Maartje: (00:14)
Welcome back to Rosie the Reviewer. This week we’re talking about Schindler’s List, which came out in nineteen ninety three. It’s directed by the one and only Steven Spielberg and written by Steven Zaillian. It’s based on the historical novel Schindler’s Ark from nineteen eighty two by Thomas Keneally. It’s based on the true story of German industrialist Oscar Schindler, who saved over a thousand Jewish refugees from the Holocaust.

It won several Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. And it’s altogether awesome. I just wanna say right off the bat. What did you think of the movie, Sam?

Sam: (00:53)
Yeah. I saw this movie for the first time in high school and it’s definitely one of those ones that sticks with you. I could remember very specifically some of the scenes of startling violence, especially. it’s predominantly in black and white. I think that’s very effective for probably some of the reasons that we’ll discuss later, some of the choices that were made. I think it’s extremely well acted. I think it’s a powerful script. I also read the book.

By Thomas Keneally. It I guess originally was called Schindler’s Ark, but the copy I have is called Schindler’s List, which I gather they probably renamed it after the movie was so successful. And I really enjoyed the book as well. It was super easy to get through. It was a historical novel, but Keneally did a ton of research. He interviewed a lot of the people who had worked with Schindler, a lot of the people who had been saved by Schindler, and so most of the details are accurate, barring

you know, of course it’s a novel, so we had to fabricate a few conversations and that kind of thing. But definitely recommend giving it a read, especially if you liked the movie. I think that there is something about a story that inspires so much hope in, you know, the ability of people to decide to do the right thing, even when it would be personally better for them not to, for them to just go with the tide and do what everyone else is doing.

And I think that this is definitely a huge shift from the last Spielberg movie that we watched. This one is pretty spectacular. And there was I think some criticism of this movie that’s probably merited in that it’s a bit white savory-y at times. The Jewish people don’t get a ton of agency in their own rescue. At the same time, you know, I think that the story itself.

ignited a lot of conversation about the Holocaust. It was really the first touchstone for a lot of people, particularly in America, about you know, the reality of day to day life living during the Holocaust. And so because of that I think it’s a very important movie. What about you?

Maartje: (02:51)
I think this is Steven Spielberg’s best movie that he’s done. I think it’s my favorite Steven Spielberg movie as well. I think everything about this movie’s good. The acting, the pacing, the narrative The way it keeps you guessing too, in a way, like it could be predictable, but it’s not

I thought Ben Kingsley in this movie is really, really, really good. Liam Neeson is good, but like Ben Kingsley is something else. and just overall the the way the Natchis are portrayed and their indifference towards who lives and who dies within a Jewish community is brilliantly portrayed as well.

I just really, really like this movie. I’d also seen it I think in high school and I’m not very good at remembering movies, but I remembered probably like you, very specific scenes from this and seeing it again just like It blew me away, is what I’m trying to say. I was really impressed by it again. So yes. Pretty good.

Are you ready to get into the plot?

Sam: (04:07)
The film opens in color, so we get really briefly a scene in color with a Jewish family praying around a table, and then it slowly fades out and the table is empty. As the candles on the table melt down, the film also melts into black and white, and we get some opening cards. In September of nineteen thirty nine, the German forces defeated the Polish army in two weeks. Jews were ordered to register all family members and relocate to major cities.

More than ten thousand Jews from the countryside arrive in Kraków daily.

Maartje: (04:38)
What do you think of the choice to start in colour and then drain the movie of all its colour?

Sam: (04:45)
Well what do you think of it?

Maartje: (04:46)
I think it’s a really kind of ominous thing to do and it signals for me very v visually the the start of all things bad and yeah, I think it’s very effective.

Sam: (05:00)
Nice.

Maartje: (05:01)
A young well dressed industrialist, Oscar Schindler, played by Liam Neeson, places a Nazi pin on his lapel and attends a party attended by many other party members, so notably he’s a party member.

We first see him ingratiating himself, buying everybody drinks and offering bribes. You can see that he’s a well liked person in this environment and everybody’s kinda watching him and the Nazis are like questioning who is this guy, what’s he doing? So immediately as you’re watching if you don’t know the story, you’re like, Wait, which side is he on?

Sam: (05:38)
Yeah, and I think it’s an effective way to set up that Oscar Schindler is not someone that most people probably would have expected to do heroic things. He was an industrialist, an ardent capitalist, he was a womanizer, he liked to drink. So not a man without flaws for sure. And I’m just gonna read you a little bit from the prologue of the book here.

Maartje: (05:59)
Yes please.

Sam (06:00)
In Poland’s deepest autumn, a tall young man in an expensive overcoat, double-breasted dinner jacket beneath it, and in the lapel of the dinner jacket, a large ornamental gold on black enamel swastika, emerged from a fashionable apartment building in Straushuskigo Street on the edge of the ancient centre of Krakow and saw his chauffeur waiting with fuming breath by the open door of an enormous and even in this blackened world, lustrous Adler Limousine.

Watch the pavement, Herr Schindler, said the chauffeur. It’s as icy as a widow’s heart. In observing this small winter scene, we are on safe ground. The tall young man would to the end of his days wear double-breasted suits, would, being something of an engineer, always be gratified by large dazzling vehicles, would, though a German and at this point in history a German of some influence, always be the sort of man with whom a Polish chauffeur could safely crack a lame comradely joke.

But it will not be possible to see the whole story under such easy character headings. For this is the story of the pragmatic triumph of good over evil, a triumph in eminently measurable, statistical, unsubtle terms. When you work from the other end of the beast, when you chronicle the predictable and measurable success evil generally achieves, it is easy to be wise, wry, piercing, to avoid bathos. It is easy to show the inevitability by which evil acquires all of what you would call

The real estate of the story, even though good might finish up with a few imponderables like dignity and self-knowledge. Fatal human malice is the staple of narrators, original sin the mother fluid of historians, but it is a risky enterprise to have to write of virtue.

Maartje: (07:38)
That is very poetic as well, it’s well written.

I’m interested to read that because it sounds beautiful and interesting.

Sam: (07:47)
Yes, and I think by writing it as a novel, Keneally has some leeway to try and interpret Oscar Schindler’s actions in a way that you might find difficult if you were writing a strict piece of historical literature.

Maartje: (07:59)
Yes, for sure.

We get another card there are very many in this movie and if you blink you’ll miss them. It says that Judenrat, the Jewish council comprised of twenty four elected Jews personally responsible for carrying out the orders of the regime in Kraków, such as drawing up lists for work detail, food and housing, a place to lodge complaints. Oscar goes looking for a Jewish accountant named

Itzhak Stern, played by Ben Kingsley, because he wants to take over a bankrupt enamelware company but needs help, including outside investors. He also visits the place where black market traders gather and has his first encounter with a Jewish man who will become sort of his man on the streets in Kraków. His name is Poldek Pfefferberg played by Jonathan Sagall.

Sam: (08:52)
Yes, and Pfefferberg is probably the reason we’ve heard of Schindler at all, because he survived the war. And the author, Thomas Keneally, happened to enter his shop totally by coincidence at some point. And upon learning that Keneally was an author, Pfefferberg was like, I’ve been trying and trying to get this story out of this guy who rescued me and a bunch of other Jewish people during the Holocaust. And Keneally was like

I don’t know man, like I’m not Jewish. I don’t know if I have the right to write about that kind of suffering. And Pfefferberg managed to talk him into it and thus the book was written and subsequently the movie. And so Oscar Schindler has become rather a big name because of this young man that Oscar met in the streets of Kraków early in the war.

