Now, just as the eyewitnesses have begun to die off, that day has come. Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece is more than just another serious film that will win a bunch of Academy Awards. “Schindler’s List” inserts the audience squarely inside the crime of the century, and by doing so, it enlarges the potential of the medium itself–to teach as well as entertain, to evoke history as much as fantasy, to prepare us for our own context of violence.
Mail bombs sent by neo-Nazis last week blew off the fingers of the mayor of Vienna. “Ethnic cleansing” continues in Bosnia. A Hollywood movie–even one that the president of the United States “implores” the public to see–can’t stop that. But the reach of film today is greater than Joseph Goebbels could have possibly dreamed. Across the world, moviegoers believe Oliver Stone’s myths about the Kennedy assassination. If there’s any justice, these same millions will now believe Spielberg’s truths about the concentration camps. The message of “Schindler’s list” comes from the Talmud: Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. All it takes is one. In the darkness of the theater, in East Timor or Croatia or Burundi, may sit just one Oskar Schindler, waiting to be reborn.
This is the connection between Spielberg, Schindler and Leopold Page (Pfefferberg in his earlier life), the survivor most responsible for bringing the story to life. Page owned a luggage shop in Beverly Hills and for 30 years he told the story of Schindler to any writer or movie type who walked into his store. Finally, in 1980, Australian novelist Thomas Keneally was waiting for his credit card to clear and heard Page’s tale. He listened, and his extensively researched novel became the basis of the film. “A human being–a single person–can change the world. That’s what I’ve been trying to do since 1945 when I promised Schindler I would tell everyone about his story,” Page says. Schindler changed Page who changed Keneally who changed Spielberg who changed…who ?
During screenings, the movie frequently sparked comparisons to “Gone With the Wind,” though it lacks any romance. There are technical reasons for its timelessness: it’s a period piece, shot in black and white, and stylized like a 1930s classic. But the larger accomplishment is that Spielberg has brought history and film into rough but proper alignment. For years, memories of the Civil War were passed down from grandpa to the rest of the family. Then grandpa finally died, and “Gone With the Wind” took up the Homeric burden of passing the epic along. The same will soon be true for the Holocaust and “Schindler’s List.” When literal memory ends, cultural memory can begin.
Some people believe too much has been made of the Holocaust. They haven’t seen the latest Polls. In a survey of Americans, The Roper Organization found last spring that some 22 percent of respondents said it seemed “possible” that “the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened.” Another 12 percent said they didn’t know. (The numbers in a similar poll were much more encouraging in Great Britain.) The explanation isn’t so much anti-Semitism as ignorance. More than 50 percent of high-school students didn’t know what the word “Holocaust” meant. A quarter of all adults didn’t even know that it was in Germany that the Nazis first came to power. They must have missed those “Hogan’s Heroes” reruns.
Of course the same ignorance applies to much of American history and nobody seems worried that, say, the survivors of Pearl Harbor are dying. But there aren’t “scholars” popping up to deny that Pearl Harbor was bombed. Without new testaments every generation, the hate virus grows stronger and attaches itself more firmly to despised peoples everywhere. As the eyewitnesses to this and the century’s other genocides pass on, the gap must be filled in the only way possible–by art with the power to transform.
Hollywood isn’t often about art, and the commercialism embodied by Spielberg would seem a peculiar mix with the sanctuaries of history. Indeed, the World Jewish Congress would not allow Spielberg to film at Auschwitz, explaining that it was sacred ground, a graveyard. He was restricted to an area outside the gates. Little did those Jewish leaders know that the director was building his own memorial, which will last as long as any bricks and mortar. That’s why the presence of Spielberg and his actors inside the Washington, D.C., Holocaust Memorial Museum seemed strangely fitting last month. A ceremony honoring Schindler pointed up how much the museum and the movie have in common. With their eye for human detail, they each transfix, overwhelm, linger. Most of all, they universalize, by conveying how easily the world slipped into madness. Yesterday, the Jews. Tomorrow, anyone. The Holocaust Museum, open only since April, is so much more popular than expected that it is turning away visitors on weekends, and more than 60 percent of the nearly I million who have already made the tour are non-Jews.
THIS BODES WELL FOR “SCHINDLER’S LIST.” THE FILM is much more proudly Jewish than other Holocaust movies, but it is built around the story of a German Christian. That broadens access to the story and sharpens the central moral question: What would you have done? One of the great ironies of postwar American cinema is that such an idea, so potentially rich in artistic inspiration, has been extraordinarily difficult to evoke in film. The evil is so immense–and thus so prone to trivialization that the normal approach has been to back off from confronting it directly.
“How is one to tell a tale that cannot be–but must be–told? I don’t know.” Elie Wiesel has written. Wiesel, Primo Levi and other survivors bear witness on paper, but filmmakers have usually either chipped off tangential pieces of the story or worked as documentarians. For all the hundreds of movies employing World War II themes, the strange truth is that until now no major feature film has unflinchingly faced the horror of the Holocaust itself.
