Context
In 1933, Adolf Hitler and the National
Socialist German Workers' (Nazi) Party assumed power in Germany
and began plans for war. The party wanted to rid Germany, and eventually
the world, of “impure” groups: Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and the
handicapped, among others. Thus began a period of genocide.
In 1935, the German government
passed the Nuremberg Laws, which defined individuals as Jews based
not on their religious practices but on bloodlines. In other words,
a person raised Christian who had at least three Jewish grandparents
was considered Jewish and therefore impure. These laws also called
for the separation of the “pure” Aryan race from the Jews. In 1938,
in an event called Kristallnacht (Night of Broken
Glass), the Nazis broke windows and tore apart Jewish businesses
and synagogues, foreshadowing the eventual attempt at comprehensive
destruction of the Jewish race.
When Germany invaded Poland in 1939,
the policies of racial hatred already in place in Germany were adopted
in the new German-occupied territories. Jewish people could no longer
own businesses in Poland and other German-occupied territories and eventually
were forced to wear armbands or patches emblazoned with the Star
of David so they could be easily identified as Jews. They were forced
out of their homes in the city and countryside and into ghettos,
concentrated and separated from rest of the population. The Kraków
ghetto, featured in Schindler's List, covered sixteen
square blocks and was populated by approximately 20,000 Jews.
In time, Jews were forced to work in labor camps, and some were
murdered by mobile killing units.
Around 1941, the “Final Solution”
was implemented in order to exterminate all the Jews, Gypsies, and
other “impure” groups in Europe. Today, it stands as one of the
darkest periods in human history. The Nazis evacuated Jews violently
from the ghettos, sending them to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and other
death camps to face the gas chambers. Bodies of the murdered were
cremated in large ovens, often making the sky above the death camps
and surrounding towns black with smoke, with human ashes raining
down like snow.
During this bleak and terrifying period in Kraków, Oskar
Schindler, a war profiteer and womanizer, saved the lives of about 1,100 Jews
who worked for him. These people would come to call themselves Schindlerjuden (Schindler
Jews). Given that the Nazis killed millions of people during the
Holocaust, 1,100 might
seem an insignificant number. However, this number represents 1,100 unique human
lives, all of which would have ceased to exist if not for Schindler,
and those 1,100 produced
some six thousand descendants. Despite the overwhelming scale of
the Holocaust as a whole, the powerful story of the Schindlerjuden and
the man who risked his life and wealth to save their lives has endured.
In 1983, Australian author Thomas
Keneally published his fact-based novel Schindler's Ark, which
chronicled, through first-person accounts, the amazing story of
the Schindlerjuden. American film director Steven
Spielberg read the book about the same time he was filming his movie E.T. He
was struck by the story, particularly by the book's powerful rendering
of the Holocaust through individual accounts. Spielberg was driven
to adapt the book into a film, but it was ten years before he was
emotionally ready to embark on the project.
Spielberg, born on December 18, 1947,
in Cincinnati, Ohio, was raised by Jewish parents in the suburbs
of Phoenix, Arizona. There, he was dismayed to find he was the only
Jew most of his classmates had ever met. He went on to study English
at California State University, Long Beach, when his grades were
not good enough to get him into film school. Nonetheless, he managed
to land a job on the Universal Studios lot and, after starting out
directing television shows, eventually moved to films. By the age
of thirty, he had directed two of the highest-grossing films of
all time: Jaws (1975) and Close
Encounters of the Third Kind (1977).
Spielberg went on to become one of the most popular, prolific directors
in history, with blockbuster films such as Raiders of the
Lost Ark (1981), E.T. (1982), Jurassic
Park (1993), and Saving
Private Ryan (1998).
The story of the Schindlerjuden greatly
affected Spielberg. He has said that he had fallen out of touch
with his Jewish identity as an adult but that he learned a great
deal about his own heritage while researching Schindler's
List. After visiting Auschwitz, the enormous responsibility
of his project became clear. Spielberg understood that in order
to help people digest and understand an event as huge and incomprehensible
as the Holocaust, he had to make the stories personal.
The director's intentions for the film were to educate
people about the Holocaust, to silence those who deny that the Holocaust ever
happened, and to make sure people never forget so that history does
not repeat itself. Moreover, he filmed the movie in the early 1990s
when genocide against Serbs, Bosnian Muslims, and ethnic Albanians
was taking place in Yugoslavia. The fact that another genocide could
happen in the present day strengthened Spielberg's desire to educate.
When Schindler's List opened in 1993,
it received widespread critical acclaim. Spielberg expected a decent
number of people to see the movie in theaters but primarily hoped
the film would be adopted by schools in order to educate students
about the Holocaust. To his surprise, more than fifty million people
saw the film in theaters, and more than sixty-five million people
watched it during a special airing on national television.
Schindler's List transformed Spielberg
from the king of high-budget action-adventure movies into a director
capable of creating moving human drama. The film finally earned
him the Academy Award for Best Director—a prize that had eluded
him in the past. In addition to Best Director, Schindler's
List won six more Academy Awards: Best Art Direction (Set
Design), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Music (Original
Score), Best Picture, and Best Writing (Screenplay Based on Material
Previously Produced or Published). The film also won three Golden
Globe awards, for Best Director, Best Motion Picture (Drama), and
Best Screenplay (Motion Picture).