Maartje: (09:38)
That’s pretty amazing actually. Imagine if he’d not managed to convince this guy. Hopefully he would have been able to convince someone else, but still, just the idea that we would have never known about this story is crazy.

Sam: (09:52)
Yeah. now as I mentioned earlier, the film’s detractors point out that Jewish people are not given sufficient agency in their own rescue in the film. There’s one particular character that is mentioned in the book that doesn’t appear in the movie. His name is Abraham Bankier. And he was a Jewish-Polish former factory co-owner. So what happened at this time was that if Jewish people owned businesses or factories, the Germans would take over the factory.

give it to a Nazi to run, but they would keep the Jewish former owner on as an employee a lot of the time to actually do the day-to-day managing of the business. And so that’s who this bankier guy was. And he was the one who actually gave gave Schindler the idea of putting Jewish people to work in his factory. Because as we’ll learn later, when you have Jewish people working in your factory at this time, you don’t have to pay them. You just have to pay the

German government effectively in order to be able to use these slave laborers and the price is much cheaper than you would be paying a Polish worker. And so it was this guy bankier who was like, Hey, if you want to save some money here, you could actually employ some Jewish people.

Maartje: (10:59)
They kind of give that role a little bit to Stern in the movie, which is interesting he’s like, Well, you would just run it on the day to day, even though he’s an accountant.

Sam: (11:11)
Yeah.

Maartje: (11:12)
so the Judenrat actually this did not just happen here in this place but also for instance in Amsterdam there was also Jewish council and a limited T V series was made about it here. Maybe one day we can actually find one that us English subtitle so we can watch it. But the most interesting about

Jewish councils like this was that they were given the illusion of power by the Nazis and agency and the idea that the Germans would be reasonable. So many of the members of these councils thought that they were limiting damage done by the Nazis if they followed orders. And unfortunately many of them also

became victims of the Holocaust when the Nazis decided they were no longer useful.

Sam: (12:01)
Right.

because we have to remember that before this, historically, Jews had always been victims of persecution for at least the last few hundred years you know, they were the victims of pogroms, they were made to live in ghettos, and so a lot of Jewish people expected this kind of treatment, and even though the Nazis were worse than what they had been living under before,

They thought that if they simply did what the Nazis told them to do and kept their heads down, then maybe that would be the worst of it. Because there really prior to this, there was no institutionalized mass murder in the way that we saw in the Holocaust. And so no one predicted that this was going to happen, and no one wanted to think that this could happen. And so, not just the Jewish council, there were also members of the Jewish police in the ghetto who

oftentimes would be crueler to their compatriots than the SS were because they believed that by doing that they could keep themselves and their families safe and they could ride out this current wave of anti-Semitism and then everything would be fine. But unfortunately the members of the council and the Jewish police, while they may have been the last people to be murdered when the ghetto was cleared out, they were ultimately murdered in the end anyway.

Maartje: (13:10)
One of the examples that is always very striking to me is that the Nazis would say you have to make the list for the deportations and they would and they would try to keep people off those lists. But then also the Nazis would give the Jewish council these cards

That would exempt people from being on those lists, even if they were on the list and they would give them to certain people, so they would have to make the choice who would get to stay and who would get to like be deported to concentration camps or work camps. And then later on they’re saying people would still be deported. But it’s all false promises and that’s how they kind of gave them that false sense of agency that they really did not have.

And it’s our gross.

Sam: (13:57)
Yeah, you really limit people’s ability to organize any kind of effective resistance against you, at least on a

Maartje: (14:04)
If you give them hope yeah.

Sam: (14:05)
on a mass level, if you give them hope, yeah.

Maartje: (14:07)
And also the reason these councils exist as well is because the Jewish community knew a lot more about the Jewish community than the Nazis did. So if they gave them these tasks of like rounding up the people, it would save them a lot of work. And it’s absolutely disgusting.

Sam: (14:25)
Right. Efficient, if nothing else, those Nazis.

Maartje: (14:29)
Yes.

Sam: (14:30)
March twentieth, nineteen forty was the deadline for entering the ghetto. We get a card that reads Edict four hundred four one nine established a closed Jewish district south of the Vistula River. Residency in the walled ghetto is compulsory. All Jews from Kraków and the surrounding areas are forced from their homes and required to crowd into an area of only sixteen square blocks.

So we see the remaining Jewish population from the Polish countryside enter the ghetto to jeers and projectiles hurled by the locals. They are crammed, many people into tiny apartments. Pfefferberg is offered the opportunity to become a member of the Jewish police inside the ghetto, but he declines.

Maartje: (15:07)
Yes. And this movie again is very effective in showing you just how cramped these apartments were. And it follows a family as they get moved into an apartment and they are like, this doesn’t look so bad and then another family moves in with them and there’s like sixteen people in one room and you’re like, no

Sam: (15:27)
Yes, and can I just say the little Polish girl yelling goodbye, Jews over and over again is bone chilling.

Maartje: (15:33)
my god, I forgot about that almost. It’s just Imagine that’s how brainwashing works. They start young.

Sam: (15:40)
Yeah.

Maartje: (15:41)
Oscar makes a bargain with a couple of Jewish investors, as Jewish refugees wait to find out whether they’ll be deemed essential workers, Stern records workers for Schindler from within the crowd, and Oscar takes on the slightly more frivolous work of interviewing for a new quote attractive secretary. He’s so nonchalant during this.

Sam: (16:05)
Yes, he’s an unserious man in some ways, for sure. Very much a a weakness for a for a skirt.

Maartje: (16:12)
Imagine being stern though. I think working around in that crowd just picking people.

Sam: (16:19)
Yeah, the first time I got teary-eyed in this movie was when there’s a man who was a teacher of I want to say like literature and philosophy or something, and the Nazis deem

Maartje: (16:28)
Yes.

Sam: (16:29)
him not an essential worker. And then Stern comes up to him and gives him a card, a life-saving card, that will enable him to work at Schindler’s factory. And you feel relief that this man has been saved, but then behind him you see all of the people who will not be saved being loaded up onto trucks.

Maartje: (16:48)
Yes, it’s like I don’t know how how you would even make that choice. But I guess he just has to like close his eyes and and pick one. That’s the the grim reality of what this means.

Sam: (17:01)
Yeah, for sure. You cannot possibly save everyone. You just have to pick away around the edges and do what you can do in Stern’s position.

Maartje: (17:08)
Yeah, I do like that he saves a lot of people who surely would not have made it to where you can just tell they’re injured or they’re like one man only has one arm stuff like that.

Sam: (17:20)
Older people too.

Maartje: (17:21)
Yes.

Sam: (17:22)
Oscar makes it a point to acquire luxury goods to use as bribes, and this was a major tool in Oscar Schindler’s arsenal. Anytime that he needed a favor from the Nazis, he would show up with bottles of very expensive liquor, black market cigars and cigarettes, food, you know, anything. He was spending money hand over fist on this stuff. And his company has begun to do well, but

It does well to make friends with everyone from local party officials to police officers, so he’s handing up bribes like candy. Meanwhile, Schindler’s wife Emily, played by Caroline Goodall, arrives in town, and there’s a super awkward encounter where she gets to the apartment where Oscar lives, and she encounters his secretary/slash mistress, Victoria Klonowska, played by Małgorzata Gebel. And obviously the secretary feels super awkward about this. Emily is not thrilled either, and Schindler is very much like,

Well what do you want to do? I’m just a guy.

Maartje: (18:18)
I’m a man, I have urges.

Sam: (18:20)
I believe at this time as well, he also had another mistress named Ingrid. So he had these three ladies going at the same time.

