au Revoir, Les Enfants, and Vittorio De Sica's The Garden of the Finzi-Continis), none of them have the scope of Schindler's List, which, with attention to the perpetrators of the Holocaust as well as to the victims, tracks the genocide from its beginnings in Nazi laws and edicts that obliterated the place of Jews in the social and economic life of Europe right up to the doors of Auschwitz-Birkenau. [2] In 1992, Duke took only 7 per cent of the vote in the Republican presidential primary in Louisiana, as compared to his 38 per cent in the 1991 race against Edwards for the governorship. Comforting though the ebb in Duke's fortunes may appear, one should bear in mind also that in 1992 Republican voters had alternatives (Patrick Buchanan, for example) who served as standard-bearers for much the same ideology as Duke but without the baggage of Nazi Party and Yian membership. [3] Thomas Keneally (1982) "Author's Note", Schindler's List (New York), p. 10; Steven Spielberg, quoted by John H. Richardson in "Steven's Choice", Premier. The Movie Magazine, january 1994, p. 70. [4] The illustrative detail is in Keneally, p. 291: "At the end of Oskar's list, therefore, Titsch now typed in, above the official signatures, the names of Madritsch prisoners. Almost seventy names were added, written in by Titsch from his own and Oskar's memories ... There was singing in the apartment, loud talk and laughter, a fog of cigarette smoke, and, in a comer, Oskar and Titsch quizzing each other over people's names, straining for a clue to the spelling of Polish patronyms". [5] An important eyewitness, Moshe Bejski, reinforces this point: "From the beginning, he [Schindler] was sympathetic toward his Jewish employees and protected them from the hardships of the ghetto. In fact, during 'actions' they would remain in the factory so as not to be exposed to the danger of deportation." See Moshe Bejski (1977) "The `Righteous Among the Nations' and their Part in the Rescue of Jews", in Rescue Attempts During the Holocaust: Proceedings of the Second Yad Vashem International Historical Conference (Jerusalem), p. 642. See the interview with Bejski in Jon Blair's fascinating documentary, Schindler (90 min.; Thames Television, London, 1983), for which Thomas Keneally and Irving Glovin provided assistance. [6] See Eric Silver (1992) The Book of the Just: The Silent Heroes Who Saved Jews from Hitler (London), p. 154. [7] Silver, Book of the Just pp. 147-48. [8] Schiff, "Behind the Camera", p. 103.

Daniel Mark Fogel is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, Dean of the Graduare School, and Professor of English at Louisiana State University, where he also chairs the Advisory Council of the Jewish Studies Program. He is the founder and editor of the Henry James Review. Among his books are Henry James and the Structure of the Romantic Imagination (Baton Rouge, 1981) and Covert Relations: James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Henry James. (Charlottesville, 1990). He is the editor of the Library of America volume Henry James, Novels 1886-1890: The Princess Casamassima, The Reverberator and The Tragic Muse (New York, 1989) and of A Companion to Henry James Studies

[Mary Frances]

Schindler's list of costs found

The Independent
October 21, 2000

OSKAR SCHINDLER, the German businessman portrayed by Hollywood, spent pounds 600,000 at pre-war rates on food, medicine and bribes to save 1,200 Jews from the Holocaust, letters found 25 years after his death indicate. He drew up accounts for an American Jewish group in 1945.

[Mary Frances]

Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler in the hit film Schindler's hit list

Evening Standard (London)
Dec 9, 1999

GERMAN authorities have warned 10 parents they face fines of around 17 each if they continue to refuse to allow their children to watch Schindler's List with their classmates. The parents said they did not want their children to see the violent scenes in the film, being shown in Arnsberg for a project. Some also said they did not want the youngsters to take part in a reappraisal of the Holocaust through school.

[Mary Frances]

Is this the real Schindler's list?

By Eric Silver
The Independent
October 17, 1999

THE DISCOVERY of a suitcase full of documents in a German attic has sparked heated disagreements throughout the world over whether it contains the original copy of Schindler's List - the catalogue of Jews saved from the Holocaust by a wartime German industrialist.

