Ralph Fiennes, right, plays the Nazi camp commandant Amon Goeth.
Schindler’s List is 25 years old. I had not seen the movie in 20 years, and the overwhelming reaction I am left with today is a new astonishment: In the 1990s, Steven Spielberg’s raw, brutal depiction of the unimaginable horrors of the Holocaust was harrowing. It felt like history, a nightmare safely in the distant past. Watching it again now feels like a warning. Here are the lessons for 2018 I gleaned from my recent rewatch.
Complicity and complacency are not only the hallmarks of rising fascism, but absolutely essential to it.
There are two complementary opening sequences to Schindler’s List. The first is the one in which Jews politely line up to register with the Nazis in Krakow, Poland, handing their fates over to an occupying power. With our hindsight, we must acknowledge that compliance with totalitarianism is dangerous, not least because it signals acceptance. The other opening sequence is our introduction to Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), newly arrived in Krakow and sucking up mightily to the Nazi powers that be, hoping to do business with them. He succeeds wildly, because narcissistic emotional children (like the bullies the Nazis were) are susceptible to the kind of flattery and buttering-up that Schindler offers. (Remember this: Bullies, once you recognize them for what they are, can be manipulated. More on this in a bit.)
Empathy can be engaged, in some people, if they aren’t actually sociopaths — but it takes time and proximity.
I’ve never been sure whether Schindler is already plotting subversion as he is scheming to get on the sweet side of the Nazi powers: Spielberg, screenwriter Steven Zaillian, and Neeson are all very coy on this point. I suspect that it is only very gradually that he comes to see what is really happening and that it is really happening to actual human beings, via his relationship with his accountant, Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), who is Jewish, and whom Schindler has to rescue from a train taking Krakow’s Jews to... well, we know where, but likely Schindler at best has only dark, vague suspicions of where his useful, smart employee is headed.
Things go south very quickly.
And blind obedience to authority is a necessary requirement of that. The scene of Jews sorting the luggage that other Jews packed onto the death trains have left behind is like a kick in the gut. As is the scene of Jewish children happily waving goodbye to their parents as they go to what we know will be their deaths. From which follows:
We can no longer feign ignorance of or astonishment at rising totalitarianism, nor can we downplay the peril of it.
We know now that the unimaginable is not only imaginable but entirely possible.
Resist, resist, resist, however you can, from whatever position you can.
We can debate at which point Schindler knows incontrovertibly what is happening to the Jews, but we cannot debate that once he knows, he uses his position, his power and his money to subvert it. There is a special small rebellious magic in how Schindler (and Stern) use bureaucracy to stick it to the Nazis: Schindler’s list is literally just paperwork, a memo to the Nazis about Jewish workhorses he needs to keep running his business.
Toxic masculinity is cultural poison, but it can be disrupted.
The counterpoint to Schindler is Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), the Nazi camp commandant, who shoots Jews from the balcony of his on-site manor for fun. Schindler figures out how to divert his worst impulses, with the sly suggestion that the power he has been using to decide who should die at his caprice could be used to decide who lives at his “mercy.”
We cannot rely on the beneficence of rich white men to save the rest of us.
Of course we must celebrate Schindler’s campaign of resistance, and indeed it forces us to wonder where the likes of him are now — men using their wealth and privilege for the betterment of all. George Soros and Bill Gates are only two dudes... And yet, we must never depend on the whims of rich white men for anything. No individual should wield such power. It’s no way to run a planet.
Schindler’s List remains extremely difficult to watch. But if there is anything heartening to be found in it today, it is the very pertinent lessons it has for us right now.
A restored version of Schindler’s List is currently screening in limited release to commemorate the film’s 25th anniversary. It is playing in Madison at Marcus Point Cinema.
