Stephen Spielberg's Schindler's List

The film Schindler's List, directed by Stephen Spielberg is an unsparing and shocking account of the deportation of Polish Jews to ghettos and concentration camps. The film is based on a book about Oskar Schindler by Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark. The book was based on interviews with 50 survivors of the holocaust who survived due to Schindler's intervention. The film is very realistic because of its source material and an accurate account of history. In the accounts of many holocaust survivors we are treated to the horrors of concentration camp life. The film pulls no punches in portraying such episodes. We see how evil Nazis like Amon Goethe routinely use hard-laboring Jewish concentration camp prisoners as targets for shooting practice. We see how many Jews were forced into sexual servitude against their will. And, in a quite dramatic episode, we see how Jews like Lowenstein were routinely shot at point-blank range because they were perceived as "undesirable".

The film is basically shown from the perspectives of three men, Oskar Schindler, Itzhak Stern and Among Goeth. Schindler is a war profiteer and cons, schmoozes, and bribes his way to the top whether it is among Jews or SS officials. He decides to open a cookware factory and knows he needs someone with a head for business to run it. Schindler will add the "panache" but it will be Stern, a Jewish accountant, who achieves success for the business. As Stern informs Schindler, "Let me understand. They p

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hite photography. The score is haunting and includes violin composition by Itzhak Perlman. The parallel editing and overlapping dialogue is often used to great effect. In one scene we see these techniques used when the Nussbaum's are being deported to the ghetto while Oskar Schindler is taking over their recently vacated lush apartment. In contrast to Schindler's comment that the apartment with its expensive dTcor "Couldn't be better", we are treated to an exchange between Mr. and Mrs. Nussbaum as they arrive in the chaos and poverty of the ghetto apartments: Mrs. Nussbaum: It could be worse. Mr. Nussbaum: How? Tell me. How on earth could it possibly be worse? The film is quite accurate historically. It portrays the cruel treatment of Jews at the hands of hypocritical and selfish SS officials like Goethe who talks of killing all Jews while taking a Jewish secretary with whom he falls in love. It shows how some Jews were so desperate to survive that they actually worked for the Nazis against other Jews as opposed to suffering a worse fate. When a Jew name Pfefferberg is shocked to see his Jewish friend Goldberg working as a ghetto policeman, Goldberg says, "I'm a policeman now, could you believe it? That's what's hard to

Category: Film - S