Schindler's List

Anna Lacy
Trauma in Film and Lit
February 10, 2014

Schindler's List is an adaptation of the Holocaust by Steven Spielberg. Much of the film is emotionally disturbing, like when one of the German officers who run Auschwitz wake up, walks out onto his balcony, and simply shoots a few of the jews who live in the camp next to his home. Even near the end of the film when all of the jews are ordered to be exterminated and a large group of women who are meant to be bound for Schindler's factories ends up at Auschwitz. The women are then lead to some showers, their heads shaved and stripped of clothing. Once they are locked inside the showers the lights go out and once they come back on a liquid starts coming out of the sprinklers over-head. All of the women seem to have a little bit of worry disappear. When the women are leaving the showers the camera shows a large group of small children entering underground showers that have smoke stacks attached to them, implying that these children are being lead to their deaths. Even though these scenes are disturbing they most likely do not even scratch the surface of what people who lived through the Holocaust truly experienced. Even though the actors and actresses in this film were quite skinny, they were not even close to being as skinny as the people who truly experienced these events.  While it would have been severely unhealthy for the actresses and actors to achieve the amount of emaciated necessary to be a historically accurate representation, doing so would have reminded the audience of how little food these people truly had to eat.