Schindler's List (1993)

"Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire."

Directed by Steven Spielberg
Produced by Steven Spielberg, Gerald R. Molen, Branko Lustig
Screenplay by Steven Zaillian
Based on "Schindler's Ark" by Thomas Keneally
Starring: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagall, Embeth Davidtz
Music by John Williams
Cinematography: Janusz Kamiński
Edited by Michael Kahn
Production company: Amblin Entertainment
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release date: 25 December 1993 (Canada)
Running time: 197 minutes
Country: United States, Poland, Israel
Budget: $22 million
Box office: $321.2 million

"Schindler's List" is a biographical history drama, directed and co-produced by Steven Spielberg, scripted by Steven Zaillian, and based on the novel "Schindler's Ark" by Thomas Keneally. The story is about Oskar Schindler, who saved the lives of more than a thousand mostly Polish-Jewish refugees during the Holocaust by employing them in his factories.

Cast

• Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler
• Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern
• Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth
• Caroline Goodall as Emilie Schindler
• Jonathan Sagall as Poldek Pfefferberg
• Embeth Davidtz as Helen Hirsch
• Małgorzata Gebel as Wiktoria Klonowska
• Mark Ivanir as Marcel Goldberg
• Beatrice Macola as Ingrid
• Andrzej Seweryn as Julian Scherner
• Friedrich von Thun as Rolf Czurda
• Jerzy Nowak as Investor
• Norbert Weisser as Albert Hujar
• Anna Mucha as Danka Dresner
• Piotr Polk as Leo Rosner
• Rami Heuberger as Joseph Bau
• Ezra Dagan as Rabbi Menasha Lewartow
• Hans-Jörg Assmann as Julius Madritsch
• Hans-Michael Rehberg as Rudolf Höß
• Daniel Del Ponte as Josef Mengele
• Oliwia Dąbrowska as The Girl in Red

I don't think that Steven Spielberg must be presented as I'm convinced: almost everyone knows him as one of the greatest and most successful filmmaker. And his "Schindler's List" stays one of the best pictures in the world and not in vain. This black-and-white work shows all the horrors of war with which faced the Jews. The film is difficult to watch, in my opinion, because it looks like the reality. Music and dialogues make this sense even more hard-nosed.

Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler is incredible. His voice, his face let me feel hope that the Jews will be saved. Amon Goeth performed by Ralph Fiennes makes me hate him - I think it's a good sign as a good antagonist must attract a viewer as good as a protagonist.

Advantages

• Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler
• Ben Kingsley as Itzhak Stern
• Ralph Fiennes as Amon Goeth
• The film is black and white
• The realness

Disadvantages

• The film leaves a nasty taste in the mouth

"Strangenesses"

• Why someone can judge people because of their nation?

Clue Moments

• A girl in red
• The piano
• The one-armed worker
• The misfire
• Oskar's speech
• Oskar's send-off
• The Russian soldier
• The grave

As I'm Russian, it was interesting for me what had been happening in Germany during the Second World War. And it turned out hard for me to see that the Nazis were cruel not only outside their country but also inside. They killed thousands skilled or talented people just because of their ethnicity. And what? Why did Hitler pay so much attention to the race? Climbing to power he wanted to keep only the perfect race, the Aryan one. I know that Arthur de Gobineau was the man who developed the theory of the Aryan master race in his book "An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races". However I still can't understand how one race might be better than an other one? We're all people. And why people murder other people? Why did they need or still do need genocide? Because of an idea?

According to Wiki, Oskar Schindler was an ethnic German industrialist, spy, and member of the Nazi Party who is credited with saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware and ammunitions factories, which were located in occupied Poland and the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

In 1939 Schindler obtained an enamelware factory in Kraków, Poland, which employed around 1,750 workers, of whom a thousand were Jews at the factory's peak in 1944. His Abwehr connections helped Schindler to protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death in the Nazi concentration camps. Initially Schindler was interested in the money-making potential of the business. Later he began shielding his workers without regard for the cost. As time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials ever larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtainable only on the black market to keep his workers safe.