Yesterday Thomas Keneally, author of the best-selling book Schindler's Ark, said that if it proves to be authentic the document may shed light on the controversial life of Oskar Schindler, a factory owner and black- marketeer who rescued 1,200 Jews from the Nazi death camps. Steven Spielberg filmed the book as Schindler's List, an emotionally charged drama that won seven Oscars in 1994, including best picture and best director.

The newspaper Stuttgarter Zeitung yesterday began serialising 2,000 documents it said had been found in an old grey suitcase marked "O Schindler". Among them were letters, newspaper cuttings and typewritten sheets listing the names of factory workers.

Speaking exclusively to The Independent on Sunday from San Francisco, where he was on a book tour, Keneally said the discovery was "extremely interesting". He had been able to see the documents only in photographs posted on internet news reports, but they resembled the copy of Schindler's list he had worked from. It had come from the back room of a store owned by Leopold Page, one of the Jews who worked at Schindler's enamelware factory. The newly discovered document appeared to be "exactly the list that Poldek [Leopold] had a copy of."

Other papers reported to have been found with the list were also familiar to Keneally. "I had copies of them on my desk when I was working on the book." That they were all found together in the suitcase confirmed his belief that the documents were genuine.

The papers could help to clear up one mystery, he said: whether or not Schindler gave a speech to the prisoners on 8 May 1945, the day the war ended. It was a key scene in Spielberg's film, with Schindler appealing to the prisoners "not to seek vengeance". Two secretaries claimed to have transcribed the speech and a version was published in a Jewish-American newspaper in the Sixties, "but the actual words have not been known until now". Some survivors fervently denied that any such speech took place - but if a text were found the argument would be settled.

Among those present on the day was Jonathan Dresner, now a 76- year-old dentist in Tel Aviv. Schindler appealed to "his" Jews not to judge all Germans on the strength of what the Nazis did to their people, Dresner recalled yesterday. "But I don't remember him saying anything about not seeking revenge."

Dresner doubted whether anybody took notes. "Everything was in chaos by then. Schindler knew he had to get away from Czech soil. The Czechs had already let him know that he would be tried as a war criminal. His speech was very spontaneous. I don't believe that anybody could have written it down."

Defending the authenticity of its documents, Stuttgarter Zeitung said the typed list had been examined by Moshe Bejski, a retired Israeli Supreme Court judge. But the elderly judge, a Polish Jew who worked for Schindler as a draughtsman, said yesterday that he not been consulted. "As a matter of fact, I have not examined it."

However, the judge - who, as a young man created fake identity papers for Jewish girls - did not rule out the possibility that the list might be authentic. He suggested it could have been drawn up after October 1944, when in the face of a Russian advance the Germans started liquidating their camp at Plaszow in Poland, and Schindler moved his operation to his home town in the Sudetenland.

According to Mr Bejski, the earlier Schindler's list carried 1,100 names, but it was expanded after the move. The occupants of two train wagons arrived at the local station, starving and frozen, from Golleschau, a branch of Auschwitz, after travelling for two weeks without food or water. Schindler discreetly intercepted their journey, and ordered the wagons to be prised open, revealing 100 people, and 17 frozen corpses. The sick were nursed back to health by Schindler's wife, Emilia.

Twenty years after the war Judge Bejski asked Schindler why he had stuck his neck out for the Jews. "I knew the people who worked for me," Schindler replied. "When you know people, you have to behave towards them like human beings. If I'm walking in the street and I see a dog in danger of being crushed by a car, wouldn't I try to help him?"

Schindler was a flawed hero, said the judge. "He was a drunkard, a womaniser. After the war, he was unable to run a normal business. A group of us once raised some money to help him. Within weeks, he phoned to say he didn't have a penny."

The grateful survivors made him a ring after melting down the donated gold teeth of a factory worker, and inscribed it with words from the Talmud: "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire". After the war a troubled Schindler squandered money raised for him by the Jews and sold the ring for money to buy drink.

