Schindler's List: More Then Just a Motion Picture

Excellent movies to me are not only engaging, but also an experience that allows the viewer to understand someone else's point of view in a unique sort of way. Over the decades many motion pictures delivered all of these great qualities that make a movie impacting, though in my eyes there is one particular movie that rises from all the rest. 'Schindler's List' gave me a new outlook on life entirely.

The Nazis, under Hitler, organized the destruction of the Jews. Why they did it is unknown. Perhaps it was because of a history of tension between the Christians and Jews, or perhaps, because Hitler needed a scapegoat for Germany's problems. Hitler's method of killing the Jews and other undesirable people was first by torture and then by plain murder. In the early days of his leadership, he took away their rights as citizens and then as people. They were treated like slaves and lived like animals. After 1942, his goal was to exterminate all Jewish and unpure people. In the end around 5 million Jews were murdered.

'Schindler's List' depicts the life of Oscar Schindler. Now here is a vain, glories, and greedy businessman 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. In the end he saved 1100 Jews. Today there are over 15,000 decedents of those survivors.

I first watched 'Schindler's List' as an innocent boy four years ago. Fourteen years old, without a clue about the world around me, by myself I watched the movie that would change my life forever. The disturbing images of the injustices and cruelty the Jews had tolerated did not just devastate me, it made me angry. How could a man have so much hate towards another man? It completely boggled my mind. I could not help, but picture myself in the same situation. If I were one of the many Jews who were forced to concentration camps, what would I do? If I were a Nazi soldier at the time would I be as cruel and hateful as them? I do not know and this disturbs me.

The end of the movie brings me to tears. At the end of the war, Schindler's Jews are in a strange land, but alive. They walk into the