Maartje: (18:28)
well I guess and the enamel factory he makes button pens for the military, am I right?

Sam: (18:35)
Yeah, for like mess kits and that kind of stuff, yeah.

Maartje: (18:38)
Right. So he’s found a way to make something that is useful to the Germans, which I thought was clever.

Sam: (18:46)
Yes, he’s getting a ton of military contracts which are great for business. He he even says to his wife at one point, He’s like, Yeah, you know, I’ve tried businesses before and they weren’t successful, but there’s this one thing that is really helping me out, and it’s war.

Maartje: (19:01)
Yeah. He was a interesting man for sure. And what I what I like about the movie is that you kind of don’t get that much of a look into Oscar’s motivations for doing things. You’re like Is he making himself better? Is he helping these people on purpose he kind of plays it down as things being good for business?

And he’s also not wrong, because it is good for business and I think that’s what’s so clever about this movie.

Sam: (19:32)
I also wanted to mention that the Secretary Klonowska was a major component of Oscar’s business. he was arrested three times. I think we only see it once in the movie, but he was arrested three times during the period of the war. and each time it was her who called around, got in touch with his powerful contacts and got him out of prison.

And so she was very helpful to him. She was a major assist in his efforts here to run this factory and to save people.

Maartje: (20:01)
Here here. Does she make it till the end?

Sam: (20:04)
Yeah, as far as I know. she is not Jewish. she’s a Polish woman.

Maartje: (20:08)
okay, but still who knows, right? Natus are bad.

Sam: (20:11)
Well, yes, and it’s worth mentioning too that there’s a a lot of Polish people didn’t necessarily like how they were portrayed in this movie. And there is this thing where there was a lot of anti-Semitism in Poland. Already Jewish people were under specific laws that were different from ethnic Poles. However, at the same time, the Germans did kill three million ethnic Poles.

in the concentration camps and so there’s a sort of a complicated relationship here, but Klinovsky is one of the ones who you know, one of the good ones, I guess we can say.

Maartje: (20:47)
Yes. What if Oscar’s employees insist on thanking him personally? A mister Lowenstein, played by Henrik Bista, who has only one arm, he was the one I was talking about before, and would doubtless have been sent away to the gun spine now otherwise, not long after Oscar’s workers are nut by Nazis and forced to shovel snow. During whisper Loenstein is shot. I hate this so much.

Oscar doesn’t wanna like see this man at first, like he doesn’t want any direct contact with Mr. Lowenstein and it’s like he’s almost like uncomfortable being thanked. Like he doesn’t wanna know

Sam: (21:27)
when I first watched this movie, this was one of the scenes that stuck with me that I remembered very vividly. And as Oscar is leaving the factory that morning, he’s asking Stern, he’s like, What are we doing with a one-armed guy? Like, how how much help could he possibly be to the war effort? And then meanwhile, behind closed doors after Lowenstein has been shot, Oscar is like, I needed that guy. He was a skilled machinist type thing. So we are getting to see these two sort of

faces of Oscar Schindler where when he is interfacing with the Nazis, he is very much playing his cards right and everything.

Maartje: (22:01)
Yes, and then when he’s behind closed doors he’s you can see that he cares.

Sam: (22:06)
Stern is picked up in a Nazi dragnet and Oscar must go to rescue him from the trains. In the book, I believe that it wasn’t just Stern. It was a number of other workers who are also picked up at the same time. And Oscar’s going along the train calling for him. And he ends up in this little scuffle with these two Nazis on the platform who are like, Well, we have our list and he’s on the list. And Oscar’s Well

I’m just gonna have to report you to all my important friends. So you’ll get sent to the Eastern Front probably. Have a good day. And he’s using his tall white man confidence to the best of its ability here. And he manages to get Stern off the train. And in the book, when he gets Stern off the train, all of his other workers who are in the car with Stern also just get off because they see their opportunity. They’re like, We’re also gonna come. And the Nazis just

Maartje: (22:56)
Mm-hmm.

Sam: (22:56)
don’t argue. And they one of them makes a specific point to say to him, like,

Well, we don’t you know, we don’t care if we specifically get him, as long as we get a Jew. Like the list is the list and whatever. And it’s just very I don’t know, it really strikes home for you that this is such a massive scale of destruction that the Nazis are like, well, if we don’t get this one, we’ll get another one. You know, it doesn’t matter to us. And the whole premise of this movie of, you know, on the in the scale of such

Horror and tragedy doesn’t matter to save one person, kind of thing.

Maartje: (23:31)
It also to me shows how it’s about numbers rather than like people. It’s very dehumanizing. Like like they don’t see these people as human. They’re just a number. A number they have to like exterminate. And they are like whether it’s this one or that one, it doesn’t matter as long as it’s all of them.

Sam: (23:53)
Yeah, there’s also a brief scene here where we see some Jewish workers going through the belongings that have been taken from Jewish people. So clothes, jewelry, anything that people packed to take with them, and then was taken away from them by the Nazis. And I think it’s important to mention that to provide some context about the Holocaust here. I mean, even just

The horror of the fact that they were just taking these people’s clothes after they were dead and fixing them up and sending them back to German families who had been the victims of bombings. You know, they’re like, Well, we can’t let anything go to waste.

Maartje: (24:25)
what made me shudder is the gold teeth that they’re sorting through at the same time. We’re like Jesus Christ, they mean that really literally like everything these people had was gonna they were gonna pull it off them.

Sam: (24:38)
Yeah. Grizzly.

Maartje: (24:40)
Yes.

We’re in the Kraków Ghetto in the winter of nineteen forty two and this is when we meet Amon Göth, played by Ralph Fiennes, and I didn’t recognise him. I forgot this was him for the entire movie until the very end. I was like, wait. He’s the commandant of the new labour camp going up nearby

and he selects a maid for himself.

A dream raised woman named Helen Hirsch played by Embeth Davidtz and murders a female architect, Diana Reiter, played by Elina Löwensohn. And he murders her specifically because she dares speak up against him and hold the work. And then after he murders her, he gets another person to do a

Exactly what she told him that needed doing and that’s what’s so gross about it.

Sam: (25:32)
Yes, and there’s almost an equal amount of unpleasantness in the part where he selects Helen as his maid because you can tell that he has his eye on her from the start and you know that it will not go well for her to live in his house.

Maartje: (25:45)
No, it will not. Can I say Ralph Fiennes in this role? Absolutely terrifying.

Sam: (25:51)
Yeah. I remember there’s one part in particular where it zooms in on just his eyes and there is nothing human in there. Like he does such a good job.

Maartje: (26:02)
Yeah. Like I actually have believed this was the actual man. It’s that good.

Sam: (26:08)
March thirteenth, nineteen forty-three is the liquidation of the ghetto. And the word liquidation is awful, but anyway. Chaos and Panic reign Pfefferberg attempts to escape to the sewers with his wife Mila, played by Aldona Grochal. He briefly manages to get away from the Nazis, but he discovers that his wife hadn’t come with him, and so he ends up going back and turning himself in.

This is also a scene that’s taken right from the book where some Nazis are coming around the corner, so he starts putting luggage that’s been dropped on the ground to the side of the road, and he tells them that he’s been ordered to clear the roads. And Goth honestly, whether he believes him or not, he thinks it’s kind of funny that this guy is there clicking his heels and saluting, and so he lets it slide.