"He spent money quicker than we could raise it," said Bejski. "But you had to take him like he was. If Schindler had been a normal man, he would not have done what he did."

Uwe Vorkotter, editor of the Stuttgarter Zeitung, insisted that the judge had authenticated the typed list. "We talked frequently to him. It is a problem. [ The journalist] Stefan Braun accepted that he was not a young man but said he was very clear. However, since yesterday you can imagine how many people have called him. He doesn't want to talk about it any more."

The film Schindler's List ended with survivors laying stones at a memorial, and its director, Steven Spielberg, set up a charity to keep alive the memory of what had happened to them

"The Shoa Foundation has got that drive to record the testimony of survivors before everyone dies, because time is running out," said Elizabeth McIntyre, a London-based director who made the award- winning documentary The Lost Children of Berlin with its money.

Ms McIntyre, who worked with Spielberg in the editing studio, said his fascination with the Holocaust was deeply personal. "It has been said that when he was a child he learnt to count by looking at the numbers imprinted on his grandmother's arm, from one of the concentration camps."

The man who saved 1,200 lives

Born 1908 in Zwittau, Moravia, son of German Catholics.

Used Nazi connections to open enamelware factory in Poland, employing Jewish slave labour.

Listed more than 1,000 Jews as essential to war effort, saving them from death camps.

Ordered production of forged documents to get food for starving Jews.

Moved factory to Sudetenland. Spent all $2m profiteering fortune on protecting workers.

Fled dressed as prisoner as war ended, with letters from the saved.

Penniless in Munich, identified Nazi war criminals.

Set up fur farm in Argentina, 1949, with money from International Jewish Relief Fund failed.

Declared bankrupt in 1957. German business also went bust.

Plaque unveiled in the Park of Righteous Persons in Israel.

Died in poverty in Hildesheim, 1974. Asked to be buried in Jerusalem.

SUITCASE FULL OF PAPERS WAS UNOPENED FOR 25 YEARS

THE EDITOR of the Stuttgarter Zeitung newspaper says he was given the suitcase of documents for free by the son of a woman who had kept it in her attic since Schindler's death.

"One of our journalists has a personal contact with the son of people who were very close to Oskar Schindler and his wife," said Uwe Vorkotter. Schindler spent the last weeks of his life with the couple in Hildesheim, north Germany, and gave them his possessions.

"The son and his wife had the suitcase for about a year. When they sorted out the house of his parents they found it in the attic. They knew about the contacts with Schindler but in the first months after the death of the father they didn't look in the suitcase."

A journalist and a historian then examined the 2,000 documents in the case for about six months. "Of course the first thing I thought of was The Hitler Diaries. The man who wrote them lives in Stuttgart so we were warned. You can be sure that we would not take such a risk."

The Schindler documents were easier to verify. "We knew where the material had been for the last 25 years. No one would be able to falsify all those thousands of documents. The Schindler Jews in Israel helped us identify people in the photographs."

As for the list itself, Mr Vorkotter was not claiming exclusivity. "There were many `Schindler's Lists' dating from October 1944 to the end of the war in May 1945. Ours is from 18 April 1945. The lists were updated from time to time. This was a list for Schindler."

Mr Vorkotter said he would be publishing a further six articles about Schindler's life after the war, based on the documents in the suitcase. Two letters from Schindler refer to the list, one sending it to the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial so that archivists could make a copy and the other offering thanks for its return. "Maybe there are other originals but I don't know of them. We wanted to ask Steven Spielberg but he's not so easy to get for an interview. Perhaps that will change now."

[Mary Frances]

European Times Krakow: Jews return to scene of `Schindler's List'

By Adam LeBor
The Independent
October 9, 1998

WHEN ALLEN Haberberg first wrote to a contact in the Polish town of Dabrowa Tarnowska to try to trace his family roots, he had no idea he was starting a journey that would end in Eden.

Mr Haberberg, 37, a former metals trader, was born in New York. Like many Jews with roots in Poland, he wanted to discover more about his heritage.

