"To Give Life is to Live": A Critique of Schindler's List - Part 2

Allusive Scenes of Dehumanization

Schindler’s List had multiple scenes of constant disposal of the Jews’ clothes, suitcases and their belongings. The Nazis would take their luggage before boarding trains, convincing their Jewish subjects that their luggage would arrive with them to their destination, but it never did. Instead, the Nazis collected the Jews’ belongings and mined through them for valuables – real silver menorahs, teeth with silver and gold fillings, and diamond and silver jewelry. In a sense, the Jews were debased to their belongings’ worth, once again dehumanizing the Jews as commodities and disposed goods that would soon be forgotten. The classical music composition for one of these scenes was titled “Stolen Memories”, which was what was depicted – lost memories, ravaged by the Nazis to blot out the history of millions of people who could only be remembered by those who lost them in the War.

The last scene of dehumanization that I would like to note is the gas chamber scene in the end of the film. After Schindler successfully gained the transport of his approximate 700 male workers to the new labor camp in Czechoslovakia, the women workers were accidentally sent via train to Auschwitz instead. The women arrived terrified because they knew where they were. The process of extermination began where their heads were shaved and they were made to strip of their clothes. The Nazi guards then led the women into a bath chamber and then closed the door.

Again, when the Nazis removed the Jews of clothes and cut all of the Jews’ hair short, they were dehumanizing the Jews to animals like cattle to be led to the slaughterhouse. The film focused on the Nazi guards point of view from the large window into the bath chamber, depicting the women like scared mice because with their short hair and loss of clothes, they resembled each other so much. But when the lights were turned off and the showers started, the women quickly realized that instead of toxic gas, they received saving water.

Immolation

Image from Google Images

Immolation. Definition: the act of killing or offering as a sacrifice, esp. by burning. Since ancient times, the Jews used immolation as one of the forms of sacrifice to God for atonement of their sins (e.g. burnt offerings). But in the Holocaust, the Jews were that burnt offering for the Nazis - their way of atoning their acts against the Jewish people. To them, immolation was their way of justifying their madness and cruelty towards the Jews as well as to demolish their evidence of their treatment against the Jews.

The image of immolation depicted in Schindler’s List began with an innocent image of snow-like dust falling from the sky in the summer. Children ran around in Krakow, excited over the prospect of white matter falling from the sky in the summer. But Schindler’s face communicated the fear, confusion and reality of the white matter – smoke bits falling from the sky, which meant there was a massive fire ongoing in the outskirts of Krakow.

When Schindler arrived to the scene, he witnessed the horror of how the Płaszów labor camp members were being forced to uncover the buried bodies of their fellow Jews and then place them on a ramp to be then burned in a giant pyre. The gaunt carcasses of the Jews on film cut to the core of the film’s audience, hoping to transcend a view of the reality and inhumanity that took place in Nazi Poland.

The Girl in Red

Image from Google Images

During the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto, the film focused on one little girl in a red coat. As the rest of the film was in black and white, this little girl in the red coat stood out. She was a larger symbol for the innocence of the Jews but the multitude of blood spilt as well. The little girl wandered from line to line during the liquidation period of the Jews; yet, the Nazis did not shoot her freely as they did with other non-compliant Jews because she was child. The little girl then escaped into another building without being noticed because she was only a child, probably four or five years old at most.

The Nazis must have discovered her whereabouts in the building in the Krakow ghetto. Many of the children who were first placed in the Płaszów labor camp were eventually sent to Auschwitz’s death camp because the Nazis planned to annihilate all Jews from the youngest generation to the elderly. As one of the German officers said regarding the Jews, “No future – no legacy. It’s policy now.” He was referring to the Nazis’ Final Solution.

The audience does not see this little girl again until her dead body was being rolled away in a wheelbarrow to the giant burning pyre. The shock that Schindler and the audience had when they witnessed what the fate of the little girl in red was overcoming. According to multiple sources, the fate of the girl in red was the game-changer for how Schindler perceived the treatment of Jews, changing his mentality from collateral damage to inhumane treatment against a people. The girl in red was the lamb led to her slaughter. Her death represented all of the innocent deaths of the Jews.

Conclusion

20 years ago, Steven Spielberg directed and produced Schindler’s List about one of the most inhumane, unjust and occurrences of genocide and war in modern times, and one man’s small kindness that changed the course of history for so many Jewish generations to come. Yet, this story is not only the story of the Jews because a life for one man is worth the same for any other man. Aren’t we all born equal in the eyes of God? And isn’t diminishing one man’s life to something less is also diminishing every man’s life? Who has the right to choose who can live and who to die? These are the questions with which I leave you.