Guest Author - Peggy Maddox

Everyone has heard of the movie called Schindler's List (1993), but how many movie-goers who flocked to Spielberg's other films have watched this one?

I wonder because my own reluctance to avoid the painful subject of the Jewish Holocaust caused me to hesitate 14 years before finally sitting down to watch this superb movie.

Some history-challenged people actually fall for the lie that the Jewish holocaust "never happened." It happened, all right, and the Spielberg film comes as close as anything could to conveying both the horror and the frightening ordinariness of it.

The film has a huge cast, most of whom appear in crowded scenes. From the three principal actors all the way down to the little girl in the red coat, the performances are perfect. The depictions of respectable middle-class men and women being driven from comfortable homes to be systematically reduced to the status of naked two-legged animals, is riveting and excruciating. The intensity of the brutal "final liquidation" of the Krakow ghetto on March 13, 1943, which Schindler watches from the hillside, reduced me to sobs. It is believable that the event transformed the greedy, self-centered war profiteer into the man who would risk death and beggar himself in order to save as many Jews as he could.

Schindler's List won seven Oscars: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay based on material from another medium (Schindler's Ark by Thomas Keneally), Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Editing, and Best Music for an original score.

It also received five Oscar nominations, including one for Liam Neeson as Best Actor. Neeson lost out to Tom Hanks, but his performance in Schindler's List is far more complex than that of Hanks in Philadelphia. Hanks turned in an excellent performance as the likable young lawyer stricken by AIDS and discriminated against because of his illness. It was easy for audiences to empathize with Andrew Beckett. Neeson's task in Schindler's List, on the other hand, is to portray a man who is despicable on many levels, yet was able to perform a monumental act of courage and determination.

Oskar Schindler was a womanizer who repeatedly humiliated his wife, a heavy drinker, and a black marketeer. He was a member of the Nazi party and owed his wartime financial success to his ability to talk the Nazi talk. A failure in business both before and after the war, Schindler was able to accumulate an enormous fortune because Jewish-owned businesses were "Aryanized," that is, taken from their owners and given to non-Jews to run. Without the services of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, it is questionable how successful Schindler would have been even with his wartime advantages.

No one will ever know what caused Schindler to act as he did. In the film he has a kind of evil twin, the Nazi work camp commandant played by Ralph Fiennes. In one scene, in an apparent effort to persuade Goeth not to kill any more prisoners as the mood takes him, Schindler says that true power lies in sparing the people at one's mercy. Goeth tries it a few times, but evidently derives more satisfaction from killing than in pardoning. One is left to wonder if at least part of Schindler's motivation in saving "his" Jews was the sense of power it gave him.

Whatever his motive, Schindler saved about 1,200 Jews from extermination and made it possible for their 6,000 descendants to be born.

Spielberg's Schindler's List is an important film to watch, not just as a vivid depiction of what was done to the Jews during World War II, but as a timely warning of what can happen when a group of people is singled out for less than equal standing in the community. It all begins with words.

An important ingredient in the Nazi propaganda that served to dehumanize the Jews to their fellow countrymen was the use of non-human words to refer to them. Amon Goeth, the Nazi commandant, ponders the problem in his sick relationship with his Jewish domestic Helen. He is confused by his attraction to a creature whom his government has taught him to call by such words as vermin, lice, and filth.

How we talk about people determines how we behave towards them. It's something to think about next time you hear someone use a term that places someone else in a non-human category.

When all his other films are forgotten, Spielberg's Schindler's List will remain one of the greatest movies ever made.