Schindler’s List is Spielberg’s best film to date and may be the best film
of the latter half of the twentieth century. It tells the true story of Oskar
Schindler, a greedy, decadent German businessman who uses his connections in
the Nazi Party to start a factory in Poland
and staff it with Jewish slave laborers. Schindler has nothing for or against
Jews personally. He merely sees them as a good way to make a quick buck.. The
fact that the Jews he employs get to live a little while longer is just
incidental.
Slowly, though, Schindler begins to change. First, influenced by his
dignified, Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, but then
just by being aware of the evils happening around him, Schindler becomes an
unlikely hero. The tipping point is when Schindler witnessed the brutal
destruction of the Krakow Ghetto. It would take a heart harder than Schindler’s
not to be moved by that. From then on, he finds that he has a new purpose, which
is to save as many Jews as possible.
The most awe inspiring scene in the history of cinema happens when Schindler
learns that some of his Jews have been diverted to Auschwitz
due to a bureaucratic error. Schindler strides into the camp, literally through
the gates of a man made hell on Earth, and with a combination of fast talk and
bluster, plucks his Jews literally from out of the gas chambers.
At the end of the war, it turned out that Schindler had saved about 1100
human beings from death, using the skills of chicanery and guile that had
served him so well as a businessman and a bon vivant. He was not, by the most
standards, a particularly good man. But when the war was over, he did weep for
those he could not save. If only, he laments, he had been a bit cleverer,
worked a bit harder, perhaps more might have lived. And so Spielberg shows us a
portrait of a great man.