Film Lesson: Schindler's List

Schindler’s List, directed by Steven Spielberg in 1993, portrays a harsh, remorseless account of the Holocaust.

The scene that was the most powerful for me was when the Nazis were taking away the children. They did it so simply. They led them out with what seemed to be a children’s nursery rhyme, while they all sang along and marched with the soldiers. While all the adults where elsewhere in the camp, the Nazis then loaded the children into several trucks, and closed the trunk once full. And that was it. There was no killing. No bloodshed, and little hassle in the operation (except for the few who ran away). The Nazis were about to begin to move the trucks, when the adults were moved into the dirt field a couple of meters away from the entrance. And there in front of them, were the children. The kids didn’t seem to have a care; they looked as if nothing was wrong, even though everything was horribly wrong. The trucks roared, and the kids were off, waving goodbye. A riot broke out in the group of adults, and they all went running for their children. But the children didn’t have a clue. They continued to wave goodbye while their parents were running and making a desperate attempt to save them. But all was lost. The trucks had already been driven past the gate. Without a care, the children were lulled into thinking they were ok. Their future was lost to the Nazis. This was a very powerful scene, because it comes to show how cruel the Germans were. They took away all the children like taking candy from a baby. They took away the future of the Jews. And what did the children do? Nothing. They were fooled so precisely, and got them into thinking it were just some normal trip. But only history knows what happened after: they were killed. Led away from their parents, and killed. A plain and lucid plan that resulted in the death of all those children is hard to imagine, and depressing when you realize that it was performed with perfect precision.

Another part of the movie that was very emotional was the scenes with the girl in red. In the midst of the liquidation of the ghetto comes a small blonde girl dressed in red, in contrast to the black and white world that surrounds her. Innocent and naïve, she walked the streets of the ghetto while Germans were gunning the Jews down left and right. In all this turmoil, she walks alone. She comes to an apartment, slips inside, and hides herself under a bed, fearing the ferocious soldiers outside. Time passes, and the scene soon comes to Schindler looking at the Germans cremating all of the bodies of the ghetto, to destroy the evidence that a mass murdering had happened. Nameless bodies are all moved in wheelbarrows to a burning pile of Jews, with black soot covering their ragged bodies. Then another cart comes. In it are nameless corpses, and a little girl with a red dress, dead. Her clothes were dirty, dusted, much like the corpses next to her, and her hair was in a messy clump. Indifferently, she is placed on the ramp to be incinerated. I found this to be the most emotional scene of all because it was like she was a representative of the burden held by all of the Jews. She was a little girl, with aspirations to grow up and become something great, just like everyone else. She was an individual with a family, friends, and a place to call home. She had done nothing wrong, and yet, she and the people she knew were being ruthlessly killed before her eyes. Her life ended abruptly, symbolizing how the Jews had everything taken away from them, when they still had so much more to give.

Some of the images that will always stay with me were the brutal deaths of the Jews. For example, when a Jewish engineer tried to advise the German of an error in the construction of a facility, they shot her down through her head. Her head pummeled to the earth with such a force that she bounced back up and landed on her side. Another killing that was memorable (in a bad way) was when a young man tried to run from the formation of Jews. One German soldier attempted at firing at him, but they all missed. Two other soldiers chased after him, and caught him when he was about twenty-five feet away. They dragged him by the arms back to the line of Jews, and another soldier shot him square in the chest when he was only about fifteen feet away. An odd sort of dust mixed with blood spurted out of him, and he fell limp in the two Germans’ arms.