Meanwhile, a mother-daughter pairing, Shia Dresner, played by Miri Fabian, and Danka Dresner, played by Anna Mucha, find a hiding spot for the daughter, but not the mother. the woman who has created this hiding spot on the floorboard says, There’s no room for you. So the mother ends up relying on the mercy of a young Jewish police recruit who recognizes her from before the war so that she can stay hidden. As Schindler watches helpless from a nearby hilltop, he sees a little girl in a red jacket amidst the confusion.

Later on the Nazis move through the ghetto after it’s been cleared out, searching for people who are hiding, and it’s very grim. They’re filling ceilings full of holes, they’re essentially waiting quiet until Jewish people think it’s safe to come out and then they’re murdering everyone who was able to hide from them earlier.

Maartje: (27:40)
One of them is hiding at a piano. It’s all just very like no. And in the same kind of liquidation scene we also see doctors poisoning those who are too ill to get out of there because they know they’ll be murdered otherwise and they want to spare them the horror of that. And I thought it was interesting that they showed Schindler

Watching from above on his horse as he’s riding with his wife

Sam: (28:09)
It’s not his wife.

Maartje: (28:10)
Is that not his wife? Oops he’s like in his fancy riding suit with his fancy riding boots, but you can tell that it does really like

Weigh on him when he watches that happen.

Sam: (28:22)
Yeah, and I I don’t believe that Schindler was there at the actual liquidation of the ghetto, but he had seen one of the earlier roundups, I believe, and the violence of it did really shock him. And I don’t know if that played a role in his subsequent decision to step up his efforts, but it certainly may have.

Maartje: (28:39)
Yeah. Life at Płaszów is grim, involving long days of heavy labor during which a person could be shot for sport at any time by the commandant who does this from his freaking balcony.

In an especially cruel affront, the streets are paved with the crumbled remains of Jewish headstones. Göth attempts to persuade Schindler and other factory owners to move their factories inside the camp. Oscar instead persuades Göth to let him establish his own silk camp. And I think in at this point in the movie you get a sense that he’s doing that specifically so he can save more people.

Sam: (29:15)
Well yeah, because the thing about him establishing a sub camp is that he has to pay for everything. when you’re setting up a concentration camp, the German government has these very specific specifications. So you have to have this much fencing and this much barbed wire, you have to have this many SS people guarding it, you have to have X, Y, and Z, and he has to pay for all of that out of pocket. So

Financially, is it the best idea for him to be moving all these people onto the campus where his factory is? Probably not, but if they don’t have to go back to Płaszóww every night, there’s a good chance that they’re not gonna be murdered by Göth.

Maartje: (29:51)
Right. Goth seems so kind of amused by Oscar as well. He seems kind of to be indulging him a little.

Sam: (29:59)
Yeah, I think that’s true. I think he did get a little bit of a kick out of it, and we’ll see that again later with the Water on the Trains episode, where Goth is like, Okay, this is funny to me. You wanna show these little acts of mercy, have at it. That’s fun for me to watch, whatever you wanna do. and Goth, the way he’s depicted in the movie, as terrible as he is, they didn’t even show the full array of horrific things he did because

It honestly makes him look a like a cartoon villain, but he was a real person and he really did do those things.

Maartje: (30:31)
what didn’t they show that was too hard to believe?

Sam: (30:35)
there was a ton of other stuff, like him just mowing down entire work groups and that kind of stuff. just the scale of things that he was doing is I I feel like depicted much more in detail in the book and we get little choice bits and pieces in the movie for sure, but I think if you had

Maartje: (30:51)
Yeah.

Sam: (30:51)
shown all of it you’d be like, Alright, here’s this guy murdering a bunch of people again.

Maartje: (30:55)
Yes. Right. It becomes co almost comical in a non funny way.

Sam: (30:59)
Yeah.

the relationship between Schindler and Goth is interesting because Schindler definitely felt revulsion towards him and his behavior, but at the same time he understood very well that you get pretty far with a guy like this if you play to his interests. And so Schindler would come over with this expensive liquor and they would have these all-night drinking parties where they would invite sex workers in and

They would have two Jewish musicians from the camp playing music and they would have these wild parties and we see that really briefly in the movie. But I think it’s important because Goth genuinely thought that him and Schindler were friends. He was like, Yeah, this is my buddy Schindler, and maybe he likes the Jews a little too much, but we can indulge him, you know, ’cause we’re buddies.

Maartje: (31:45)
Yes. Yeah, right.

Sam: (31:46)
Though Oscar plays the thorough capitalist, particularly to the Nazis with whom he ends up spending a lot of his social time, several situations occur during which he directly intercedes to have people brought to his camp, which is considered a haven, because people get enough food, first of all. In the labor camps, people are getting maybe, you know, they’re getting less than a thousand calories a day. In Oscar’s camp, they’re getting two thousand calories a day, so it’s it’s enough to live on.

And Oscar is being sent food from Płaszów, but he is being sent the amount of food that they would feed the prisoners in Płaszów. And so it’s not enough. So he’s having to spend a significant amount of his own money on black market bread and all of this kind of stuff. also if you get sick at Oscar’s factory, you’re allowed to go to the clinic and you won’t be murdered. You’re allowed to get better and go back to work.

He doesn’t separate the men and the women, so husbands and wives can visit with each other and all that kind of stuff. And you of course won’t be summarily murdered. Oscar is not allowing the SS guards into the factory itself, except for inspections that have to occasionally occur, but he is generally speaking not allowing them to have close contact with his workers.

back in the Płaszów Metalworks Factory, Rabbi Menasha Lewartow, played by Ezra Dagan, is a hinge maker. He has a harrowing run-in with Goth that suggests he surely won’t survive a second. And there’s this horrible scene where Goth doesn’t think he’s been making hinges fast enough. So he tries to shoot him. His pistol jams several times while he has this poor man kneeling on the ground in front of him. He pulls out a second pistol, which also jams.

And he eventually gets angry and walks away. But Stern goes to Schindler and he’s like, This guy has a target on his back. Goth is gonna kill him at some point, so you have to get him out, especially because he’s a rabbi, right? It’s this whole thing, it’s very symbolic. It’s the same thing with the Jewish gravestones. It’s like we have to get rid of anything that gives these people any sense of like dignity, basically. And there’s this second situation where an orphan

Cleverly tries to prevent Goth from executing others by accusing an already dead man as a chicken thief. And so Goth is walking up and down this line of prisoners and he shoots a man and he’s like, which of you stole this chicken? And the kid steps forward and like it was that guy. And in the book, Goth thinks this is very funny. Like he clearly doesn’t believe him, but he’s sure, sure, sure. But this is another situation where Stern is like, this kid’s number’s gonna be up. Like Goth is gonna find a reason to kill him. And so he also gets brought to Oscar’s factory.

And lastly, a young woman named Regina Perlman, played by Bettina Kupfer, convinces Oscar to bring her aging parents to safety. And when she goes to see him, he initially thinks that she is a plant, that she’s been sent by some of the Nazis, and she’s here trying to figure out if he’s trying to save Jews or not. So he’s very stern with her. He’s like, no, I don’t do that kind of thing. I don’t rescue people. I’m a capitalist. But then he does ultimately bring her parents to safety.

And he even suggests to Amon’s maid, the poor put upon Helen that she should not give up hope ’cause he’s going to try and save her as well.

Maartje: (34:52)
Yeah. Man this movie I think I don’t know, it just gives me all the feels. In so many different kind of feels too.

Sam: (35:00)
Yeah, definitely.

Maartje: (35:01)
Schindler tries to convince Goth that and he does this with a very healthy amount of good liquor that showing mercy actually demonstrates power.

