Schindler's List :- Not just a movie

I happened to watch Schindler's list a few days back. I know its an old movie but you seldom get 3 hours 15 minutes at a stretch. So when I finally got, I jumped in.

This is not just a movie. It shows the abyssmal depths to which humanity can fall and supernatural heights that it can achieve simultaneously. On one side is a philosophy of a regime based purely on race and creed, while on the other hand is a man who transforms into a savior by exploiting the vice of every man around.

The man, Oskar Schindler, is a shrewd businessman who can go to any length to build a successful enterprise. This ambition of his is evident from the fact that he considers war as an important ingredient for profit. He starts off well and in the course of the Nazi rule in Poland his transformation begins. First he encounters a one armed Jewish metal worker and then witnesses the liquidation of a Jewish ghetto. The gradual change in the man's ways are marvellously depicted. Once changed he goes on to bribe officials to get more Jews out of concentration camps, now with the sole purpose of saving them. The end is an emotional finale that depicts Oskar lamenting that he could have given away everything he had as bribes and saved 10-15 people more.

The story is a real life one and finds mention with Yad Vashem i.e. the Jewish organisation that remembers the Holocaust.

One question or topic for discussion that arises is why did the humans fall to such depths ? Why a specific race of people was made a target of hatred ?

Well, true answers would make you sleep, but in short they were economic reasons which led to people believe in a person as convoluted as Hitler. Germany was reeling under hyper-inflation and Hitler offered hope in the form of rapid industrialization and chanelled the hatred of people towards a particular class .

What the movie depicts truly is the lack of remorse in almost every National Socialist party member. They are so deeply and fiercely indoctrined that they refuse to consider the Jews as fellow humans. Let alone the party officials, even the common Germans were well moulded in the philosophy. They were unaware of the cruel facts of concentration camps and believed to the last day that Germany will win the war, that whatever the Fuhrer said is true.

The movie also shows that there is no stopping a good deed. Even in such turbulent times, humans can go to any length when it comes to compassion. Watch it just to come out of your robotic schedules and feel like a human again. Something that makes you feel transcendental to such scale is surely not just a movie.