As Germany began losing the war in July 1944, the SS began closing down the easternmost concentration camps and evacuating the remaining prisoners westward. Many were killed in Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen concentration camp. Schindler convinced SS-Hauptsturmführer Amon Göth, commandant of the nearby Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp, to allow him to move his factory to Brünnlitz in the Sudetenland, thus sparing his workers from certain death in the gas chambers. Using names provided by Jewish Ghetto Police officer Marcel Goldberg, Göth's secretary Mietek Pemper compiled and typed the list of 1,200 Jews who travelled to Brünnlitz in October 1944. Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent the execution of his workers until the end of World War II in Europe in May 1945, by which time he had spent his entire fortune on bribes and black-market purchases of supplies for his workers.

Schindler moved to West Germany after the war, where he was supported by assistance payments from Jewish relief organisations. After receiving a partial reimbursement for his wartime expenses, he moved with his wife to Argentina, where they took up farming. When he went bankrupt in 1958, Schindler left his wife and returned to Germany, where he failed at several business ventures and relied on financial support from Schindlerjuden ("Schindler Jews") – the people whose lives he had saved during the war. He was named Righteous Among the Nations by the Israeli government in 1963. He died on 4 October 1974 in Hildesheim, Germany, and was buried in Jerusalem on Mount Zion, the only member of the Nazi party to be honoured in this way.

Soundtracks

1. John Williams - Theme From Schindler's List
2. John Williams - Jewish Town (Krakow Ghetto - Winter '41)
3. John Williams - Immolation (With Our Lives, We Give Life)
4. John Williams - Remembrances
5. John Williams - Schindler's Workforce
6. John Williams - Oyf'n Pripetshok/Nacht Aktion
7. John Williams - I Could Have Done More*
8. John Williams - Auschwitz-Birkenau
9. John Williams - Stolen Memories
10. John Williams - Making The List*
11. John Williams - Give Me Your Names
12. John Williams - Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem Of Gold)
13. John Williams - Remembrances (With Itzhak Perlman)
14. John Williams - Theme From Schindler's List (Reprise)

Quotations

* * *

Oskar Schindler: Power is when we have every justification to kill, and we don't.
Amon Goeth: You think that's power?
Oskar Schindler: That's what the Emperor said. A man steals something, he's brought in before the Emperor, he throws himself down on the ground. He begs for his life, he knows he's going to die. And the Emperor... pardons him. This worthless man, he lets him go.
Amon Goeth: I think you are drunk.
Oskar Schindler: That's power, Amon. That is power.

* * *

Itzhak Stern: It's Hebrew, it's from the Talmud. It says, "Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire."

* * *

Itzhak Stern: This list... is an absolute good. The list is life. All around its margins lies the gulf.

* * *

Oskar Schindler: In every business I tried, I can see now, it wasn't me that failed. Something was missing. Even if I'd known what it was, there's nothing I could have done about it because you can't create this thing. And it makes all the difference in the world between success and failure.
Emilie Schindler: Luck?
Oskar Schindler: War.

* * *

Title card: There are fewer than 4000 Jews left alive in Poland today. There are more than 6000 descendants of the Schindler Jews.

* * *

Amon Goeth: Today is history. Today will be remembered. Years from now the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history and you are part of it. Six hundred years ago, when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Casimir the Great - so called - told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belongings into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. They came with nothing. And they flourished. For six centuries there has been a Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened. Today is history.

* * *

Amon Goeth: This is very cruel, Oskar. You're giving them hope. You shouldn't do that. *That's* cruel!

* * *

Oskar Schindler: My father was fond of saying you need three things in life - a good doctor, a forgiving priest, and a clever accountant. The first two, I've never had much use for.

* * *

Amon Goeth: You want these people?
Oskar Schindler: These people. My people. I want my people.
Amon Goeth: Who are you? Moses?

* * *

Oskar Schindler: Look, All you have to do is tell me what it's worth to you. What's a person worth to you?
Amon Goeth: No, no, no, No. What's one worth to you!

* * *

Helen Hirsch: My first day here, he beat me because I threw out the bones from dinner. He came down at midnight and asked for them. And I asked him, I don't know how, I could never ask him now, I said, "Why are you beating me?" He said, "The reason I beat you now is because you ask why I beat you."
Oskar Schindler: I am sorry for your troubles, Helen.
Helen Hirsch: I have accepted them.
Oskar Schindler: Accepted them?
Helen Hirsch: One day, he will shoot me.
Oskar Schindler: No, he won't shoot you.
Helen Hirsch: He will. I see things. We were on the roof on Monday, young Lisiek and I and we saw the Herr Kommandant come out of the house on the patio right there below us and he drew his gun and shot a woman who was passing by. Just a woman with a bundle, just shot her through the throat. She was just a woman on her way somewhere, she was no faster or slower or fatter or thinner than anyone else and I couldn't guess what had she done. The more you see of the Herr Kommandant the more you see there are no set rules you can live by, you cannot say to yourself, "If I follow these rules, I will be safe."
Oskar Schindler: He won't shoot you because he enjoys you too much. He enjoys you so much he won't even let you wear the star. He doesn't want anyone to know it's a Jew he's enjoying. He shot the woman from the steps because she meant nothing to him. She was just one of a series neither offending him or pleasing him.