He knew his grandparents had been killed in the Holocaust and were connected to Krakow. Armed with two letters, written by his grandmother in 1942, he travelled to Dabrowa Tarnowska. There he met his contact, a pharmacist called Jola. She is now his wife. The couple bought three houses in Krakow's old Jewish quarter of Kazimierz and are converting the properties into a kosher hotel, the city's first, the Hotel Eden.

Scheduled to open next summer, the Hotel Eden is the latest project in the revival of Jewish cultural life in Krakow. "I fell in love with Krakow as soon as I got here. I had a Jewish upbringing in America, but some part of me feels more Jewish living here than I did in New York," Mr Haberberg said. "I go to synagogue twice a week, which I would never have done in the US." Until the Holocaust, Krakow was home to more than 68,000 Jews, a community made famous in the 1993 Steven Spielberg film Schindler's List. The factory on the outskirts of the city that was once owned by Oskar Schindler still operates, though the nearby former concentration camp at Plaszow has been demolished. The house of the camp commandant, Amon Goeth, still overlooks the site. Ravens rest on a satellite dish, next to the balcony from where Goeth would take pot-shots at the prisoners.

Jews first settled in Krakow in the 13th century, and their numbers grew after they were expelled from Spain in 1492. By the 19th century Krakow was a centre of Jewish life in Poland, the country with the biggest Jewish community in Europe. Only a few thousand Krakow Jews survived the war. Most of them left for Israel, Europe or the United States. Polish anti-Semitism and the pogrom of camp survivors in 1946 and a subsequent anti- Jewish campaign in 1968 reduced the community to a few hundred. Now triggered, in part, by Schindler's List, but more by a slow change in attitude towards Jews among younger Poles and the Polish government, Jewish life is reviving. Krakow once again has a Rabbi, Sasha Pecaric. Kazimierz's main square, Szeroka, is the site of a synagogue, a kosher restaurant, the Jarden Jewish bookshop and the Ariel Cafe, which hosts nightly concerts of Jewish Klezmer music. The cafe, which has period furniture from the early part of the century, is modelled on a Jewish salon, the owner, Janusz Benigier, said. "Jews were part of Krakow's atmosphere, and something has gone from Poland with their loss. We lived together for ages and our cultures were cemented together. "Jewish writers wrote in Polish, our music has Jewish roots, we even share a sense of being martyrs." Lucyna Les, who runs the Jarden bookshop, said: "This is the last Jewish quarter in Poland that has not changed for hundreds of years. The old days, when Krakow was filled with Jews, can never come back, but we have to preserve as much as we can. Three million Jews lived in Poland and left their influence on almost every aspect of Polish culture, from art and poetry to cooking. They lived here and they were part of Poland."

Like many young non-Jewish Poles, Ms Les thinks the Holocaust created a vacuum in her country. "Many Poles have never met someone Jewish. People are afraid of the unknown but knowledge produces tolerance. "Now something new is happening in the young generation, who don't look at Jews like their parents did. "They come here and see how Jews live, what they wrote, what they eat, and how intertwined Jewish and Polish culture is." This week marked the Day of Atonement, one of the the holiest days in the Jewish calendar.

At the recently restored 17th century Isaac synagogue, once the glory of Krakow's Jews, two life-size cardboard cut-outs of Orthodox Jews stand in memory of the former worshippers, killed in the Nazi camps. A video plays continuously, showing a film of the vibrant life of Jews in Kazimierz during the 1930s. A housewife haggles over the price of a chicken in the market square, young students at yeshiva - religious school - grin at the camera, while their fathers, clad in black hats and coats, gossip on street corners. It is a vanished world of Polish Jewry, one that can never return.

[Mary Frances]

http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Exclusive/0,,401792,00.html

Nazi movie exhibition enrages actor

Guardian Unlimited
November 23, 2000

A Warsaw exhibition featuring photographs of movie stars in Nazi uniform was shut down by the Polish government yesterday. The exhibition caused a storm of controversy with both the press and the public: one actor who found hiimself showcased was so incensed that he absconded with his own portrait, pausing only to slash at the other pictures with a ceremonial sword.

