Shindlers list Essay Example For Students

Shindlers list Essay Term Papers Count: 55,000 Home | Join | Login | Sign Out | Search | Browse | Contact for: SCHINDLERS LIST Term Paper Title SCHINDLERS LIST # of Words 8374 # of Pages (250 words per page double spaced) 34 SCHINDLERS LIST Date of publication: 12/15/1993 For cast, rating and other information, (click here) By Roger Ebert Oskar Schindler would have been an easier man to understand if hed been a conventional hero, fighting for his beliefs. The fact that he was flawed a drinker, a gambler, a womanizer, driven by greed and a lust for high living makes his life an enigma. Here is a man who saw his chance at the beginning of World War II and moved to Nazi-occupied Poland to open a factory and employ Jews at starvation wages. His goal was to become a millionaire. By the end of the war, he had risked his life and spent his fortune to save those Jews and had defrauded the Nazis for months with a munitions factory that never produced a single usable shell. Why did he change? What happened to tu rn him from a victimizer into a humanitarian? It is to the great credit of Steven Spielberg that his film Schindlers List does not even attempt to answer that question. Any possible answer would be too simple, an insult to the mystery of Schindlers life. The Holocaust was a vast evil engine set whirling by racism and madness. Schindler outsmarted it, in his own little corner of the war, but he seems to have had no plan, to have improvised out of impulses that remained unclear even to himself. In this movie, the best he has ever made, Spielberg treats the fact of the Holocaust and the miracle of Schindlers feat without the easy formulas of fiction. The movie is 184 minutes long, and like all great movies, it seems too short. It begins with Schindler (Liam Neeson), a tall, strong man with an intimidating physical presence. He dresses expensively and frequents nightclubs, buying caviar and champagne for Nazi officers and their girls, and he likes to get his picture taken with the top b rass. He wears a Nazi party emblem proudly in his buttonhole. He has impeccable black market contacts, and hes able to find nylons, cigarettes, brandy: He is the right man to know. The authorities are happy to help him open a factory to build enameled cooking utensils that army kitchens can use. He is happy to hire Jews because their wages are lower, and Schindler will get richer that way. Schindlers genius is in bribing, scheming, conning. He knows nothing about running a factory and finds Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), a Jewish accountant, to handle that side of things. Stern moves through the streets of Krakow, hiring Jews for Schindler. Because the factory is a protected war industry, a job there may guarantee longer life. The relationship between Schindler and Stern is developed by Spielberg with enormous subtlety. At the beginning of the war, Schindler wants only to make money, and at the end he wants only to save his Jews. We know that Stern understands this. But there is no mo ment when Schindler and Stern bluntly state what is happening, perhaps because to say certain things aloud could result in death. This subtlety is Spielbergs strength all through the film. His screenplay, by Steven Zaillian, based on the novel by Thomas Keneally, isnt based on contrived melodrama. Instead, Spielberg relies on a series of incidents, seen clearly and without artificial manipulation, and by witnessing those incidents we understand what little can be known about Schindler and his scheme. We also see the Holocaust in a vivid and terrible way. Spielberg gives us a Nazi prison camp commandant named Goeth (Ralph Fiennes) who is a study in the stupidity of evil. From the veran da of his villa, overlooking the prison yard, he shoots Jews for target practice. (Schindler is able to talk him out of this custom with an appeal to his vanity so obvious it is almost an insult.) Goeth is one of those weak hypocrites who upholds an ideal but makes himself an exception to it; he preach es the death of the Jews, and then chooses a pretty one named Helen Hirsc Wilhelm Roentgen EssayThroughout the novel, the setting is explained in many different ways. The story takes place in Nazi Germany in which all of the minorities, namely the Jews, were persecuted brutally against. The setting is in the Alps for the first part of the book where Oskar is racing motorcycles because he was a professional motorcycle racer. His business takes place in an urban environment in which the Nazis control. Schindler does all of his underground rescuing directly underneath the Nazis noses, without them even noticing. Schindler risked his life daily by going and standing up for what he believes is right. I just want to stand up for the helpless in theses oppressive times.(166) In a totalitarian government Schindler would be considered opposition and he would be destroyed by the Nazi regime. So he was also persecuted against even-though he was a gentile. There are many symbols expressed by Thomas Keneally throughout the book. One symbol is the swastika which is the symbol for the Nazis. The swastika is supposed to mean peace and good luck, but in this case it means world domination and genocide. But that is not the real symbol of this novel. The real symbol is the list. It means saving everybody who is on it. It is a sense of hope for the Jews, they need to be put on the list in order for their lives to be spared. We need the list, Schindler?(109) This is when the Nazis were trying to get the list so they could exterminate all of the Jews who were on it. What Schindler is trying to do takes so much courage and it gives the people of oppression some sense of hope. They have nobody to protect them and what Schindler is doing is revered greatly by the Jewish people as a whole. The symbol of the swastika is completely used out of context. The list however, was a sense of hope. The plot of Schindlers List is to show how one man can stand up in a time of oppression and prevail. During the book Oskar comes to terms with reality and he figures out that he must help all of the Jews. He has to help Jews because his accountant is Jewish and he did not want to see him die because of his religion. He feels that nobody should be killed because of religion. So he decides to take as many Jews under his wing as possible. He puts them to work for him doing various things. He pays them and protects them from the Nazis. I feel I need to help out in some way.(193) He feels that since he helps out that he is doing good for a people. He has to be able to help out his workers. He feels that all people should be equal. He is absolutely right. What he had done was a beautiful thing. Basically, what I have seen is that Schindler was an amazing person. Nobody helped the Jews in World War 2, but Schindler did. It was a highly revered and heroic thing to do. I believe that the equality Schindler felt was truthfully amazing and he should go down in history as a savior. Schindler was a man who cared greatly about people. He was one of those men that felt that all men were created equal.