Kominek - Schindler's List

Response – Schindler’s List

Annie Kominek

One of the shows I frequently watch and love, a comedy called 30 Rock, has a character named Tracy Jordan. He is an actor (an actor on a TV show playing an actor on a TV show) and is trying to EGOT, which means he’ll get an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. For his Oscar, he tries multiple ways, but ends up winning the Oscar for a movie called Hard to Watch. I’m not sure of the plot of the movie, but it basically has death, sadness, loss, and everything sad and awful that you can think of scrunched into one movie. If there is ever a real-life version of the movie Hard to Watch, it would be Schindler’s List.

Oskar Schindler started out this long and terrifyingly beautiful movie as a man just looking to make a buck. As the war progressed and he built a relationship with Amon Goeth, the Commandant of the Płaszów work camp, Schindler began to feel horror at the world around him. Just like Vladek Spiegelman, Oskar Schindler used his business savvy as a way to convince and manipulate Goeth. Under the guise of working for Nazi war machine, Schindler was actually working against it and saved the lives of 1,200 Jews right under Goeth’s nose.

Schindler’s List is a movie that I can only watch if I spread it out over several sittings. Being of strictly Polish descent, the German occupation of Poland is a part of my own family history, and can sometimes upset me greatly. While my family were not Jews themselves, they were affected (as was every Pole) by the war. This makes me a bit extra sensitive perhaps to certain things relating to WWII. Either that or I am just a baby, because I had tears falling down my face for at least half of the movie (especially at the most poignant moments).

Schindler’s face as he saw the little girl in the red coat, dead in a wheelbarrow to be burned, caused me to burst into tears. It is easy to remove oneself from these events as you know in your head This is just a movie, but you also know in your head that This actually freaking happened. Once I get to the moment when I realize that yes, this is fake, but it is a recreation of something true, my heart seizes and I can’t keep myself from feeling it as if it was really happening before my eyes.

Spielberg’s use of the black and white also helped sell this fact. To those of us who never lived through it, we have only seen the events and atrocities of WWII in black and white. To us, everything before ~1970 was black and white. Filming like this marries the pictures of the real atrocities of the war to the pictures and film itself. When looking at Amon Goeth in real life through photographs, it looks so similar to the Goeth from the film (especially the scenery and setting) that it is hard to differentiate the two. This is brilliant on Spielberg’s part, in that he filmed to bring us back to that time, and the only color is sparse and grainy as well.

For me, the hardest part of the film was the scene where the children were being driven out of Płaszów. Spielberg sets us up for this in such a horrible way: first, we witness people being shoved onto trains, following our “main characters” within the camp. Next, Spielberg shows us the extreme relief of the women that were kept at Płaszów and not loaded away (to Auschwitz, if I remember correctly). We feel that relief with them. We feel how happy they are to remain at the “good” camp, where they know the rules and everything is familiar. After that, we hear the song playing on the radio, and the children singing… and being marched… and loaded onto trucks. The screaming and terror in the women’s eyes broke my heart, and I can only imagine if someone was trying to take my nephews away from me. I would have screamed and cried and chased them down just like the women in the movie did. That was one of the strongest moments for me in the entire film.

There are countless other things I would talk about, but I’m getting up to 800 words, so I will just end it with two things:

Did anybody else notice that at the end, when we were watching Schindler’s Jews put the stones on Schindler’s grave, that the child with Olek Rosner looked just like the little kid that played Olek Rosner himself in the movie? I couldn’t find any evidence to support this, but that would be an amazing thing if a descendant actually got to play in the film.

And also:

 Dziękuję, Oskar Schindler. You were an amazing man.