Entitled simply The Nazis, the exhibition, staged at Warsaw's Zacheta Gallery by New York-based artist Piotr Uklanski, featured stills of various actors taken from movies in which they have played Nazis. More famous faces included Ralph Fiennes, Frank Sinatra, Richard Burton, Roger Moore, Clint Eastwood and Omar Sharif. But it was one of the lesser known stars of the exhibition who finally decided to take matters into his own hands.

A supporting player in Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum and Krzysztof Kieslowski's Dekalog, Daniel Olbrychski is a stalwart of Polish cinema, best known for his roles in such homegrown swashbucklers as Dangerous Moves and With Fire and Sword.
According to Olbrychski's version of events, he became so enraged when a little girl who had visited the exhibition asked the actor if he was really a Nazi that he stormed to the Zacheta Gallery, removed his picture from the wall and attacked the other portraits with a sword that he had smuggled in.

The 55-year-old actor claimed that the show was "an abuse of the actors who played in anti-Nazi films." Prosecuting lawyers allege that the actor caused an estimated $80,000 (£57,000) worth of damage during his zealous act of vandalism.

In ordering the exhibition to be closed down, Poland's cultural minister Kazimierz Ujazdowski conceded that it could re-open when an "appropriate commentary" was added about the evils of Nazism.

[Mary Frances]

Hi All!

The performance of Ralph Fiennes as a Nazi officer in Schindler's List was ranked 15th on the American Film Institute's list of most memorable heroes and villains in 2003.

The film was also placed #9 in the 100 Greatest Movies of All Time.

Bravo!

[Mary Frances]

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=16000

Nazi’s Child, Victim Share ‘Inheritance’

by Tom Tugend
The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles
June 16, 2006



Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig, left, a Holocaust survivor, meets Monika Hertwig, the daughter of Amon Goeth, at the Plaszow Concentration Camp memorial. Photo ©Allentown Production

Monika Hertwig was 1 year old when her father, Amon Goeth, was hanged as a war criminal in 1946, after a trial by a Polish court.

Goeth, memorably portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in Steven Spielberg’s movie “Schindler’s List,” was the sadistic SS commandant of the Plaszow forced-labor and concentration camp, who relaxed by shooting down inmates from the balcony of his villa.

Helen Jonas-Rosenzweig was picked among the prisoners by Goeth as his maid and was brutalized for two years. She survived, thanks to Oskar Schindler, and lives in the United States.

Now, more than 60 years later, the two women are the unlikely protagonists of the feature documentary “Inheritance: A Legacy of Hatred and the Journey to Change It,” to premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival.

The two women’s first meeting, in the film, is memorable. They stand, holding hands, in front of the Plaszow memorial stone, which recalls the murderous brutality of one woman’s father and the suffering of the other.

Until she was 13, Hertwig believed that her father had died as a war hero and said she was devastated when she learned the truth. She previously traveled to Plaszow with a group of Israeli students and two survivors.

“Inheritance” is the creation of James Moll, a longtime Spielberg associate and co-founding director of the Shoah Foundation, who won a 1999 Oscar for “The Last Days,” a documentary about five Hungarian Holocaust survivors.

Moll was producing additional material for the “Schindler’s List” DVD, he recalled in an –interview, and needed permission to use some photos of Goeth.

“I tracked down Monika, called her on the phone, and the first thing she said was ‘I am not like my father,’” said Moll, now president of Allentown Productions. “It struck me then that one side of the Holocaust that has never been explored was the impact on the children, grandchildren and even great-grandchildren of the perpetrators.”

Hertwig had been told by her mother about the Jewish maid in the Goeth household, and told Moll she would like to talk to her. Jonas-Rosenzweig was understandably reluctant to meet the daughter of the “monster” she had served, but eventually agreed.

Goeth’s 60-year old daughter is now active educating German children, including her grandson David, about the Holocaust.

“This is my work,” she says. “You can’t change the past, but maybe you can do something about the future.”

