The List of Life

Schindler’s List
Steven Spielberg
USA
1993

Just when I thought I will never see a film more passionate and more beautiful than my long time Italian classic favorite “The Bicycle Thief”, this 1993 Academy Award Best Picture winner struck me like a lightning of humanity at its purest, tore my heart relentlessly nearly close to the sorrow thousands and millions of aggravated, humiliated, and profaned Jews experienced, and most importantly moved me in a place where questions about life and its importance, ironies, ambiguities, and catastrophic evil are constantly breathing intemperately. There have been a lot of films that made me misty eyed, also a number of films that made me cry, but “Schindler’s List” just has been so far the only film I found myself bursting in tears I never thought I contain. The equation of material things like car, watch, and a pin of gold and of a thing as simple yet as complicated like life made me feel that it is extremely unacceptable. In fact, to even think of these money and material possessions as a replacement to or something more important than life is sick and evil. The world has been so intellectual yet decadent and educated yet so greedy. Power seekers in order to be what they want needs to blind and so they become blind, not of their historical goals but of the simpler things like the life of many ordinary people.  The world honestly is gruesomely consumed by the doom of ravenousness and constant ignorance of harmony and humanity. Never in my life though I have believed that we will ever become the absolute peaceful world, the idea is so beautifully Utopian and it is never a characteristic of this planet and so the closest thing that we can do is to minimize chaos and maximize peace. The founding of United Nations is one my favorite historical point in our history.

Now, what made me abhor this never-ending asymmetrical relations of the powerful and the powerless and the conventionalized sacrifice of many else’s life for the power-seekers when from the start I know it is an incurable plague? I can’t be any more satisfied and inspired to that brilliance exceptionally delivered by Steven Spielberg—a director I first considered seriously good in the nostalgic “Artificial Intelligence” (with my favorite child actor ever—Haley Joel Osment), and then I admired in the groundbreaking “Saving Private Ryan” (with the Hollywood Apple of my eye—Tom Hanks), and now I adore in my favorite film of all time and all nation—“Schindler’s List”. The amount of wonder Spielberg added in the film is unthinkably great. After hearing a lot of stories from his grandparents, and some friends and acquaintances who have experienced the wrath of the Second World War, he conducted ardent research about the Jew survivors of the Holocaust that until now continues as he founded the Shoah--a visual library where all the conducted interviews of all living Jews retell the painful and harrowing experiences. The setting, the Jews of the 2^nd World War or the Hitler War as I am fond of substituting, is the best backdrop any storyteller can choose or have if you want to feel the spirit of life in its most unadulterated anatomy. These aggravated people of Jews forced to surrender their businesses and lands, robbed of their properties, detested in front of fellowmen, and scorned by (at least) the Nazis, perhaps alongside with soldiers at war, have brought forth the most exceptional amount of empathy I can manage to produce. Even with their seeming passivity, their downright hope and desire to survive with their family and loved ones definitely deserves respect. Their eventual inhumane and unnecessary death makes reviewing what the world provided them really painful and poignant. The cause of their horrifying death doesn’t cease with the end of the war which makes things very disturbing and worrying because the cause is nothing more or less than discrimination and it still plagues our society, and it may happen again. 

Spielberg makes Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) the absolutely perfect imperfect man to save 1,100 Jewish lives and to learn one of the greatest lessons ever covered in films. Schindler is a war profiteer, when the Nazis ruled Poland, they confiscated all Jew-operated and owned businesses. Being the wise man, he convinced the Jew owners of these businesses to transfer everything to his name thus making it a legal German-owned company. With the help of the accountant and a Jew Izthak Stern (Ben Kingsley) and Jewish working for the cheapest rates, Schindler makes more money than any man can ever live luxuriously for the rest of his life. If there is one thing that really made me emotionally and spiritually connected to this black and white film is its premise of money buying people and gold buying ideology. As of now I can’t think of any other as inappropriate yet dramatically striking irony in life than life and money, life and death is not even half of it. Schindler is able to send some Jews from other concentration camp to his factory and route trainload of Jews instead of transporting them to some other camps through bribing. It is not a rocket science; the more Schindler can bribe the captain of a camp, the more people he can get for his factory. At first, he wants Jews to work because their labor is too cheap that you don’t even feel you’re paying them but before the transfer to Auschwitz, he then wants more and more Jews in his factory not to earn anymore but to save lives. Schindler’s list is the list of life, it’s allegory to the book of life is wonderful. The transition between Schindler the businessman and Schindler the savior is ambiguous when I think it should be distinct. However, t is not a drawback at any serious ways instead it only interprets how discreet one German should be in sympathizing with the Jews.

