Movie Review - Schindler's List

A small girl in a red, velvet coat, soft, blonde curls falling over her cherubic face, her pudgy hands clinging on to a ragged doll, a red hat shadowing her caramel eyes full of trust and innocence, skipping down the streets of Krakow, Poland, not a care in the world, maybe besides what mother had made for supper or whether daddy would gift her a fat teddy on her birthday next Saturday as promised…

A small girl in a stained, red velvet coat, unkempt curls falling over her blood-smeared face, hands bereft of her favourite toy, eyes wide open – unblinking, accusing, scared, crying as though all her trust has been betrayed, her angelic form crudely piled into a barrow, lost somewhere in the mound of the rotting corpses, being wheeled away to nothingness. And Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) watched…watched this carnage before his unwavering eyes and something inside him snapped. This scene denoted the death of Oskar the womanizer, the war-profiteer, the arrogant and the frivolous. It gave birth to Oskar the sympathetic, the resilient, and the epitome of all that is good in mankind.

The above scene from the movie Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg, starring Liam Neeson and Ben Kingsley, describes a scene from World War II, wherein the German Nazis were purging the province of Krakow in Poland of all the Jews, to set up one of their infamous, hideous concentration camps. The site was cleared ruthlessly. No one was spared.

Based on a true story, Oskar Schindler, a German Nazi himself, was known as a war-profiteer who bribed his way into the SS party, who in turn sponsored him a factory manufacturing army mess kits. However, after witnessing the bloody carnage, Oskar decides to save as many Jews as possible by labeling them as ‘essential workers’ for his factory. Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley) his accountant as well as administrator is a Jew himself. With the help of Stern, Schindler ‘buys’ his ‘Jewish slaves’ to work in his factory, but in truth he is protecting them from meeting their untimely demise in the gas chambers.

Shot completely in black and white (except for a few scenes like the girl in the red coat), the film has a certain kind of timelessness about it. When I think of this movie, I see a six feet four inches tall, burly Oskar sitting in a dark corner of a bar, a Cuban cigar falling halfway from his lips, a brandy balloon in the other, the sly eyes watching every woman strolling into the bar, missing nothing. The soft, sensuous tune of Por Una Cabeza adding on to the scene of old-world charm recreated in 1993. I see Schindler promising his wife that she is the only woman in his life only to be met by a look of disapproval and hurt. I see Oskar going back to his old philandering ways. I see the blood, the death, the destruction, caused by man in the name of racial purity and then I see Stern jotting down the names of the 450 odd Jews they have managed to buy so far and Schindler shouting ‘More More’! I see Schindler ‘winning’ the Jewish maid Helen Hirsch in a game of cards, freeing her from the sadistic clutches of Amon Goth, a psychopath in the guise of a Nazi officer, I see him spending his lifetime’s fortune in saving every Jew he could and still being mortified, distraught towards the end. Moreover, I see the disturbing, blurred images of women being stripped down to nothing and being pushed into the gas chambers. I see their quivering hands turn on the taps, expecting the deathly cyanide filled smoke to fill their lungs and choke them to a terrible death. I FEEL the relief when the tap is turned on and water gushes out instead.

The climax shows that the war will come to an end at midnight, and Oskar being a certified Nazi will have to flee from the factory at five past twelve. The rescued Jews come forward and present him with a gold ring (made from the dental braces of one of the workers!) On the ring are inscribed the words from the Talmudic text, “He who saves the life of one man, saves the world entire.” Oskar is distraught, for he feels that he could have saved many more lives. He points frantically at his car…worth the lives of 10 men…the gold tie-pin…worth one life, and finally breaks down and sobs inconsolably. The movie ends with the survivors and descendants of the 1100 Jews, called the ‘Schindler Jews’, who gather at the grave of Oskar Schindler in Jerusalem and pay his respects. As Schindler quoted in the beginning of the movie, “They wont forget the name Oskar Schindler around here…He did what no one else did…He came with nothing and left with a steamer trunk, two steamer trunks of money, all the riches of the world…” Oskar Schindler indeed left with the best riches mankind could ever afford. He left with the riches that accompany a man who has given his everything to buy someone his life back. To conclude in Stern’s words, “The list is life.”