"To Give Life is to Live": A Critique of Schindler's List - Part 1

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Life is full of pain, but “A man who saves one saves the world entire,” according to the Talmud. Schindler’s List is the story of that one man, who known to many as a war profiteer, womanizer and Nazi party member became the saving force for 1,100 Polish Jews during the Holocaust. Oskar Schindler was his name, and this film was about his acts that saved generations of people. So, from what began as an independent historical fiction film series evolved into a film series about genocide, which plays such a larger role in recent wars of the last and current centuries.

The themes most present in this film were the good versus evil complex, power, equality and dehumanization. In a detailed foil analysis of Amon Goeth and Oskar Schindler and the director’s constant use of cinematography to depict different interpretations of the humanization of Jews, Schindler’s List contained the essence of the Holocaust in its many horrors yet its humanity in the act of an individual to save many from their deaths.

Day and Night: A Foil Analysis of the Characters Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth

Schindler’s List skillfully depicted a foil comparison/contrast between the main character, Oskar Schindler (representing the internal human desire for good), and his counterpart, Amon Goeth (representing the internal human desire for evil). Although a member of the Nazi party, Schindler’s motives for his company turned from acquiring his own profit to acquiring the survival of the Jews that he employed. In this way, the human desire for good won within Schindler. On the other hand, Amon Goeth’s constant gluttony for violence, intimidation and loyalty to the Nazi party’s actions without doubts reflected the human desire for evil taking over an individual so that he does not even recognize right from wrong anymore. Rather, like the Nazis, he made his own meaning of right and wrong, deciding who should live and who should die.

The Nazis believed that they were delivering justice to the Jews when they would kill them for a wrongdoing (e.g. theft, not working, lack of productivity, idleness, fatigue, illness, etc.) Schindler told Goeth that real power was knowing when to withhold justice and grant pardons to the Jews who erred in the eyes of Goeth. For a while, Goeth believed that this type of power was true power, but again, the foil structure between Schindler and Goeth was too strong that Goeth returned to his old ways to killing for sport. To Goeth, power was taking life, but to Schindler, power was giving life.

The juxtaposition of Schindler’s birthday party scene and the Goeth’s beating of Helen Hirsch depicted the foil nature between Schindler and Goeth. Schindler celebrated life to its fullest with love and friends, showing his naturally good nature when he kissed the Jewish woman. However, the scene of Goeth beating Helen represented man’s naturally tendency to violence and evil acts if left unchecked. The struggle between good and evil continued to erupt in the film and the larger historical event of the Holocaust.

The de-humanization of the Jews by Amon Goeth and the other Nazis, not including Schindler, played a larger role in why many Jews were sent off to Auschwitz and why other Jews were saved. To Amon Goeth, the Jews were like lice and ‘mice’, vestibules of disease and bad qualities, less than human, who would infect the human superior race (the German Aryan race). However, Goeth also struggled between his constant dehumanization of the Jews but yet his natural tendency to have compassion for his housemaid, Helen. To Goeth, any Jew who he did not have any personal interaction with was a shooting target because “she [or he] mattered nothing to him” as Schindler told Helen. However, the close working relationship between Goeth and Helen played upon Goeth’s constant struggle in trying to protect Helen yet not viewing her status as equal to that of the Germans and the Nazi party. Goeth’s finally submitted to allow Schindler to bribe him for the worker rights of 1,100 Jews and to allow Helen to be transported to Schindler’s new labor camp instead of Auschwitz towards the end of the film. Even though he was a perpetrator of human rights violations, Goeth still maintained the capability to choose to humanize Schindler’s Jews and Helen, making them the exception to the millions of Jews who were sent to Auschwitz and other death camps at the end of the war. In a sense, because those 1,100 Jews belonged to Schindler, Goeth elevated their status from simple cargo or property to precious cargo, which became the responsibility of Schindler.

Goeth and Schindler’s constant struggles among themselves and inwardly depicted the constant struggle of mankind with good and evil. It is like our own selves, the internal struggle between good and evil, that comes into play in our daily lives. Every individual has the internal characteristic to be good, but it is their hearts, motives and actions that develop their true nature, either good or evil. Many aspects such as culture, religion and personal convictions factor into the development of one’s character. Schindler had all the makings to become a cold-blood Nazi murderer like his counterparts, but his personal convictions and continuous humanization of the Jews ensured his character to be good. Mass killing of the Jews was considered murder to Schindler - not simply disposal of a lesser race.

The De-Humanization of a People in Film Cinematography

Schindler’s List director Steven Spielberg portrayed the Nazi dehumanization of the Jewish people using multiple references to the animalistic and “less-than-human” portrayal of the Jews in the Nazis’ eyes. First, the Nazis declassified the Polish Jews to second-class citizens, relocating all of the Polish Jews into ghettos. Schindlers’ Jews specifically went to the Krakow Jewish ghetto.

Before and during the ghetto-ization of the Jewish people, the Nazi propaganda compared Jews to vermin, particularly rats. Diagrams and anatomical drawings were displayed in shops’ windows with the faces of Jews and the faces of rats compared side-by-side, showing the resemblance between the two species. Hence, the Jews were classified as something dirty, parasitic, undesirable and worthy of extermination like rats. In one scene, a Polish girl shouted “Goodbye Jews!” three times at the Jews while they moved towards the Krakow ghetto. This scene represented the larger sentiment that the Germans and then the non-Jewish Polish citizens had developed towards the Jews. In their eyes, the Jews needed to go – they were not worthy to dwell with others but were to be marginalized and excluded.

The commonly known Nazi principle was that the Nazis would execute the elderly, the disabled and the ill. There were multiple scenes in Schindler’s List where the Nazis would fire on site at the disabled and the sick. In the scene where Jews were forced to shovel the snow, the Nazis shot an one-armed Jewish man, who was one of Schindler’s workers. However, to the Nazis, he was ‘damaged goods’ and not worthy of living because he could not contribute to the Nazis’ agenda.

Another cinematographic depiction of the dehumanization of the Jews during the Holocaust was the scene in which the Nazis liquidated the Warsaw ghetto. The Nazis came into the Warsaw ghetto and began to round up the Jews without any questioning, only taking those who were obedient and in good health and shooting those who were noncompliant and injured (e.g. the hospital scene). In a parallel universe, watching that scene was like watching a toymaker choose the toys without any blemishes, and those that did not meet the standard, he disposed of them. The Warsaw Jews were commodities for labor, and only the healthy and compliant ones would live.

The next scene of a reference to the dehumanization of the Jews also took place during the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. Poldek Pfefferberg tried to convince his wife, Mila Pfefferberg, to escape the liquidation through escaping into the sewers, but she refused adamantly, saying, “I won’t go in the sewers!” Mila’s protestation towards traveling in the sewers was her constant refusal to do something that would resemble rats because rats traveled in the sewers. 

To be continued...