One of my favorite scenes is when Schindler welcomes the male Jews off the train from the old camp to his new factory and said something like—“…inside are bread and hot soup waiting for everybody.” I will cry with those words if I am one of those Jews who wake up every morning to spend the rest of his day working harder than any animal while waiting for arrant Nazis to shoot him to his death. That bread and hot soup is not simply bread and a hot soup but words that will promise them that there is hope for them to live again like human beings. That factory is a sanctuary, the safest place for any Jew, and it is so overwhelming that those thousands of lives depends on one, only one person, and his money. While the train of the male Jews are safely routed to Auschwitz, the train where the female ones are ridden for some mistake have been transported to a different camp where sure they will die after some time. Stern tells Schindler about the error, and the lives of hundreds of Jew women and children, in a matter of hours or minutes, will either be saved or perished.

 

The ultimate best scene in the film and perhaps of all scenes from films I’ve ever seen is the long sequence at the end of “Schindler’s List”. The war ended and Schindler being a German needs to escape in that absolved factory, before he would take his car Stern and several other Jews melted a gold tooth and mold it into a ring with inscriptions saying—one who saves one life saves the world entire. His workers also make a letter explaining Schindler’s unbelievable predicament to the Jews in case he get caught, and every single Jews in the factory signed it. Schindler starts to cry saying he did not do enough. Stern consoles the man he has always seen the goodness even from the start asking him to look at those over a thousand he has saved. It wasn’t enough for Schindler, he wasted so much money before for wines, women, and good and sinful times, when all those money could have doubled the numbers of Jews who could have survived the war. He starts to begrudge at his car, saying that it could have saved ten more people and even at his Swastika gold pin which could be used as a bribe for at least one more life. Schindler bursts into tears as his people around try to hug him and comfort him, as the simplest way to thank him for letting them live the greatest gift the Lord gave us—life. As I break into tears alongside this cinema’s and history’s significant moment many thoughts outpours in my head, most of them I mentioned in the first paragraph but what makes me weak is that people will still continue to kill people for reasons conscious or unconscious, the Turkish film “I Saw the Sun” made me realize that. But as the film suggests, anyone can still do something, a change, a change that may no be perfect, universal, and absolute. We are not God to completely change the world, but we do have our spaces in this world, and there are people in the proximities of our hearts, our aspirations, and soul. No matter how small that change was for as long as it benefited even a single person provided with the purest intentions then the Jewish proverb—“one who saves one life saves the world entire”, will be our friend.

Adolf Hitler is the main and the most obvious culprit in this one of the history’s most dreadful and atrocious period in our world. The 2004 German film “Downfall” allowed me to reserve certain respect for this man they call the 2^nd Anti-Christ. For how monstrous he had done in our history, he was still a man, almost like a God the German nation trusted. Watching “Schindler’s List” doesn’t make me utterly hate Hitler after all. As a disclaimer, it is unsatisfying to learn that there is no accurate and absolute studies about the reasons why Hitler hated the Jews. Therefore while Hitler may have hated and wanted to eradicate the descendants of Jacob, I have to agree with some studies believing that the world have their own different share of this consummate hatred. Hitler is just one of those who hates even before he became Fuhrer of the German nation. Hitler was not the only one, all the people who are bigots, hypocrite, envious, narcissists, and ignorant are the real murderers. As I mentioned earlier, these different figures of evil have not been buried with the millions of body-casualties and this evil in the form of discrimination will still haunt millions of lives today and in the following generations to come.

I can’t thank the Lord well enough for destining me to witness this purifying film I now officially declare as my #1 in my Top 100 Films of all Time and Nation, Steven Spielberg and every single names in the credits of the film for producing a life-changing poignant work of art and history, the Video City near our house where I rented this DVD which even though I paid for a day of penalty is still worthy and even worthier than all of the movies I ever rented there combined, and all of the universe conspiring for this one in a million cinematic experience emblazoned in my heart and soul. More people should see this heart-rending, soul-breaking, moral-provoking black and white Holocaust masterpiece. “Schindler’s List” proves Hollywood’s undeniable power and influence and Spielberg demonstrates the universality of human experience. You don’t have to be a Jew yourself and you don’t have to have a family thrown at Kraskow ghettos, all you need to have is the heart for all the hundreds of thousand of Jews massacred in the Hitler War and some swamping deluge of cinematic talent of course. The frame by frame shots, composition, black and white contrast, simple camera movement, adept film editing, excellent sound design, and touching score still put this film in a heavenly pedestal. This movie simply made me so proud about my passion and enthusiasm for films.