Goth forgives the young worker for not thoroughly cleaning his bathtub and you think he’s letting me go, but his forgiving mood doesn’t last long and he ends up shooting him as he’s leaving. Which is really sad. We also see a young couple getting married in a rare moment of happiness in a labour camp.

And the Centre intercut with Oscar at a wild party and Goth brutally beaten poor Helen. Helen is in

a bad place.

Sam: (35:38)
Yeah. The scene is

very uncomfortable. Goth is you think he might rape her, but then he’s too much of a purist because she’s Jewish and so then he subsequently beats her for I don’t know, being attractive and tempting him, I guess.

Maartje: (35:56)
Seducing him in his words, yeah.

Sam: (35:58)
Yeah.

Maartje: (35:59)
It’s horrible.

Sam: (36:00)
Yeah, the scene of the young couple getting married in the book was interesting because obviously the men and women are separated. And so this young man sneaks his way into the women’s barracks by dressing like a woman, and

Maartje: (36:15)
Mm.

Sam: (36:16)
then they have this little wedding ceremony where he does the stepping on the glass and all the traditional things that you’re supposed to do. And these people really perceive it as

you know, a little secret moment to practice their culture and their religion and to have this rare y it’s almost like sticking it to the Nazis, you know, the fact that they can still do these things. And then there is a soldier who passes through their barracks and the young man comes this this close to getting caught. and it’s very tense.

Maartje: (36:47)
But they survive, right?

Sam: (36:50)
Yeah, I believe they both survive.

Maartje: (36:52)
thank God.

Sam: (36:53)
Yes, and the bit where Oscar tries to talk Goth into killing fewer people is also in the book. He’s like, Maybe if I play to this guy’s ego, you know, and I’m like, ooh, you know what would really demonstrate that you’re powerful if you show some mercy and show these people that you can be even handed and that you’re not gonna just gonna murder people at random. And supposedly Goth actually did for a couple of weeks stop shooting people from his balcony, but then he ended up picking it up again.

But

Maartje: (37:21)
Mm.

Sam: (37:22)
it’s kind of funny in a sad way that when later on Göth was one of these guys who was constantly cooking the books of the camp. And so, like for example, when he was sending food to Płaszóww for Oscar’s Jews, he would only send a small portion of what he said he was sending, but on the books he would write that he had sent the full amount, and so he would be getting money for this stuff, and then he wasn’t

Spending the money on that stuff. He was spending it on himself. And when the German High Command figured this out, they weren’t very happy about it. And so there was a point where he was directed to stop killing people at random because it was like, well, this camp is part of the war machine now. We need these workers. And so actually it was higher-up Nazis who told him to stop shooting people off his balcony, ultimately.

Maartje: (38:11)
Hmm. The Germans and their so called efficiency and rules. I guess that’s one thing we can count on them for.

Sam: (38:20)
Yes, exactly.

Mila tells the other woman in her barracks a story she has heard about gas chambers, but no one wants to believe her. They’re all convinced that or they want to believe, I suppose, that the Germans wouldn’t destroy their own labor force.

Maartje: (38:35)
Yeah, I also think it’s not very good for moral to be hearing all this stuff, and that’s another reason why they want her to stop talking.

Sam: (38:43)
Right, it’s just horrifying rumors at this point, right?

Maartje: (38:46)
Yeah.

Sam: (38:46)
However, soon the sick and healthy are separated in the camp. They need to make room for more workers to come from Hungary, and so the sick and the elderly and the children are to be gotten rid of. So yeah, there’s this really horrible part where all the children come around the corner and the mothers immediately have a meltdown, and this scene also

Had me teary-eyed because woof, like fucking imagine. So they see their children

Maartje: (39:15)
Yeah.

Sam: (39:16)
being taken away. Some of the kids manage to hide. One of the kids manages to hide in the bottom of the lavatory. He like sinks himself down into that pit full of human excrement. And then seeing how brutally hot the train cars are in the midday sun, and everyone on the trains are calling for water, Oscar has them all hosed down.

And he bribes one of the Nazis he says every time the train opens, give these people water every time the train stops, open up and give these people water and Göth watches him do this and he’s like, Oscar, you’re so silly. Why would you give them hope?

Maartje: (39:49)
Yes.

Oscar gets arrested, so this is the one time you see it in a movie, as you said. but he’s able to use his connections and talk his way out of it. when he leaves the prison Ash is falling from the sky.

On april nineteen forty four, Department D orders Goth to exhume and incinerate the bodies of more than ten thousand Jews killed at Płaszóww and the Kraków Ghetto Massacre. So that’s a card we get again.

Oscar recognizes the red jacket on the pile of corpses, so the thing that has given him sort of hope and is a symbol for his journey to save these people, he finds it on the pile of corpses. And that’s when older colour disappears again. This was the only colour in the movie for a while. And now it’s gone.

Sam: (40:38)
Yeah, super effective for sure.

Maartje: (40:40)
Yes.

Sam: (40:41)
before this, Goth has been killing people with wild abandon and they simply bury them in the woods. And at this point the regime I think is getting a little twitchy that at some point in the Russian advance they’re gonna find all these bodies and they wanna get rid of the proof of what they’ve been doing. So now they have to destroy all of these bodies that they’ve buried.

Maartje: (40:59)
And the movie does another thing which I thought was really effective. They have this image of the the big chimney coming from the furnaces. That is a thing that people look up to in fear, as they would, obviously, but it’s filmed so effectively that it just gives you chills.

Sam: (41:20)
Yeah, for sure. Although in this part we are seeing the bodies being burned in this massive open pit, which is

Maartje: (41:26)
Yes.

Sam: (41:27)
somehow more horrifying because it’s like they’re just dumping bodies in, the Nazis are laughing and cracking jokes. It’s just surreal.

Maartje: (41:35)
We have seen a bit like this in Son of Saul which is also a movie about the Holocaust you should watch and you can listen to our episode about that.

Sam: (41:45)
The camp at Plaschau is to be closed and all of its inhabitants are to be sent to Auschwitz. and this is part of a consolidation that the Nazis started doing later on in the war. They had to start getting rid of people who were witnesses and who would be able to tell the outside world what they had done. And so though things are momentarily bleak, Oscar hatches a plan.

To build a new subcamp in Czechoslovakia near his hometown. He’s actually a Sudeten German. And he and Stern compile a list of people that they will bring with them to this camp, which comes out to about a thousand, including Helen Hirsch. And he plays a game of cards with and Göth and says, Look, if I win, I get to take Helen. If you win, I’ll give you a bunch of money. Which is just yeah, there’s something about that, you know.

Maartje: (42:32)
And he ends up paying him extra money too, I believe, he says anyway. I’ll make it more, he says.

Sam: (42:39)
Yeah, he ends up giving Goth a pretty significant bribe to let him build this subcamp elsewhere. And again, when he’s building this subcamp, he has to pay for all of it. So though he may have been making profit initially from having all these slave laborers, he is certainly spending a lot of money on bribery and building camps.

Maartje: (42:59)
Yeah, I wonder when his money was running out. At which point.

Sam: (43:03)
Well, certainly we see it in the film, you know, later on when Stern is like, Do you happen to have any money hiding somewhere that you haven’t told me about? And Oscar’s like, So it’s come to this, huh? I’m broke now.

I believe also Oscar did have some property and maybe some money scrolled away, but his accounts were frozen at the end of the war because he was in the Nazi party. So yeah.

Maartje: (43:23)
Ooh,

of course. You almost forget for a while that he isn’t a Nazi party because he’s doing all these things to save people. And you’re like,

Sam: (43:32)
Yes.