“The Pawnbroker” and “Sophie’s Choice” beautifully mined the displaced sorrow of survivors in the years after the war, as did “Enemies, A Love Story.” “The Diary of Anne Frank” and the TV movie “Playing for Time” focused on the character of one woman doomed by history. “The Night Porter” nihilistically exploited the story for its sadism. All were disturbing but lacked the direct descent to hell depicted by Spielberg. They also lacked the redemptive uplift of Liam Neeson’s protagonist. Somehow, “Schindler’s List” manages to be simultaneously more overpowering and less depressing than anything on this subject attempted by Hollywood before.
Among documentaries, Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah” and Marcel Ophuls’s “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “The Memory of justice” and “Hotel Terminus” all brilliantly used either archival footage or, more effectively, personal memories. The directors served as heroic historians, preserving scores of firsthand accounts while the witnesses were still alive. Yet as movie experiences, they can feel numbing and forbidding, certainly for mass audiences. To someone who hasn’t seen it, “Schindler’s List” sounds as if it’s in the same category. It certainly seems like a movie made by a European auteur (“It is impossible that these are the same blokes who made ‘E.T.’,” says Keneally). But it compels in its own, entirely fresh way.
The only other frontal approach outside the art houses came in 1978 when NBC aired the miniseries “Holocaust.” This served an extremely valuable educational function for the historically ignorant, especially when it was shown in Germany. But the plight of the Jews came off mostly as just another sentimentalized disease-of-the-week show, torqued up for sweeps. The series managed to diminish the horror even as it melodramatized it. Only “The Killing Fields,” which was about the destruction of Cambodians, not Jews, approaches “Schindler’s List” in authentically conveying the texture of genocide.
One of the ways that Spielberg negotiates the dangers inherent in the material is to meld old-fashioned storytelling with the documentary style. But he manages this without seeming deceptive or cheap, perhaps because he never intercuts archival film, as Oliver Stone does. At the very end, when the actual, now elderly Schindler’s Jews gather at his grave in Israel, the “true” story intrudes, but this is mostly just to remind us that Oskar Schindler is not Indiana Jones but someone who lived.
BECAUSE HE’S PAINTING WITH REALITY, SPIELBERG resists personalizing the Jewish victims too much. He’s been criticized, wrongly, for this. The horror is actually more authentic for its impersonal nature. If characters we knew well were killed, the murders would be more heart-wrenching, perhaps–but less palpably real.An even greater challenge was to rip the Nazis free of their cliches. This is accomplished by emphasizing officious bureaucrats who are the embodiment of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”–and by Ralph Fiennes’s warped commandant, Amon Goeth. His depravity in the film is no exaggeration. “I knew Goeth,” says Anna Duklauer Perl, a survivor with no connection to the book or movie. “One day he hung a friend of mine just because he had once been rich. He was the devil.”
Plenty of Amon Goeths live on today–in Bosnia, among other places. Spielberg says he made the film in part for that reason. But invoking the Holocaust in modern-day policy discussions has always been perilous. Does it minimize the particularity of the war against the Jews? Does it superimpose differing circumstances on top of each other? Or is it that deepest of moral questions circling back toward us again?
Shortly after he saw the film, I asked President Clinton whether it made him rethink his Bosnia policy. After condemning the “crazy” and “terrible” ethnic hatreds in the region, he answered: “I really think it’s different. I don’t think you can make a case that it is the same thing and to the same degree that drove us into World War II.” (Actually, it was Pearl Harbor, not violence against civilians, that drew us into the war.) “On the other hand,” the president continued, “the most troubling thing to me about ‘Schindler’s List’ was being reminded that we turned away boatloads of Jews….And so, we are now engaged in the longest humanitarian airlift in American history in Bosnia. We have, I think, helped to forestall anything worse happening in Sarajevo. [The film] didn’t make me think we should have put huge numbers of soldiers on the ground to try to stop them. It did make me think we cannot afford to be totally disengaged.”
The president cannot move more aggressively in Bosnia because, quite simply, the American people do not want him to. Changing that view–if indeed, it should be changed–is mostly a matter of his political leadership. But it is also in the realm of art and memory. Shortly before he committed suicide, Primo Levi wrote:
“For us [the survivors] to speak with the young becomes ever more difficult. We see it as a duty and, at the same time, as a risk: the risk of appearing anachronistic, of not being listened to. We must be listened to: above and beyond our personal experiences, we have collectively witnessed a fundamental, unexpected event…It took place in the teeth of all forecasts; it happened in Europe; incredibly, it happened that an entire civilized people…followed a buffoon whose figure today inspires laughter, and yet Adolf Hitler was obeyed and his praises were sung right up to the catastrophe. It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say.”
That is the core of what Steven Spielberg has to say in “Schindler’s List.” And it is the core of what the rest of us have to see.
