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December 24, 1993 - Image 42

Resource type:
Text
Publication:
The Detroit Jewish News, 1993-12-24

Disclaimer: Computer generated plain text may have errors. Read more about this.

SPIELBERG'S TRIUMPH

Eyeball-to-eyeball with evil:

Schindler (Liam Neesen)
with Nazi commandant.

Amon Goeth

S BY DAVID JAMES

(Ralph Fiennes).

The 300
women

and children
whom
Schindler

personally

rescued
from

Birkenau.

range; brains splatter; children hide from
the SS in excrement up to their necks in
latrines; a Nazi commandant, lounging
on his balcony overlooking a labor camp,
shoots Jews at random with his rifle: The
very arbitrariness of his action instills in-
sufferable fear of "the master" above.
And yet, there is a glorious — if, indeed
that is the right word — understatement
to the film. Blood, yes. Sorrow, indeed.
Savagery and butchery: inescapable. To
many people, such rottenness is the sum
total of the Holocaust; amid such carnage,
there is an easy tendency for subtleties
and nuances to evaporate and disappear.
r. Spielberg does not do
this, partly because the ex-
traordinary story — how
Oskar Schindler, a Czech-
German and Nazi Party
member, saved 1,300 Jews
– does not let him; partly
because he is in such com-
111/1 mand of his craft that he
does not succumb to the obvious and the
facile: His Nazis are not cardboard stereo-
types of evil; his Jews do not glow with
unadulterated innocence; his hero is not
even a hero in the conventional sense.
Contrary to our yearning that heroes
be heroic across-the-board, Oskar
Schindler is a hedonist and a bon vivant.
He drinks voluminously, smokes end-
lessly, frequents cabarets and, although
married, has two mistresses. (The film
and the book omit another facet of
Schindler's life: He fathered three illegit-
imate children.) As Liam Neesen, the Irish
actor who plays Schindler, said in an in-
terview in Washington, "Schindler was
no Francis of Assisi, by no means. Like
him or hate him, his virtues — and his
vices — saved these lives."
By letting Schindler be Schindler, with
his warts and his virtues, Steven Spiel-
berg has created a near-masterpiece: a
powerful, unforgettable, searing contri-
bution to the language of the Holocaust;
a singularly graceful and potent film that
etches into memory, remains there, in-
delibly and inexhaustibly, frame by frame,
syllable by syllable, sorrow by sorrow, hope
by hope.
The film's timing couldn't be better. Not
just because it's being released in Decem-
ber so it will just get under the wire for next
year's Academy Awards. Or because it may
help refute an American Jewish Commit-
tee poll released Dec. 3 that found that only
62 percent of Americans believe the Holo-
caust occurred. But also because Holocaust
survivors are an endangered species; aged
and dying, with them goes the living mem-
ory of what they endured. "Schindler's List"
tells their story, one that, unlike Wash-
ington's unexpectedly successful U.S. Holo-
caust Memorial Museum, does not require
journeying to the nation's capital to hear.
At an award ceremony for Schindler's
widow at the Holocaust museum two
weeks ago, Murray Pantirer, who was
saved by Schindler, said "Jews going to the
ovens shouted, `Zakhor — 'remem-
ber."

"Schindler's List" is Steven Spielberg's
cinematic shout to remember. On Wednes-
day, it opened in 16 cities around the coun-
try; on Dec. 25, it opens in Detroit. The
magic of Mr. Spielberg's name will bring
millions of Americans to theaters to see
it; the fine reviews it warrants will per-
suade others to join them. They will exit
remembering. And remembering — al-
most a half century after the gates of
Dachau and Treblinka and Sobibor and
Auschwitz were peeled open; a few years
after punk kids started thinking it was
cool to carry around dog-eared copies of
"Mein Kampf'; as reports come daily of
neo-Nazism on the rise in Europe and of
new slaughters in Bosnia — is the only
way to stop a new flood of hate before the
world is, again, drowned by deathly wa-
ters, and drenched by sorrowful tears.

`SCHINDLER'
MAN he 'MUGU
ultimate question regarding

I

Oskar Schindler is why he did
what he did. To many people, the
possible answers do not satisfy,
maybe because we seek logical,
linear causes for seemingly hero-
ic goodness, maybe because we want to
know how to replicate it so the next geno-
cide can be quenched before it begins.
Schindler was born in 1908 in Zwittau,
a Moravian industrial town that was then
part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. His
parents were German. His mother was a
devout Catholic; his father was not.
In 1938, Schindler joined the Czech
Nazi Party. His motives may have been
patriotic — or opportunistic: As a sales-
man, he had noticed that it was easier to
make a sale if one was a party member.
A Brooklyn psychotherapist, Luitgard
Wundheiler, who has written about
Schindler, is certain, "beyond a shadow
of a doubt, that Schindler's patriotism had
nothing in common with the Nazi racial
ideology. Schindler remained free from
any kind of racial or national prejudice
and continued to count Jews and Czechs
among his friends."
In September 1939, almost immediately
after Germany invaded Poland, a 31-year-
old Schindler went to Cracow, hoping to
take advantage of the war to make a for-
tune. Four months later, he bought an
enamel factory that was near bankrupt-
cy. As the firm prospered, Schindler in-
creased the number of Jews on its payroll
from seven in 1939 to 550 by 1942. From
the beginning, they were treated with dig-
nity and respect, and the name "Schindler"
became synonymous with "refuge."
By adding a munitions department to
his factory in 1941, Schindler made the
plant ostensibly essential to the war ef-
fort. About the same time, Germans cut
Jews' food rations to subsistence levels.
Schindler used the profits from selling
enamelware on the black market to pur-
chase food for his workers.
This may have been the moral pivot for

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