Schrindlers List

I recently finished watching the movie Schindler's List. It's not the first time I've watched this film, but it has been awhile. This movie, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley and Ralph Fiennes, recounts the story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a German industrialist and member of the Nazi party, who manages to rescue over 1,100 Jews from the Polish ghettos and labor camps. After doing some research into Schindler's life, I was amazed that this movie was pretty accurate in the details.

Schindler begins the movie as an opportunistic businessman who moves to Krakow, Poland to begin a business making and selling pots and pans to the German military. His opportunism is shown when he buys a business that was formally under Jewish ownership for a mere pittance of what it's worth and then employs Jewish labor because they're cheaper than Polish laborers.

Schindler's 'conversion' comes when he sees the German Gestapo run through the Jewish ghetto killing the weak and infirm and enslaving the healthy for their own workforce. Schindler was at first motivated by profits more than altruism; after all, the SS had taken his cheap Jewish workforce. So he works his connections with the SS (Schindler is seen schmoozing SS officers at the beginning of the movie, which is how he is able to get lucrative business contracts for his products) to grant work permits for his factory workers.

After awhile, through the course of visiting his friend Amon Goeth (Ralph Fiennes), commandant of the labor camp, and his continual conversations with Itzhak Stern (Ben Kingsley), his Jewish accountant, Schindler begins to experience moral qualms over the wanton cruelty being exacted on the captive Jews. Little by little, he begins to ask for "essential" work permits for obviously non-essential, unskilled laborers as a ruse to rescue family members of his workers. As the war begins to go badly for the Germans, orders are given to close all labor camps and ship the 'work force' to death camps, like Auschwitz. Schindler is about to go back home to Czechoslovakia with his massive fortune, when he realizes that his workers will all be slaughtered. Under the ruse of starting another factory, this time for munitions, he buys his Jewish workers (Schindler's List) at exorbitant fees and has them shipped to Czechoslovakia. For the remainder of the war, Schindler's factory is a haven for his Jewish workforce; a safe place for them to ride the storm. He spends the remainder of his fortune buying munitions off the black market and shipping them as his own because he had vowed that nothing that was made at his factory would be used in the war effort.

At the end of the war, Schindler is broke and has to flee knowing that he would be a wanted man (as all members of the Nazi party were). All told, Schindler saved over 1,100 Jews from extinction. Schindler was buried in Jerusalem at Mount Zion, the only member of the Nazi party to receive that honor. He was also honored as one of the "righteous Gentiles" at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial.

The movie won seven academy awards and received near unanimous critical acclaim. It is also included on the AFI Top 100 movies of all time list (#9). I hesitate to call this a 'good' movie because that would be a gross understatement. This is a very powerful