Maartje: (43:32)
wait a second, he’s still a Nazi Or at least

Sam: (43:35)
Yes.

Maartje: (43:36)
he’s a party member.

Sam: (43:37)
So we should say this part of the movie where Schindler is helping Stern to make the list is poetic license. In real life, Schindler didn’t really have anything to do with the actual names on the list. it was Stern and one of the Jewish camp workers named Marcel Goldberg who was responsible for compiling the list. And the list ended up consisting of some of them were Schindler workers.

A lot of them were people who had bribed Goldberg to end up on the list, or people that Stern was friendly with, or, you know, it was really just them coming up with names to put on the list. so Schindler didn’t personally really have anything to do with it, but I’m I mean I’m not really mad about that change. It’s very dramatic in the film. The two of them sitting there and trying to remember names off the top of their head to put on the list. And ultimately, about eleven hundred people ended up being saved, and the extra

hundred people or so were because Schindler would take on other Jews displaced by the German retreat between this point and the end of the war.

Maartje: (44:37)
the movie tries to make it seem like Oscar Schindler knows who every single person on the list is. And I also don’t mind it. Like it’s effective in the movie, but it’s a bit unreasonable for him to know all the people on the list, but they do make it seem like that.

Sam: (44:57)
Right. And realistically, Oscar doesn’t know all these people, right? Like he

Maartje: (45:00)
No.

Sam: (45:01)
he knows that they’re his workers, he feels some degree of paternalism towards them, but he doesn’t know their names.

Maartje: (45:07)
No.

Of course male workers arrive at the camp at Brünnlitz but the women are routed to Auschwitz per mistake is the idea. They were also supposed to be arriving at Brünnlitz. And their heads are being shaved, they have to take off all their clothes, and they are being shoveled towards a building that

they all go into and they all see the chimney and they all know, god, god, what’s happening and then they’re in there and the showers open and it’s an actual shower and I’ve never felt relief and goosebumps like that because all the people start crying because they thought they were dying and they’re not. It’s an actual shower.

Sam: (45:50)
Yes, very, very emotionally effective, although doubtful that people at the time would have known that people were being gassed in this fashion. So a little poetic

Maartje: (46:01)
Right.

Sam: (46:02)
license there probably, but I think it works.

Maartje: (46:04)
I guess they set it up like this because of the person telling the stories earlier and then of than they would have known from that rumour. But like you said, that’s not gonna be realistic. But it works in a movie.

Sam: (46:17)
Right. ‘Cause we know we know those stories about the gas at Auschwitz.

Maartje: (46:20)
Right.

Right. Exactly. Oscar must then bargain to get the women back that were supposed to be going to Brünnlitz And the person he has to bargain with is Rudolf Höss. Which if you remember he’s one of the big bad guys. And he’s played by Hans-Michael Rehberg in this movie. And it’s really funny because he

he puts out some diamonds upon his table and he’s like I don’t like these diamonds to be on this table right here. I don’t like the look of them on my table, so I’m just gonna quietly move them off my table And that was really effective. And he gets them back with his bribe.

He gets initially Hess says you can have three hundred of the new people that are coming in, I think they’re Bulgarians or something, he says. But he wants his specific people. And he does get them back and he’s at the trains helping them into the trains. And then he sees that the guards are taking the children away and Oscar won’t let it slide. He’s like, I need these children, they’re mine, get off them.

Sam: (47:23)
Yeah, and this is a thing the real Oscar would do as well, because of course Nazis who were paying attention would be like, Why do you need kids at a factory? And he would very angrily tell them, Well, they have small hands, so who else is gonna get inside of these shells to polish them? I need people with small hands. And it was an outrageous lie, but the fact that he told it with such conviction seemed to work time and time again.

Maartje: (47:47)
Yes. And it’s really smart of him to start a munitions factory for sure, too, because they wouldn’t have needed bots and plans anymore as much. But they needed bullets.

Sam: (47:59)
Yes, yes. That’s that’s the thing too. Yeah, he’s starting a munitions factory. He did in his factory in Kraków he did have a small part of it that was making munitions, but the idea at Brünnlitz was that he was gonna expand that portion of it.

Maartje: (48:12)
Yes.

Sam: (48:13)
in real life, we don’t know that Oscar went to Auschwitz himself, and the story, which again, we don’t know the full veracity of this, we don’t know exactly what happened because different people remember it differently. But the story seems to be that one of his secretaries was sent to Auschwitz with a substantial bribe, and that she was the one who spoke to

The Commandant at Auschwitz, and that meanwhile Oscar was talking to his friends at the Armaments Inspectorate, trying to put pressure on it from that end. And there’s even some suggestion that this woman may have had to offer sexual favors to get these women out of Auschwitz. But again, we don’t know that this is 100% for sure. However, this woman is not named. We don’t know who she is, but I felt like she should also be given some credit for this.

Maartje: (48:59)
Yes. Can we just quickly just stop and think about the risk that everybody also Oscar was taking every single time he offered a bribe? It’s like imagine if th those bribes weren’t accepted. You could have been easily locked up and for however long and even could have been executed.

Sam: (49:24)
Well, that’s the thing, right? Like this guy’s been arrested three times at this point, and he has gotten by so far on the fact that he is genuinely a friendly, charming man, and a lot of the people at the armaments inspectorate liked him. And he would use any tool at his disposal. So for example, I believe one of the generals who worked at the armaments inspectorate was named General Schindler and they were not related. But Schindler would let people make the supposition that maybe they were related.

Maartje: (49:51)
Ooh. Imagine it’s we were talking about White Lady Kareness. This is the male equivalent, except he’s not a Karen. But he is this brazen and his like self esteem and all that that he just blags his way out of everything.

Sam: (50:08)
Yes, he uses the privileges at his disposal to benefit people who don’t have those privileges.

Maartje: (50:11)
Yes. Yes.

Sam: (50:14)
We could all probably learn a lesson or two from Oscar Schindler.

Oscar’s new armaments camp is as idyllic as any concentration camp probably could be. He keeps the SS officers out of the camp, and it’s funny because at this point we’re pretty late in the war, right? So he’s trying to run down the clock effectively. And he tells Stern that they will claim quote unquote startup problems to avoid making even a single shell toward the German war effort.

he keeps getting razzed on because the way that the industry works is that one factory will make a certain portion of something and then they’ll send it onto the next factory that specializes in the next step of the process kind of thing. And so the factories that he’s sending his piece of the operation onto are like, dude, everything you send us sucks. And

He keeps having to be like, sorry, yeah, we’re having these startup problems, you know, the machines, we can’t calibrate them, like we’ll do better next time, kind of thing.

there’s even a rumor going around that he is purposely miscalibrating the machines. So all of his workers are doing the correct thing, but the machines are never gonna pump out shells that actually work. So we don’t know if that’s true. It could be part of the Oscar Schindler myth, but regardless, we have a card that says

For the seven months it was fully operational, Schindler’s Brünnlitz Munitions Factory was a model of non production. During this same period he spent millions of Reichsmarks to sustain his workers and bribe Reich officials.

Maartje: (51:38)
It made me laugh really that he decided to make faulty ammunition. But I say it made me laugh but again this was a huge risk. I would imagine. people would start to notice that everything he was doing wasn’t making any sense.

Sam: (51:53)
For sure. And he’s getting a little reckless in this period too, because, like, for example, if Jewish people escaped from a transport and they got picked up by, you know, the the Germans, Schindler would hear about this and he would go to the place where they were being held and he’d be like, Nah, instead of sending them to Auschwitz, just give them to me. I’ll work them real hard at my labor camp. You don’t have to worry about that. So this is how he’s accumulating more people as he’s going along as well, which is also risky.