The “Inheritance” screening schedule is: June 25, at 2:15 p.m., Crest Majestic Theatre, 1262 Westwood Blvd., Westwood; June 27, at 5 p.m., Italian Cultural Institute, 1023 Hilgard Ave., Westwood; June 29, at 7:30 p.m., Laemmle Sunset 5, 8000 W. Sunset Blvd., West Hollywood.

For ticket information, call 866-345-6337 or visit www.Lafilmfest.com. For more background about the film, visit www.allentownproductions.com.


Fest Puts Spotlight on Israel

Just a month after the unprecedented Israel film day at Cannes, the Los Angeles Film Festival (June 22-July 2) will host an “International Spotlight: Israel” series — proof of Israeli cinema’s growing global profile. The subtitled movies often critique aspects of Israeli society, following the current trend: Dalia Hager and Vidi Bilu’s drama, “Close to Home,” for example, depicts unenthusiastic female soldiers in the current intifada; while Bubot Niyar’s documentary, “Paper Dolls,” follows struggling gay Filipino immigrants who care for invalids by day and perform in drag at night. (Both movies won awards at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.) Gil Karni’s doc, “Troubled Water” chronicles the rise and turbulent fall of a Jewish settlement in the Gaza Strip. For information, visit www.lafilmfest.com. — Naomi Pfefferman, Arts & Entertainment Editor

[Mary Frances]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/movies/review97/germany.htm


Schindler's List

Germany Views Its Past Through 'Schindler's List'

By Rick Atkinson
Washington Post
May 3, 1993


FRANKFURT, GERMANY, MARCH 3 -- The Holocaust returned to Germany today with the opening of the movie "Schindler's List" and the reopening of a national debate about guilt, courage and the unresolved mysteries of mass murder.

Not since the late 1970s, when the American-made television miniseries "Holocaust" provoked widespread rumination by Germans about their dark past, has a cultural event here uncorked such painful introspection.

The Steven Spielberg film, which premiered Tuesday night at a special gala here before opening today across the country, has garnered generally rave reviews in the German media. (One exception this week lambasted the movie as a Hollywood tear-jerker and suggested that it should have been titled "Indiana Jones in the Krakow Ghetto.")

But on talk shows, in classrooms and in countless magazine and newspaper stories, the film has Germans brooding in a very German way about some uniquely German questions: why it took a foreigner -- once again, an American -- to make such a movie; whether Germans today are fundamentally different from the silent majority that supported Adolf Hitler during the Third Reich; and, most pointedly, why more citizens didn't display the courage of Oskar Schindler, a randy, hard-drinking Nazi industrialist who shielded more than 1,000 Polish Jews from death camps.

"The film forces the viewer to ask why others didn't try to do what Oskar Schindler managed," the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung observed in a front-page editorial.

Schindler spent the last 16 years of his life in Frankfurt before dying in 1974, penniless and largely anonymous, at least in his native Germany. Despite belated recognition by the postwar German government, which in the mid-1960s provided Schindler a small monthly pension, a medal and 160,000 marks ($40,000) as compensation for his lost factory, his knack for squandering his money reduced him to passing his final years alone in a seedy attic flat near the central railroad station. Until now his memory here has been preserved chiefly through a minuscule plaque in a Frankfurt housing project, which notes that the street "Oskar-Schindler-Strasse" is named after a "savior of many Jews from extermination in concentration camps."

Schindler's actions were rare but not unique. The film has triggered a roll call of righteousness in Germany with the commemoration of others who risked imprisonment or death to do the right thing. Frieda Adam, for example, sheltered her Jewish friend Erna Puterman in her Berlin apartment for more than two years. Similarly, Hedwig and Otto Schroedter, honored posthumously last month by Israel, hid two Jewish families in East Berlin, sharing their meager wartime rations among eight people. A resistance group headed by Adm. Wilhelm Canaris, chief of German military intelligence, helped 15 Jews escape to Switzerland.