* * *

Chaim Nowak: Not essential? I think you misunderstand the meaning of the word. I teach history and literature, since when it's not essential?

* * *

Mr. Lowenstein: I am an essential worker.
First S.S. Guard: Essential worker!
Mr. Lowenstein: Yes! I work for Oskar Schindler.
First S.S. Guard: Essential worker for Oskar Schindler.
Mr. Lowenstein: Yes!
Second S.S. Guard: A one-armed Jew. Twice as useless.

* * *

Amon Goeth: The truth, Helen, is always the right answer.

* * *

Itzhak Stern: Let me understand. They put up all the money. I do all the work. What, if you don't mind my asking, would you do?
Oskar Schindler: I'd make sure it's known the company's in business. I'd see that it had a certain panache. That's what I'm good at. Not the work, not the work... the presentation.

* * *

Itzhak Stern: The standard SS rate for skilled Jewish workers is seven marks a day, five for unskilled and women. This is what you pay to the Reich Economic Office. The Jews themselves receive nothing. Poles you pay wages. Generally, they get a little more. Are you listening?
Oskar Schindler: What was that about the SS? The rate? The what?
Itzhak Stern: The Jewish worker's salary - you pay it directly to the SS, not to the worker. He gets nothing.
Oskar Schindler: But it's less. It's less than what I would pay to a Pole.
Itzhak Stern: It's less.
Oskar Schindler: That's the point I'm trying to make. Poles cost more. Why should I hire Poles?

* * *

Oskar Schindler: They won't soon forget the name "Oskar Schindler" around here. "Oskar Schindler," they'll say, "everybody remembers him. He did something extraordinary. He did what no one else did. He came with nothing, a suitcase, and built a bankrupt company into a major manufactory. And left with a steamer trunk, two steamer trunks, of money. All the riches of the world."

* * *

Wilhelm Kunde: That's what they do. They weather the storm. But this storm is different, this storm is the SS.

* * *

Amon Goeth: One of you is a very lucky girl. There is an opening for a job away from all this back-breaking work, in my new villa. Umm, which of you has domestic experience? Ja, on second thought, I don't really want someone else's maid. All those annoying habits I'd have to undo.

* * *

Oskar Schindler: I go to work the other day. Nobody's there. Nobody tells me about this, I have to find out. I have to go in... everybody's gone.
Amon Goeth: No... no. They're not gone. They're here.
Oskar Schindler: They're MINE! Every day that goes by I'm losing money, every worker that is shot cost's me money, I have to find somebody else, I have to train them.
Amon Goeth: Don't be making so much money, none of this is going to matter.
Oskar Schindler: It's bad business.

* * *

Amon Goeth: Scherner told me something else about you.
Oskar Schindler: Yeah, what's that?
Amon Goeth: That you know the meaning of the word 'gratitude.' That it's not some vague thing with you like it is with others. You want to stay where you are. You've got things going on the side, things are good. You don't want anybody telling you what to do. I can understand all that. You know, I know you... What you want is your own sub-camp. Do you have any idea what's involved? The paperwork alone? Forget you've got to build the fucking thing, getting the fucking permits is enough to drive you crazy. Then the engineers show up. They stand around, they argue about drainage, foundations, codes, exact specifications, parallel fences four kilometers long, six thousand kilograms of electrified fences... I'm telling you, you'll want to shoot somebody. I've been through it, you know, I know.
Oskar Schindler: Well, you know, you've been through it. You could make things easier for me. I'd be grateful.

* * *

S.S. Guard: Occupation?
Moses: I am a writer, I play the flute.
Itzhak Stern: But Moses is also a skilled metal worker, he can make pots, he can make tanks, he can make whatever Mr Schindler asks.

* * *

You may see the trailer here.

Plot: 10/10

Entertainment: 9/10

Acting: 9/10

Originality: 8/10

Music and Sound: 9/10

9/10