Schindler's List Critique

The Schindler’s List is Steven Spielberg’s award-winning film which illustrates the profoundly nightmarish Holocaust. It recreates a dark, frightening period during World War II, when Nazi-occupied Kraków first dispossessed Jews of their businesses and homes, then forced them into ghettos and labor camps in Plaszów and finally resettled in concentration camps for execution. It is quite terrifying to think how far the Nazis were able to go with their murderous ideology. Which is the primary component of what makes the novel and film so nerve-wracking. It is difficult to imagine how an entire group that were so dehumanized by another group of people and were killed as if they were nothing but ‘bodies’ without minds or emotions. The film opens up with a close up of hands lighting a pair of Shabbat (Sabbath) candles, followed by the sound of a Hebrew prayer blessing the candles it sounds similar to the call to prayer for Muslims minus the embellished throaty notes. One of the only color scenes in the film, it quickly fades to black and white and brings us to our setting for the majority of the film. It is 1939 at the …show more content…
When he bids his Schindlerjuden good-bye, they give him a ring made of gold tooth of a factory worker, engraved with the Talmudic phrase, “Whoever saves one life saves the world entire.” Schindler breaks down, crying that he could have been sacrificed more, saved more lives. He and his wife then flee. The next morning, a Russian soldier enters the camp and tells the Jews they are free. As they walk toward a nearby town, the scene dissolves into full color and reveals a group of real Holocaust survivors walking across a field. They line up, many accompanied by the actors who play them, and place a rock on Schindler’s grave. The last person at the grave is Liam Neeson (Oskar Schindler). He places a rose on the