A Review of "Schindler's List"

by Rohini Hensman (Union Research Group)

"Schindler's List" is based on a real-life story of a Nazi whose
humanity finally prevails over self-interest and the ideology of the
party to which he belongs. Shot almost entirely in black-and-white, the
film opens with the Nazi occupation of Poland and their decree forcing
all Jews to relocate to the cities. Oscar Schindler is a member of the
Nazi Party, not, it appears, because he is particularly attracted by its
ideology but because membership is likely to further his business
prospects. His primary interest is to make money; he witnesses the Jews
being driven into Krakow, deprived of their rights, and herded into
an overcrowded ghetto without thinking of much more than the opportunity
this provides to make money by exploiting Jewish slave labour. To this
end he recruits Itzhak Stern as accountant and plant manager of his
factory making enamel-coated pots and pans for the German army, and
leaves him in charge of recruiting a workforce and managing production.

Stern accepts this job, but his agenda is different. Aware of the dire
plight of his fellow-Jews, he gets a professor, rabbi, middle-aged
housewives and even a one-armed man certified as "skilled metal workers"
engaged in essential production for the German army, knowing that their
lives may depend on their job. Thus Schindler, quite unwittingly at
first, provides a safe haven for persecuted Jews. To begin with this
does not conflict with his aim of making lots of money; he even
establishes a superficially cordial relationship with Amon Goeth, the
brutal and bestial Nazi Commandant of a forced labour camp, who kills
Jews at random because he enjoys the sense of power it gives him. But as
things get worse, Schindler is forced to choose.

One of the most harrowing sequences is the liquidation of the Krakow
ghetto, in the course of which 10,000 of its Jewish inhabitants are
brutally murdered. Schindler watches the scene from a distance, stunned.
His eyes picks out a figure, a pretty little girl walking jauntily along
amidst the terror-stricken crowd; later, when the victims of the ghetto
are exhumed and incinerated, he sees her corpse trundled in a
wheelbarrow and thrown into the fire: a powerful symbol of the total
annihilation of beauty and innocence which the Nazis stood for. "His"
Jews are no longer his: even those who survived the destruction are
faced with the gas chambers.

Schindler is ready to leave for his home Czechoslovakia with several
trunks full of more than enough money to provide him with all that he
could desire for the rest of his life. But parting with Stern turns out
to be harder than he anticipated; Stern is quite aware that he and the
rest of the workforce are destined for the extermination camps. A strong
point of the film is the almost imperceptible way in which this quiet
man, with his unflinching determination to save as many of his people as
possible, gradually comes to have a powerful moral influence over his
boss. At the last minute, Schindler changes his mind; with the help of
Stern, he draws up a list of 1100 Jews whom he wishes to take with him
on the pretext of producing armaments in a labour camp in
Czechoslovakia, and "buys" them from Goeth by playing on the
Commandant's avarice and stupidity. In a symbolic reversal of his
earlier purpose in life, he spends the money he made by exploiting the
labour of Jews in buying the lives of Jews; whatever is not spent in
bribing Goeth and other Nazi officials is subsequently spent in feeding
his workforce while producing armaments which are deliberately
sub-standard and therefore cannot be sold. Thus by the end of the war he
is completely broke, and, as a Nazi, on the run. What he does have,
however, is a character certificate signed by all his workers, and a
ring made from the denntal crown of one of the workers inscribed in
Hebrew with the saying: whoever saves one life saves the entire world.

This is a powerful film whose importance is not just historical. With
the resurgence of fascism im Europe, and its emergence in many other
parts of the world, it is a timely reminder of the overwhelmimg
degradation and ugliness hiding behind the high-sounding phrases of
fascist ideology, just as the bestial gang-rapes in Surat and other
places reveal the ugly face of Hindu chauvinism behind its religious
saffron mask. It is especially good that the film is showing in Hindi.
Only just over two years ago Bal Thackeray said in an interview, "Have
the Muslims behaved like the Jews in Nazi Germany? If so, there is
nothing wrong if they are treated as the Jews were in Nazi Germany." Do
viewers of the film agree with him? The Jews in the film are shown as
ordinary people who live, love and work like anyone else; only their
religious customs and beliefs are different from those of the majority
community. Is this a sufficient reason for the majority community to
exterminate them? The film depicts the moral degeneration of a society
that allows six million Jews to be wiped out; it shows in sickening
detail the repulsive character of those like Amon Goeth who carry out
Nazi policies. Ironically, although they regard members of the minority
community as less than human, it is they themselves who are sub-human -
so much so, that it seems an insult to animals to call them "brutes" or
"beasts".

Nazi Germany is a case where fascists achieved state power, and were
therefore able to carry out their inhuman policies without hindrance.
But they were around for a long time before they took over state power,
and Hitler was actually voted into office. How could so many people have
given their approval to such a monstrous regime? Why didn't people of
the majority community rise up in protest and stop the inhuman measures
taken against their fellow human beings? Perhaps one of the reasons
could be that the majority community already had deep-rooted prejudices
against the Jews. The film makes it clear that even if some Jews were
communal or fundamentalist, such a small minority could not possibly be a
threat to the whole of society; yet Nazi propaganda made out that they
were a threat, and people who already had anti-Semitic communal feelings
swallowed their lies.

It is important for us to be aware of how fascist movements operate,
because even if they don't achieve state power they can carry out
horrific atrocities, and if they do, it means brutalisation of a whole
society. A major part of their strategy is to enforce conformity and
stamp out difference. At first they concentrate on the most obvious
differences - in skin colour, ethnicity, language or religion - which
can only be stamped out by genocide of the people of the people with
these characteristics. Billie Holiday's moving song "Strange Fruit"
describes one such form of fascism, the American lynch mobs which could
not tolerate the existence of black people except as slaves:

Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze -
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

The Nazis exterminated not only Jews but also minorities such as
gypsies. But the obsession with eliminating deviance goes much further.
Communists were high on their list of those to be eliminated, as they
are also on the RSS list. Ultimately any critical element, however mild,
has to be eliminated. Stamping out the right to be different entails
stamping out all freedoms: the laws of Nazi Germany, like those of
Apartheid South Africa, forbade mixed marriages.

While cases where fascist organisations have actually come to power are
limited in number, there are many more cases throughout the world where
they are gaining strength. In India, with such organisations already
holding power in some states and making a bid for power at the centre,
it is crucially important for us to ask ourselves: do we really want to
be plunged into universal brutality and ugliness? Perhaps this film will
make Hindu supremacists who share the chauvinist attitudes of the Nazis
ask themselves: are they, like Schindler, going to reform and become
human again? Or will they follow in the footsteps of Amon Goeth?

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