A memorial service held Sunday afternoon on the site of Berlin's old Jewish cemetery recalled one of the few instances of collective action against the Nazi shipment of Jews to concentration camps. In late February 1943, as the Gestapo rounded up most of the Jews remaining in Berlin, including those of "racially mixed" marriages, hundreds of non-Jewish wives encircled the building on Rose Street where their Jewish husbands had been assembled for deportation. Throughout the day and subsequent night, as Berlin resident Ruth Andreas-Friedrich recorded in her diary, "They called for their men. Screamed for their men. Wailed for their men."

Confounded by this unprecedented display of mettle, the Gestapo dithered for several days before doing the unthinkable: The men were released into the custody of their wives with the bureaucratic rationale that "privileged persons are to be incorporated into the national community." Most survived the war, according to Peter Kirchner, who was an 8-year-old Jewish boy in central Berlin at the time of the Rose Street demonstration.

Yet the singularity of such actions underscores the tacit acquiescence -- if not the active complicity -- of the vast majority.

"There were more people than just Schindler who acted courageously. That has to be remembered. You can't paint it black and white," said Kirchner, who along with his Jewish mother was shielded from arrest. "Seventeen people knew who we were and nevertheless for more than two years provided us food and shelter, at great risk to themselves. So I never said all Germans are bad.

"But the great silent majority of the German people looked away when the trucks drove through the streets to haul terrified Jews of all ages to the assembly points. They remained silent and indifferent, even when it involved their neighbors or work colleagues," Kirchner added.

Spielberg's movie has also provoked debate over the contemporary relevance of Schindler-like Zivilcourage, a German term that means the courage of one's convictions.

The Munich-based Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily, for example, drew pointed parallels between the acquiescent German majority during the Third Reich and a tendency by many people today to shrug off racist violence. "Schindler is history that matters today," the paper said. "The world watching us knows that. We hope we know it too."

Finally, "Schindler's List" has provoked discussion about how best to preserve the memory of the terrible events that plunged Europe into darkness more than half a century ago. Opinion surveys show that many Germans believe they should no longer have to bear the guilty burden of their forefathers, that the stain of the Third Reich should fade after time.

There are also signs that interest in that part of Germany's past is fading. For example, the number of visitors to the concentration camp at Dachau, after soaring in the late 1970s and 1980s after the airing of "Holocaust," has recently plummeted. The 591,000 visitors last year was the fewest since 1977, according to Barbara Distel, head of the Dachau memorial.

Many hope that Spielberg's movie may spark a revival of interest while serving as a different kind of memorial, both to Schindler and to the impulses he embodied.

"It's shameful how ignored Schindler was," Distel said. "No German historian, no German writer ever told that story. It had to be an Australian {author Thomas Keneally, upon whose book the movie is based}. That says a lot about the atmosphere in this country."

"The real trick in any society is, how do you create more Schindlers?" said Andrew Baker of the American Jewish Committee here. "You can assume that the Eichmanns, the Hitlers, the evil figures of any period are always going to occur. There's no way to eradicate that evil. But you need to find ways of cultivating more people who will oppose it."

Staff writer Marc Fisher and special correspondent Ute Huebner contributed to this report.

[Mary Frances]

http://www.ewtn.com/library/MEDIA/SCLIST.TXT

"SCHINDLER'S LIST" IS A FATALLY FLAWED EPIC

by John Boland
The Wanderer
March 3, 1994

Before feeling guilty about being less than effusive over Steven
Spielberg's critically acclaimed "Schindler's List," consider: President
Bill Clinton, who speaks no evil of the "Shoah" going on today in abortion
clinics across the United States, has "implored" the American public to
see it. And "Commentary," the voice of the American Jewish Committee
(February, 1994), says it is morally ambiguous. On top of that, this
three-hour-plus flawed epic on the slaughter of Poland's Jews during the
Holocaust is absolutely mesmerizing cinema.


FACT FROM FICTION

Oskar Schindler was a real person--a Sudeten German entrepreneur in
Nazi-occupied Krakow who used his financial and personal connections-with
the Hitler National Socialists to save more than 1,000 Polish Jews from
death, employing them as slave laborers in his enamelware factory.

Schindler was also a fallen-away Catholic who embraced Nazism at the
same period of time that Pope Pius XI was warning about the storm clouds
of evil hovering over Germany in his encyclical Mit Brennender Sorge.