And I wanted to give some credit to Schindler’s wife Emily here because when the women were brought to Brunlitz from Auschwitz, they were in really bad shape. They had been at Auschwitz for some time. A lot of them were sick, they had dysentery, they were extremely malnourished. And Emily was instrumental in nursing these women back to health. so they had four doctors on site and the doctors were like, yeah.

They’re not gonna make it. And Emily just wouldn’t give up. She would go constantly and she’d be spooning food into their mouths. Like this woman was dogged. She was not gonna let anyone die in her watch if she could help it. And so I wanted to give major props to her ’cause we don’t see too much of her in the movie.

Maartje: (52:56)
No, and it barely even less than I thought, because there was a some secretary probably or another love interest.

Sam: (53:05)
Yeah, on the horses, yeah.

Maartje: (53:06)
Yeah.

Germany surrenders. Oscar gives a speech that he will remain until five minutes after midnight. he gives this speech to all his workers by the way, and also the SS are still there. So the SS leave and the workers observe a silence for their lost family, friends and neighbours. Oscar’s very last act as director of the camp is to issue fabric cigarettes and vodka

To everyone so that they will have something to barter when they are out in a world later. The workers in turn provide Oscar Schindler with a letter attesting to his good acts that he can provide if he is arrested and they also give him a ring carved with a phrase from the Talmud Whoever saves one life saves the world entire. And this made me cry.

Just his frickin ring. Oscar is suddenly gripped by grief that he could have done more and this is the first time we really see him show emotion outwardly.

Sam: (54:05)
Yeah. the workers decide that they want to make him some kind of keepsake, but they obviously don’t have any gold, so they one of them still has golden like dental work yet, he has a bridge, and so they take it out and he d charitably donates this to the cause and they make this ring. And in the book, the guy who donates his dental work, he’s already to joke about it. You know, he’s already like, you know, look at my teeth kind of thing. And Oscar

doesn’t even crack a smile, he takes it so seriously that they made this gesture to him.

Maartje: (54:38)
Yeah, yeah, I don’t know. It was just really moving. It was also a little bit uncomfortable for me to watch him cry. I don’t know why.

Sam: (54:48)
I did find this scene of the movie where he keeps saying that he could have done more in front of this assembled array of people that he rescued, like this feels a little kind of like we’re centering the emotions of this Gentile at the time when

Maartje: (55:01)
Yeah.

Sam: (55:02)
all these people around him have narrowly escaped a genocide.

Maartje: (55:06)
Yeah. it’s also because they’re all standing around him and they’re like almost worshiping this man as it is and then he also gets to like Huh, I’m a savior but I haven’t saved enough

Sam: (55:18)
Yes. Exactly.

Maartje: (55:18)
Yes.

Sam: (55:20)
so the war ends at midnight and Oscar knows that the second the war is over, he’s going to be the one who has to be on the run because he was a member of the Nazi Party and if he gets caught by the Soviets, they will simply shoot him. And despite that, he says he’s going to stay until five minutes after midnight. And in the book he’s like looking at the SS guys, he’s like, I’ll be here.

until after the war ends, even though it’s risky for me not to leave before that. He’s like, I’m gonna stay here and make sure that I am a witness and that you guys are not gonna fuck around and kill these people.

Maartje: (55:50)
Yeah. They also make that pretty clear in the movie. He’s pretty threatening for once. His whole charming bravado kind of drops and he becomes his really scary presence.

Sam: (56:01)
Yes, for sure.

A Russian soldier arrives the following day to tell Schindler’s Jewish workers that they are officially liberated. think it’s Stern who asks him, Have you been to Poland? And he says, Well, yeah, I just came from there. And Stern asks, Are there any Jews left in Poland? And the guy doesn’t really answer, but you know, the answer is obvious.

so in the book they describe how

some of Schindler’s workers go with him and they ensure that he is taken under US protection they help him to avoid the Soviets. And so I thought it would have been nice to see in turn him be rescued by the people that he rescued, but nevertheless we don’t get that in the film.

Maartje: (56:41)
I did wonder, because you don’t really know what happens to him after he leaves in a fancy car.

Sam: (56:46)
Yeah. then we get some end cards that say Amon Goth was arrested while a patient in a sanatorium at Bad Tolls. And I’ll just throw this in here. The reason why he’s at a sanatorium was that he ended up being arrested for his mismanagement of the camp at Płaszów, so he was in trouble with the Nazis before the war ended. Anyway. We see him hanged in Kraków for crimes against humanity. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

the end cards continue.

Oscar Schindler failed at his marriage in several businesses after the war. In 1958, he was declared a righteous person by the Council of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem and invited to plant a tree in the Avenue of the Righteous. It grows there still. And we see some actors, along with the real people that they played, laying stones on Schindler’s grave in Jerusalem. And then we get some more end cards that say: There are fewer than 4,000 Jews left alive in Poland today. There are more than 6,000 descendants of the Schindler Jews.

In memory of the more than six million Jews murdered.

Maartje: (57:42)
How much I was hoping that Stern would have been part of those people we see at the end to find out that he’d already died made me kind of sad.

Sam: (57:53)
Yeah. I mean it’s impressive the sheer number number of people that are still alive, ’cause this is a you know,

Maartje: (57:58)
Yes.

Sam: (57:58)
a good amount of time after the end of World War Two.

Maartje: (58:00)
Yeah. I feel like we talk about this quite often that somehow the people that go through the worst end up being really old. But I think that’s all coincidence and it’s all like if you look at the actual numbers there won’t be that many more people that have gone through horrible shit that are still alive but it feels like that sometimes.

Sam: (58:20)
Yeah, but I think that’s survivor bias because we hear their stories because they lived long enough to tell them.

Maartje: (58:24)
Right.

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, that’s what I mean. Like it feels like that, but it’s not really like that.

Yeah.

Sam: (58:30)
Yeah,

and Oscar Schindler never really did anything remarkable before the war, and he never really did anything remarkable after. This was his moment to shine, and he stepped up and then he had a bit of a tough time after the war. he eventually moved to Argentina with his wife and some of his workers actually went with him, some of his Jewish workers from during the war, and

it was this whole complicated thing where because he had been a member of the Nazi Party, he had a really hard time in Germany. And then when the story became well known that he had saved Jewish people, well, then he was getting stigma because he was a Jew lover and all that kind of stuff. So he really couldn’t win. He went to Argentina, he tried to run a farm, he wasn’t good at it. He eventually left Argentina. His wife had had enough at this point. She remained. And after that, they were not really together. And he kind of ended his days in

Obscurity. He was never really wealthy again. yeah, he just kind of a sad coda to his story.

Maartje: (59:28)
And what year did the book come out again?

Sam: (59:31)
Nineteen eighty two.

Maartje: (59:32)
Right, so before that his story was more or less unknown. That’s kind of crazy.

Sam: (59:38)
Yeah.

Maartje: (59:39)
You have some more nodes, right?

Sam: (59:49)
What we don’t see much of in the movie is Schindler’s role as somewhat of a spy. So he did a little bit of intelligence gathering and passing along. For instance, at one point he undertook a fairly risky journey to Hungary to provide a Jewish organization. If you’ll remember, Jewish people in Hungary, while not having a super great time before 1944,

They were not being subject to the Holocaust in the same way as Jewish people in other territories. And so he went to Hungary to provide a Jewish organization with intelligence about what he had witnessed happening to Jews in Poland. He had meant to just send you know, paperwork, like a witness statement, and the people that he was speaking with were like, no, it’d be more effective if you came in person.

