World War II and the Holocaust stand among the darkest times in human history, and portraying them in film is extremely difficult while ensuring sensitivity and historical accuracy. Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is one of the films that achieves this balance with exceptional success. The film is often remembered and seen as a film of suffering and death. But its true power lies in how it finds humanity within the horrors of the Holocaust. Rather than only focusing on mass tragedy, the film tells the story of moral awakening. Through Oskar Schindler, an unlikely and flawed hero, the film shows how one man’s choices can stand against a machine of cruelty and terror.
The film opens with Schindler arriving at Krakow as a businessman eager to build relations and profit from the war. He enjoys fine clothes, good food and Nazi connections to build his business. At first, his factory was not a refuge but a business built on cheap Jewish labor. By presenting Schindler as selfish and business-minded, his transformation towards the end of the film feels more meaningful and inspirational. Schindler does not begin as a saint but becomes one through witnessing unbearable losses.
Spielberg purposefully chose to shoot the film in black and white to evoke a feeling of gritty realism and timelessness, reflecting the somber history of the Holocaust. His artistic choice emphasizes the duality of good versus evil, simultaneously avoiding the “beautification” of the events which a color film could have implied.
Amid the forcible evacuation of the Krakow ghetto, Schindler, atop a hill, sees a little girl in a red coat. All around her chaos and terror unfolds while the Nazi soldiers storm houses and separate families. She wanders through the carnage, a single point of color and innocence wading through the gray and heartless world. This becomes Schindler’s point of awakening. He witnesses innocence being destroyed and feels that he must do something about it. Later in the film, the little girl in the red coat appears again among the dead. From this moment on, Schindler can no longer remain as a bystander.
After his revelation, Schindler plans to transform his factory into a sanctuary. He plans to make a list of any Jewish people he remembers and buy them from Amon Göth, the commandant of the Krakow-Plaszow concentration camp. Each name of his list is a life saved, not just a statistic. The iconic line, “The list is life,” captures the emotional core of the film. In a time and place where lists and names were reduced to numbers, Schindler restores their humanity and individuality.
The most devastating moment of the film comes at the end, when Schindler breaks down, realizing that he could have saved just some more people by selling some more of his things. He starts pointing out that he could have sold his car or his Nazi pin, which could have gotten some more people out of the camps. The line, “I could have got one more,” truly shows the transformation of Schindler from a shrewd businessman to a saviour of many generations.
Schindler’s List does not offer comfort, but it does offer hope. It doesn’t say that evil can fully be defeated. Instead, it insists that compassion and gestures large and small can go a long way. The last images of the film portray real survivors visiting Schindler’s tomb and laying stones on it, linking history and memory together.
In essence, Schindler’s List is about the moment a human being chooses to view his fellow man as human rather than as a number, a name instead of an amount of money. Spielberg has created a film that simultaneously mourns the past and challenges the present. The film presents an important but quiet question: When we are confronted with the suffering of the innocent, will we turn away, or will we take action?
