After 30 years, 'Schindler’s List' still stands tall

Reflections on a viewing of Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust masterpiece, released three decades ago last week.

On Saturday, thanks to a showing at the Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History to mark its 30th anniversary, I had a chance to see Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List on the big screen, for I believe the first time since its initial theatrical run. I have seen the film on television and otherwise in the years since, but never in a theater since 1993. 

When Schindler’s List first came out, I was 15 years old. I don’t think I was too young to see it, but I do think I was certainly too young to fully understand it, especially the human complexities. I should also note that the very first thing I ever had published in newsprint, as a high school sophomore in 1994, was a brief article in my school newspaper’s cub issue, in which I invoked Schindler’s List to argue against Holocaust denial. 

Upon this new viewing of the film, though, I have no reason to question my initial assessment: Schindler’s List is a great film, a powerful film, and even if it’s not the definitive American Holocaust film, it remains on the very short list of the most important ones. 

The story is well-known: In the early 1990s, at a time when he had just co-founded his own studio (DreamWorks), directed a megahit (Jurassic Park), and was at the absolute zenith of his popularity and clout, Steven Spielberg decided to make a major, epic film about the Holocaust. Based on Thomas Keneally’s historical novel Schindler’s Ark, the film was developed over many years, with Spielberg — setting off a cascade of what-ifs — considering at various points to pass it off to the likes of Martin Scorsese and Brian DePalma.

The film told the story of Oskar Schindler, a Czech-born German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who came to Poland to make his fortune during the war. A man with no initial interest in anything but profit, who socialized and did business with leading Nazis, Schindler eventually had a change of heart.

He then went to extraordinary lengths — mostly achieved through the large-scale bribery of the Nazis — to save the lives of more than 1,000 Jews who worked for him in his factories. While lists of Jews, both during the Holocaust and other times in Jewish history, usually aren’t a good thing for my people, this list was of the employees of Schindler to be shielded from the Nazis.

Set at first in the Krakow ghetto, with later brief scenes at Auschwitz, and finally at the factory in Czechoslovakia, Schindler’s List is full of horrific brutality and many, many people dying horribly on screen. But it ends on a note of hope, as we’re told that generations of people were born and lived because of what Schindler did. 

Schindler’s List won massive critical acclaim and was even a decent-sized box office hit, especially for a three-hour film that’s mostly in black and white and depicts unspeakable horrors. It won six Oscars, including Best Picture and Spielberg’s first Best Director award. Spielberg not only refused a fee for directing the film, but in 1994 he founded what’s now known as the USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education. That organization is the world’s largest collection of digitized testimonials of living Holocaust survivors- a cohort that has gotten much smaller over the 30 years since Schindler’s List was released. 

Once again, I maintain that Schindler’s List is a major work. It tells Schindler’s story in an empathetic way and makes his transformation and redemption feel earned and believable. It’s also brilliantly written, shot, and scored, with Steven Zaillian contributing a great script and Spielberg’s usual collaborators, cinematographer Janusz Kamiński and composer John Williams, doing some of their finest work. 

Liam Neeson gives the best performance of his career as Schindler, while Ralph Fiennes, in one of his first major roles for American audiences, gives one of the best-ever Nazi performances in a movie. Ben Kingsley, in the third major role, plays Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s Jewish accountant. 

The film, it’s important to note, is not afraid to use Spielberg’s trademark corniness, from Kingsley’s “The List Is Life” speech to the epilogue at Schindler’s grave. 

Now, for a film that was critically acclaimed, dominated the Oscars, and is generally regarded warmly, there exists a semi-large coterie of Schindler’s List skeptics. it was always more concentrated in academia than the critical community, but some anti-Schindler’s List types are critics or even filmmakers. 

The cases most often made against the film are the following: 

• It extolls a man who was an actual Nazi and didn’t lift a finger to help Jews until pretty late into the war. He could have done more and, per this viewpoint, simply having him give a speech about how he could have done more isn’t enough. Rich Brownstein, the Holocaust film scholar and author of the book Holocaust Cinema Complete, whom I interviewed recently, made this case, although he was quick to praise Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation work. 

• So many stories of Holocaust heroism involved Jews saving themselves or other Jews, but this featured a non-Jew saving Jews. Maus author Art Spiegelman has said the film “refracts the Holocaust through the central image of a righteous gentile in a world of Jewish bit players and extras.” 

• It has a happy ending when most Holocaust stories do not (“The Holocaust is about 6 million people who get killed. Schindler's List is about 600 who don’t,” Stanley Kubrick once allegedly said). Also, nearly every major character with a name, and who gets a lot of screen time, lives until the end. 

• The scene in which a group of Schindler’s female workers, believing they are headed to his new factory, are instead brought to Auschwitz, where they are stripped naked and brought to a shower room. But instead of gas, water comes out, and then Schindler arranges for them to be sent to the factory, where they survive through the end of the war. This scene has been described as both manipulative and historically inaccurate, with Michael Haneke stating that “the mere idea of trying to draw and create suspense out of the question whether out of the shower head, gas is going to come or water, to me is unspeakable.”

• Those skeptical of Spielberg’s work in general, whether of his sometimes-cornball sensibilities, his unwillingness to challenge power, or both, tend to not like Schindler’s List, either. 

These are all arguments that have been made by people whom I respect greatly, but I disagree with all of them. 

The criticism is that Spielberg should have made a movie about a different Holocaust story, emphasized another aspect of the Holocaust, or made a different person the hero… I’ll just say that no one has ever said that Schindler’s List is or should be the only Holocaust film. There have been so many others, and many more will be made in the future- including the new The Zone of Interest, which is great but as different from Schindler’s List as can be. 

Francis Coppola has said of Apocalypse Now that “my film IS Vietnam,” but Spielberg has never said or implied that “Schindler’s List IS the Holocaust.” 

Who “deserves” to have a movie made about them is a largely pointless and irrelevant question, as we frequently see in the sort of depiction/endorsement confusion so prevalent in film discussion to this day. The relevant question is whether Schindler’s List is a compelling story that’s worth telling, not whether its protagonist was a good enough guy. 

Yes, Oskar Schindler was a complicated, and in some ways terrible man. Even his act of saving Jews was accomplished by giving huge sums of money to Nazis. But the movie acknowledges that, all the way through! It’s completely upfront about his war profiteering, his socializing with Nazis, his greed and amorality, even his womanizing. He keeps the Nazi pin on his jacket until the very end. 

None of that is whitewashed — and if the movie had omitted it, that would be indefensible. It’s just all part of his redemption arc, one of the most moving and well-executed ones in the history of movies. If Schindler’s redemption was good enough for him to be named Righteous Among the Nations and to be buried in Jerusalem, it’s good enough for him to have a movie made about him. 

Point taken about the main characters all living. But Spielberg certainly righted that wrong five years later with his other World War II epic, Saving Private Ryan. And if Schindler’s List were made today, I have a feeling it would focus more on the Jewish characters. And while historians argue about the Auschwitz shower scene, some of the Schinderjuden have said they remember that happening. 

And yes, the film ends on a hopeful note, which is very much the Spielberg way. But not until after we’ve seen some pretty unspeakable brutality. 

People have been arguing about Schindler’s List for 30 years, and I’m happy to keep having those arguments. But count me on the side of those who love and appreciate the film. 

Schindler’s List is available to rent on VOD channels.