Because the things that you’re saying are truly so horrible and unbelievable that people need to see your face as you’re saying them so they can believe them, kind of thing. And he did actually get money during the war from some of these Jewish resistance organizations who were helping him to fund some of the stuff that he was doing at his factory. So he was kind of working with these organizations a little bit during the war. and he actually was awarded fifteen thousand dollars by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee after the war for having done this intelligence work.

Maartje: (1:01:06)
Interesting. Yeah, I understand why it’s not in the movie, but it’s still really interesting that he did that.

Sam: (1:01:14)
Yes. And Steven Spielberg, based on the research that he had done for this movie, founded a vast archive of firsthand interviews with Holocaust survivors. And today that archive is the largest collection of genocide witness testimony in the world, including not just the Holocaust, but also subsequent genocides around the world.

Maartje: (1:01:35)
Interesting. is it available online? Do we know?

Sam: (1:01:37)
I don’t think it’s been fully digitized. You can find a lot of information about it online and I think you can probably ask for things, but they have things like over a thousand hours of eyewitness testimony and like all of this, you know, stuff that we that we wouldn’t have archived if it hadn’t been for this repository, this place to put it.

Maartje: (1:01:56)
That’s pretty neat, just collecting of history to make sure it doesn’t get lost.

Sam: (1:02:01)
in the decades as the war was fading from living memory, there was this resurgence of Holocaust denial and we still see that now. And so I think it’s

Maartje: (1:02:12)
Mm.

Sam: (1:02:13)
really important to have these people who had been there on the record saying what they had experienced.

Maartje: (1:02:18)
Yes. Interesting, I didn’t know that. That Spielberg had done that. Hmm. I’ll have to look into it.

We have to rate this movie, but before we do I’d like to remind you that you can find us wherever you get your podcasts and rate us or review us, we would very much like that. And you can send this episode to your friends.

Sam: (1:02:37)
Every time you send this episode to a friend, people are reminded of the power of a good list.

Maartje: (1:02:43)
I do like a list. What would you like to rate this movie out of?

Sam: (1:02:47)
Mm.

how many names on the list out of ten would you rate this movie?

Maartje: (1:02:51)
I would rate this movie nine point eight more names on the list out of ten. It doesn’t get a ten because of the White Savior thing. And perhaps the fact that there aren’t enough women doing cool stuff in it. But other than that, it’s pretty much the perfect movie for me. So good on all accounts. The music is really remarkable.

The acting is great The style of the movie is great, the filmmaking is awesome. It keeps you on your toes. You are rooting for everybody to survive. You hate the bad guys, but the bad guy is scary as hell, he’s not two dimensional, he’s great.

I don’t know, I just loved it very much. I wanna watch it again already, and that’s remarkable for a Holocaust movie. it’s a tough subject to cover, but I wanna watch it again. How about you?

Sam: (1:03:44)
Yeah, I’m gonna give it nine more names on the list out of ten. I think that particularly if you compare it to Son of Saul, for example, it’s a bit more of a Hollywoodized version. And as you say, there is a bit of white savioriness going on. it’s a story about the Holocaust, but it’s about like the one good white guy. but that said, it is an excellent film.

Definitely one of Spielberg’s strongest. It’s extremely well acted. even though Spielberg may have taken some artistic license here and there, and you know, it’s maybe not 100 million percent historically accurate, the point was to tell this story, to strike a chord with people, to put the Holocaust back on people’s radars and make people look at it. And I think it manages to do that. And yeah, great film would definitely recommend.

Maartje: (1:04:29)
Okay. how excellently concise of both of us if I do say so myself. Anyway, are you reading anything?

Sam: (1:04:37)
I am going to start reading a book on my vacation called Vietnam a History by Stanley Carnow. It has won a Pulitzer Prize and I’m interested because I know the broad strokes of Vietnam. I know about the Ted offensive and Me Lai and that kind of stuff, but I feel like this book will help me pull together my knowledge a little bit better. So yeah, I’m excited to read more about that.

Maartje: (1:04:59)
I bet I’m also reading another book. I’m reading The Alchemist by Paolo Coelo I think you pronounce it. It’s fairly old book. It’s a very short book. It’s apparently quite a moving book. I just finished Dungeon Crawler Carl, which is not a very moving book, so I needed a little

Little bit of meaning in between before I read the second book of that series that I was reading. So yeah.

Sam: (1:05:27)
Nice.

Maartje: (1:05:27)
That’s it for me.

Sam: (1:05:29)
glad you’re back on the reading train, pal.

Maartje: (1:05:30)
I’m so back. This is my sixth book in two weeks.

Sam: (1:05:35)
Heck yeah. you’re gonna have a a novel filled fall, I feel like.

Maartje: (1:05:39)
Yes, and I do purposely pick smaller books, like they can’t be over four hundred pages because then I won’t stick with them. But if they’re like under four hundred I can do them.

Sam: (1:05:51)
That’s fair, man. you gotta do whatever it takes. one of my buddies, actually, she’s probably listening to this, shout out. but she has also been doing some more reading. But she was talking about how sometimes you feel this sense that you have to be reading something like smart or intellectual. You have to be learning something from reading. And it’s like, nah, man, like reading can just be a hobby. Like you can just read for fun to turn your mind off for a little while. That is also okay.

Maartje: (1:06:16)
And think ultimately you can learn something from every single book you read, even if it’s fiction, like there will be something in there that’ll make you think or think about something in a way you haven’t thought of it before and that’s learning too. So I think you learn anyway if you read. And what I’m learning as I’m reading so many books now is that reading is a muscle you need to train. So in order to be reading like

A lot of non fiction. You need to have read fiction that keeps you going and then you can read a big non fiction book and it’ll feel the same way as the other books do. It’s just a muscle. You need to be exercising a bit.

Sam: (1:06:56)
Yeah, super valid. And one of the things I love about reading is that so many other things that I do, I’m doing more than one thing at once. Like even when I’m doing chores, I’m also listening to a podcast or when I’m watching TV, I’m checking my phone or whatever. But when I’m reading, I’m just reading. And I think it’s a great way to retrain our minds to not be so distracted all the time.

Maartje: (1:07:19)
It’s exactly that. And for people who know me very well, I am like addicted to my phone. And I also just got a device that lets me block all my apps and I can’t unblock them. And that’s helped tremendously in my reading journey as well. So it’s just really lovely to be able to focus and read an entire book and get lost in it. And another thing I wanted to mention for those of us who have trouble reading sometimes

If you don’t like a book, it’s okay not to finish it.

Sam: (1:07:48)
Absolutely. You don’t have to finish anything that you don’t like.

Maartje: (1:07:51)
And I’m gonna end it here before we turn into a book reading podcast.

Sam: (1:07:56)
Well, we are a book reading podcast.

Maartje: (1:07:58)
you are you’re doing all the heavy lifting, but maybe one day I’ll be as trained as you and then I’ll be also able to contribute with some more books.

Sam: (1:08:08)
Hell yeah, man.

Maartje: (1:08:09)
Anyway, thank you so much for listening to yet another episode of Rosie. You can follow us wherever you get your podcast and rate us five stars. You can follow us on Instagram at RosieWerPodcast, or you can visit our website at RosieDeReviewer dot com and you can rate this movie with us and it I feel like it’s gonna be a high rating for most people.

And we’ll see you next week. Because we don’t do vacation on Rosie.

Sam: (1:08:36)
That’s right, we’ll be back next week. Bye.

Maartje: (1:08:38)
Bye.