Greed vs. Sentimental Feelings

At the beginning of the movie, Oskar Schindler in Schidnler’s List is a man who is an opportunist desiring to only become filthy rich. He carelessly squanders his money on women and bribing the Nazi’s into letting him build his factory. Along the way, he continues to throw away his money in order to keep himself safe, but over time realizes that the Jews are people too and ends up creating a list of Jews to save and eventually buys them off of the Nazi’s for his own company in his hometown. 

The movie, for me, is a constant struggle of trying to figure out if Schindler is greedy or if he actually cares about the lives he is saving. At the beginning of the movie, a Jew comes to thank him for hiring him to work in his factory, even though he only has one arm, and Schindler seems very disgusted by having to deal with a Jew who wants to thank him. In this scene it is evident that he is still just greedy for money and does not really care about what he is doing for his own workers. But as the movie progresses, he begins to feel a certain attachment to certain workers, and it seems as if he might sentimentally care about these people too. At the end of the movie, the Jews who he saved present him a ring made out of silver from one of the Jew’s crowns on his teeth and as he accepts it, his hands fumble and it drops to the ground. He quickly goes to retrieve it, still shaking all the while. He then proceeds to get angry with himself for being so careless with his money; buying cars, pins to pin on his jacket. He says that if he had not bought these things for himself, he could’ve saved more lives.

This last scene for me in itself is two-fold. I feel like the end of the movie can either be seen as Schindler really being angry with himself for not spending more money to buy more Jews so that he could have saved more lives, or it could be seen as wanting to be even more of an opportunist and wanting to save more lives so that he would look like a better person because he saved more people. Throughout its entirety, this movie is a movie of greed, devastation, and sorrow. I am not completely sure on how I view Schindler, all I know is that the lives he saved have passed on generations; and that in itself is more than I could ever for of a person.