Schindler’s List Extra Credit
The movie starts off at a train station, where the Jews in Poland, after Poland’s defeat to
the Germans, are being forced to register all their family members and move to major
cities. It said in big text that more than 10,000 Jews from the countryside arrived daily in
Krakow. They are saying their names to administrators, who are writing (and spelling) their
names onto official documents. Being half Jewish myself and having the last name
Kauffman, I wonder if this is the reason there are spellings of Kaufmann, Kaufman,
Kauffmann, and Kauffman. Maybe all of the administrators heard, and thus spelled the
name differently, and they stuck to today. The next scenes show Oskar Schindler
fraternizing with various Nazi officials at a dinner, where their singing pans to a street
where the Jews are being taunted and gathered by the Nazis. We then see the Judenrat,
which is the council where complaints are filed and other administrative affairs with the
Jews are handled. Oskar talks to an accountant in the Judenrat, who tells him, before they
talk business, they he is legally obliged to tell Oskar he is a Jew. Pretty surprising to hear,
being legally compelled to tell others you are Jewish before even conversing with them.
We then see the Jews moving into the Ghettos. Was shocking to hear that all of the Jews in
Krakow, which must have been thousands, were forced into an area of only 16 square
blocks. Living conditions did need seem habitable or enjoyable. There is a child screaming
“Goodbye Jews!” and it was pretty sad to see even children discriminating and
participating in the ostracization. Oskar purchases a factory, using goods to pay Jewish
investors, as they quickly realize money has no value in the Ghettos, only goods.
Jews were separated based on essential or non essential work in the Ghettos. They also
smuggled differing foods, like cigars, cognac, fresh fruits, and sardines, into the Ghettos, as
there was a good-based black market. He (Oskar) wants others to remember him as
someone who did something extraordinary, who built a bankrupt company into a large
manufacturing company, and someone who leaves with “pots of money”. People writing
their names on their luggage on the train platforms was quite saddening, considering many
of them would never see their things again, yet they were under the impression they would.
Seeing the shoes piled up reminded me of an image I had saw when I was younger, the
shoes of the children and the Jews killed, and how there were millions of these shoes, along
with hats, jewelry, clothes, and even teeth. The Jews, who gathered their most important
belongings, had everything taken from them. Throughout the movie there were some grisly
moments, sometimes I felt anger, sadness, confusion, and outright surprise at how humans
treated one another. Figures like Schindler, who made an effort to save the lives of Jews,
statistically made no difference in the Holocaust, but were moral and ethical champions to
me. While only a little over a thousand lives were saved compared to millions that
perished, the subtle act of defiance under the guise of business should not go unnoticed.
Bribing officials and manipulating contracts and employment allowed Schindler to save
over a thousand Jews, but should he have been caught, he would have been killed
immediately. This movie was laced with emotion and tense scenes, with actions so horrific
it was hard for me to believe they could have happened. Schindler had no obligation to risk
his life to save others, yet he did so in a time when almost all others were too fearful.
German nationalism at the time was certainly rooted in primordial context, with much of
the momentum behind the volkisch movement, which deemed Jews and non-aryans as an
alien race, not belonging to the German people. The ability of the German government to
separate the people on this ethno-nationalist view was central to garnering support for the
genocide, considering their goal was to separate the Jews and non-aryans as an inferior
race, making it easier to strip them of their rights and lives. The idea of primordial
nationalism was certainly embodied in scenes where people were treated as either pure or
non-pure, that their value and belonging to German society was entirely based on their
blood and roots, something unchangeable, a foundational idea of primordialism. Also an
interesting dynamic in the movie was the affiliation with an ethnic group for gain. While
Oskar Schindler was German, he utilized his ability to identify with the Nazi party to secure
war contracts. Like we spoke about in class, Ethnic purity for the Nazis meant that there
was no room for Jews, cosmopolitans, or any non-Aryans, which the Nazi’s sought to
achieve through a ginormous wealth transfer, and the attempted eradication of Jews and
non-Aryans. Further discussing the idea of Jews in the early 1900’s depiction of German
nationalism is the idea, tracing back to primordialism, that the Jewish population was “the
other”, making it much easier to ostracize and isolate an entire section of the population.