Making a true connection with the Jewish victims facing the Holocaust can be overwhelming. More than six million Jews were slaughtered, which is a tremendous number to understand emotionally and intellectually. The Jews left their homes to being tortured and murdered in concentration camps are so vast that understanding the plight of individual victims is an engrossing tragedy. After World War II, the survivors themselves were truly able to tell stories how they feel about the horror of the Holocaust.
Steven Spielberg hoped to address the Holocaust with his historical epic film, Schindler’s List. He presented his film with a black and white presentation that effectively represents the World War II era and deepens the impact of the story. Black and white colors present the filmmaker’s opportunity to use different color schemes to highlight key scenes and signal shifts in time. The colors symbolically bring the viewers back in time to see the Holocaust in a vivid and terrible way. The film visualizes many of the actual locations and conversations about the events happening in the story, including Nazi-occupied Poland, the concentration camps in Auschwitz, and the suffering of the Jews. In addition, the score in the film, with the effective use of the piano and violin, played in the movie creates a depressing mood of the Holocaust. In Schindler’s List, the viewers get closer to the events and characters in the story. More importantly, these artistic and psychological accomplishments capture the way many people visualize World War II through black-and-white images, historical background, and heartbreaking music.
Spielberg uses parallel editing, or crosscutting, in which two or more concurrent scenes are interwoven with each other, throughout Schindler’s List. Parallel editing illuminates the difference between the suffering of the Jews and the comfort of Schindler and the Nazis in Poland. It also demonstrates the powerful contrast between happiness and sadness. There are two scenes to demonstrate the powerful impact of parallel editing in this film. In the first scene, Schindler moves into his luxury apartment in Krakow after the Jewish owners are evacuated by the Nazis and sent to the Krakow ghetto. In addition, Schindler takes no notice of and has no remorse for the evacuated couple. The tremendous impact of his cruelty intensified the owners’ suffering. The second and perhaps most compelling example, three scenes are interwoven: Schindler celebrates his birthday, a wedding takes place in a labor camp, and a Nazi officer beats a housemaid. The contrast between these scenes forces viewers to confront the reality of the Jewish situation during the Holocaust, when violence and death were always just around the corner.
Oskar Schindler, a Nazi war profiteer and womanizer, wanted a higher living by opening a munitions factory and employing Jews because their wages are lower. His goal was to become a millionaire. However, by the end of the war, he had risked his life, spent his fortune to save the Jews, and had defrauded the Nazis for months with his factory that never produced a single usable shell. Why did he change? What happened to turn him into a humanitarian? When Schindler witnesses increasing violence and killing of Jews in Nazi-occupied Poland, he undergoes a slow transformation by becoming a compassionate man saving the lives of the Jewish workers in his factory. As he witnesses the evacuation of the Krakow ghetto, he sees a little girl in a red coat. The image and the violence move him that his humanity awakens, and Schindler realizes he must do something to help. Schindler makes his factory as a haven for Jews and begins actively to give his assistant, Itzhak Stern, expensive goods to use as bribes to bring more Jews into his factory, where he can keep them safe from death at the hands of the Nazis.
Oskar Schindler himself embodies this idea of recognizing and caring for the individual and takes a stand against evil. He is unable to stand by and watch his Jewish workers perish for he makes a personal connection with them and does not want to see them killed. This relationship between Schindler and the Schindlerjuden (or Schindler Jews) parallels the connection the viewers make in a similar situation. In a sense, the viewers know and care about the Jews, want them to survive, and feel triumphant when they do.
Spielberg personalizes the Nazis as well, however. The character of Amon Goeth allows an intimate glimpse into the mind of a Nazi officer corrupted by anti-Semitism. He shoots Jews from his balcony for target practice. He sees the Jewish people as a mass, not as individuals with thoughts and feelings. However, he is intoxicated by his Jewish maid, Helen Hirsch, and struggles with his conflicting feelings of attraction to Helen and pure hatred of Jews. Unlike Schindler, Goeth denies his connection to an individual. He cannot overcome his hatred, just as the Nazi Party, in general, could not overcome its wholesale hatred of Jews.
Spielberg conveys the horror the Schindlerjuden faced during the Holocaust. The viewers meet the characters and follow their plights closely, developing a connection to these individual victims. This connection is Spielberg’s main goal in Schindler’s List. He wants viewers to identify the characters in order to feel their pain and fear. This forces the viewers to confront the horror on a personal level and to realize that every victim had a story, loved ones, a home, a business, and a life. To look at the Jews of the Holocaust simply removes their individuality and uniqueness.
Spielberg carries the idea of individualism through to the powerful final scene in the film. Here, in full color, the real surviving Schindlerjuden appear. Lined up as far as the eye can see -many with their actor counterparts in the film- they place rocks on Oskar Schindler’s grave. Spielberg’s decision to show the actors accompanying the actual survivors serves two purposes. First, the scene drives home the point that the characters in the film are real people rather than just invented figures. Viewers can feel a great sense of satisfaction in seeing the actual survivors who triumphed over evil. Second, Spielberg is sending a message to all those who doubt the reality of the Holocaust that human proof of the tragedy exists and that what happened can never be erased. Witnesses to the horror are still alive to tell their tales and to make sure we never forget.
Bibliography
Ebert, Roger. “Schindler’s List Review.” RogerEbert.com. Chicago-Sun Times. 15 Dec.1993. Web. 19 Jan. 2014.
Keneally, Thomas. Schindler’s Ark. Los Angeles: Hodder and Stoughton, 1982. Print.
Monahan, Dave, and Richard Barsam. “Parallel Editing.” Looking At Movies. 4th Edition ed. N.p.: Norton & Company, 2015. Print.
Monahan, Dave, and Richard Barsam. “Elements of Narrative.” Looking At Movies. 4th Edition ed. N.p.: Norton & Company, 2015. Print.
Schindler’s List. Dir. Steven Spielberg. Perf. Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Ralph Fiennes. Universal, 1993. Film.
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