Bea Schaefer
ENG 3UI Linnerth June 4, 2017 Steven Spielberg’s 1993 historical drama film, Schindler’s List, based upon Thomas Keneally’s novel, Schindler’s Ark and real life events, displays a true act of selflessness by a man named Oskar Schindler, portrayed by Liam Neeson. The film follows Oskar Schindler, a struggling German businessman who is a part of the Nazi party, who builds a new company with all jewish workers during World War II. Throughout the course of the war, Schindler’s company becomes very successful, and he ends up hiring eleven hundred workers. Ultimately, Schindler works very hard to protect all of his workers from the hands of the Nazi’s. In the end, Schindler ends up saving all of them, becoming a hero to the jewish people. This film won seven academy awards in 1993 for Spielberg’s extraordinary work on bringing the real life experiences of holocaust survivors to life, and was ranked eighth in the top one hundred films of all times by the American Film Institute. The film has many human rights violations. As we all know, the holocaust was a horrible time in history, and a lot of changes to the way humans live were made in the aftermath of it. When the movie begins, Jewish people are being forced to live in the Krakow ghetto, which is a very obvious violation to article 12. Although some of it was not shown in the film, the holocaust was extremely discriminatory to many types of people, especially the jewish. Articles one, two, three, and seven were all violated in the film, since the jewish people were not treated equally, and were forced out of their homes and split up from their families, as if they were not human at all. The Nazi’s in the film did not hesitate to discriminate upon the jewish people in any way they could. Most importantly, articles four and twenty five were heavily abused in this film, because while the jewish people were ushered around to camps, they were used as slaves in labour camps to make products for the Nazi’s, all while living in extremely small, unsafe barracks, with nearly a hundred other people at once. Article 18 was violated as well, since the jewish people were not allowed to practice their own religion until the very end of the movie, when Schindler let them hold a religious ceremony at his factory. Overall, the jewish people in the film became very worn and beaten down, since they truly had no choice in any matter. The Nazi’s made it so that if they were to step of line or protest in any way, the Nazi’s would shoot them in the back of the head and kill them instantly. Throughout the film, the characters gave in and did what the Nazi’s wanted them to so their lives would be spared. The discrimination became so bad, that the jewish people were defenseless, and millions of them ended up getting killed because they simply had nobody to help them, and the assumed that either way they were probably going to die at some point during the war, either by the Nazi’s or something else. Director Steven Spielberg did a phenomenal job with this film, staying very close to the reality of the holocaust, so the viewers would realize what it was really like. Spielberg once said that he treated the movie like a documentary, since it was based off real life experiences and testimonies of Schindler’s jewish people. At the end of the film, Spielberg relieved the viewers of the cruel reality of the holocaust by having an emotional scene at Schindler’s factory as he is fleeing to escape imprisonment from the allied forces for being a member of the Nazi party. In the scene, Schindler expresses his excessive amount of regret for not saving more jewish people, since he spent too much time spending money on himself, when he could have stopped spoiling himself, and instead, saving a couple hundred more jewish people. The scene was raw with emotion as Schindler cried, and his worker came and hugged him. And to top it all off, a few of the men made him a golden ring with a hebrew saying in it to thank him for all he had done for them, and all that he sacrificed for them. Overall, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List was a fantastic movie to watch, and it stayed very true to the real happenings of the holocaust, which was truly an eye opener for the viewers. The ending of the film was absolutely magnificent, and many would say that it moved them to the point of tears.
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