“Schindler’s List” – thirty years on

It is now thirty years since Steven Spielberg’s extraordinary “Schindler’s List” was released – I watch it every few years and see something new every time. The film is not an overtly campaigning or political movie and nor was Thomas Keneally’s non fiction novel, “Schindler’s Ark” on which it was based. They both tell a fundamentally true story.

One of the challenges of artistic creation is to be subtle even in the face of history that is horrific. War films rarely achieve this. “All Quiet on the Western Front” was an exception and there have been a few others but all too often they have been blood and guts hero stories rather than giving genuine insights into the human condition. “Schindler’s List” isn’t really a “war film” at all – in essence it symbolises the depths to which citizens of “civilised” countries can plunge.

The myth is that The Holocaust was an aberration flowing from the genocidal madness of Germany’s leaders. It was that, but never forget how many thousands were complicit in implementing “Sonderbehandlung” (“special treatment”) as it was euphemistically called. In the film a group of officers discuss this in a matter of fact way as if the gas chambers were perfectly normal. It is a morality free zone at Auschwitz.

Oskar Schindler is the contrasting phenomenon to the norm of time and place. He succeeded because he left no evidence that the Nazis could use to prosecute him – he was once locked up by them but was cunning enough to get out. He established a pragmatic “friendship” with the grotesque Austrian Amon Göth who was Commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp. The Light and Dark contrast of Schindler and Göth is a key theme of the film.

The messages of “Schindler’s List” are , I think, personal rather than being overt. For me “challenge the norms” is one. Mind you to be effective in that challenge in Kraków in the 1940s took a special type of cleverness and courage which Schindler had.

There is no hierarchy of horror in history. The family murdered in Auschwitz is the same as one slain in Gaza. The quantum makes The Holocaust exceptional but at a personal level it’s the same. Otto Frank lost his daughter Anne and his wife Edith in Bergen-Belsen. Over the past eighty years from Stalin’s Gulags to Mai Lai to Tiannamen Square to Netanyahu’s attacks in Palestine families have continued to be bereaved. Not “collateral damage” but as targets.

“Where have all the graveyards gone, long time passing?
Where have all the graveyards gone, long time ago?
Where have all the graveyards gone?
Gone to flower, every one!
When will they ever learn, oh when will they ever learn?”