A rake, a womanizer, and an opportunist, after the war Schindler went
through bankruptcy, alcoholism, and emotional depression. He ended his
days by living off the generosity of those Jews he had saved: the real
"Schindlerjuden" who appear in the poignant epilog of "Schindler's List,"
laying tributes on his grave in Jerusalem.

Author Thomas Keneally heard about Schindler from one of those
survivors quite by accident while ordering a piece of luggage one day.
Later, he wrote a novel about him called "Schindler's List," which is the
basis of Spielberg's movie.

In Keneally's story, Oskar Schindler evolved from Nazi to anti- Nazi
after witnessing atrocities in Krakow's Jewish ghetto. "I was now
resolved," he says, "to do everything in my power to defeat the system."

Spielberg's Schindler, however, is a different critter: a tough,
silent, Indiana Jones anti-superhero whose motives for saving "his Jews"
remain a mystery to the end.


AMBIGUOUS GOODNESS

As "Commentary" summarizes: Spielberg's Schindler strips him "of his
human complexity and replaces it with--nothing. By robbing us of
Schindler's renunciation of Nazism, even in private, Spielberg gives us a
simply enigmatic creation, the good Nazi. See, the director seems to be
saying, heroism is ambiguous, goodness is ambiguous, right action,
decency, following feeling-- all ambiguous."

And for this--the Jewish publication adds--"for introducing the
suggestion of moral ambiguity into the Holocaust, the very heart of the
absolute, he has won the ecstatic plaudits of the critics."

Ten years ago, in 1984, it should be remembered, a chilling film
about a more recent holocaust--in Cambodia--was equally praised by the
critics: Roland Joffe's "The Killing Fields." In that one, the massacre of
seven million fellow Cambodians by Pol Pot and his vicious Khmer Rouge was
blamed on the Communists' reaction to American bombing during the
Southeast Asian war in Vietnam.

Vincent Canby, dean of the "New York Times" movie reviewers, went
even further, saying that the killing was also a "Khmer Rouge attempt to
reduce the population to a manageable size"-- much as the Chinese
Communists today are instituting a Nazi-like "eugenics and health
protection" pogrom using the same demented reasoning. No doubt we will
wait many years for Hollywood to tackle this Chinese holocaust--or, for
that matter, the millions slaughtered under Stalin and his successors.


CRITICS' CHOICE

For purely artistic merit, it is no wonder "Schindler's List" has
captured the critics' acclaim. Shot in startling, documentary-style
black-and-white, it's unlike anything they've seen since the advent of
Technicolor.

The acting is uniformly fine, especially from those in minor roles as
the Jewish victims, and Steven Zaillian's script is spare and uncluttered.
It is Spielberg's handling of the chaotic crowd scenes, ultimately, that
is utterly brilliant. Not since Lenin's favorite Soviet filmmaker, Sergei
Eisenstein, has a director used pandemonium so masterfully .


PARENTAL WARNING

"Schindler 's List," as "Commentary" notes, is also something of a
breakthrough in the film industry's self-policing code: warning parents of
"nudity," "violence," and "adult situations." While scenes of Jews being
forced to strip naked as a form of degradation are generally handled in
good taste, "Spielberg supplies emotional relief and contrast by cutting
to shots of barebreasted Aryan women dallying with their Nazi paramours."

As for violence, "Jewish heads explode . . . at an average rate of
one every 12 minutes," usually at close range by pistol fire. SS sadists,
too, shout their orders in the now too-familiar American expletive heard
repeatedly in gangster movies and Madonna films.

Director Spielberg, according to recent news reports, was upset when
a young high school class viewed R-rated "Schindler's List" as a history
project, and laughed and jeered throughout the film. Like so many other
current moviemakers, he wants it both ways: buxom nude blondes, buckets of
gore, foul-mouthed bullies--and reverence.

In today's youth-oriented MTV society, you don't get that by mixing
"The Diary of Anne Frank" with "The Rocky Horror Picture Show."