I watched Schindler’s List for the first time the other day. I always heard it was one of the best movies ever. To be honest I was not too impressed with it. What did you think of it?

(Below I say what happens in the movie, so don’t read it if you don’t want to know. Not much detail on the gory details. More the themes and overall story.)

(I didn’t take notes while I was watching. I wasn’t planning to write anything. So I go by memory only. I didn’t include all elements of the plot. Hopefully it is a fair recounting.)

There are two overall parts of the movie: the main plot which is about the personality development of German capitalist Oskar Schindler, and the surrounding events regarding the holocaust of the Jews.

I think the reason the movie is so well-regarded is because of the holocaust part. There are very human, grim and intimate depictions of the interactions that constituted the holocaust. It depicts the increasing suffering and terror, and the many wilful individual acts required to bring it about. There are several scenes of cruelty and debasement at small and mass scales. Casual and programmatic. Pogroms, murder, theft, teasing, beatings, all serving to create and emphasize a power differential to the extent of de-humanization.

Watching in 2026, some of the scenes are very much like videos of Israelis as they engage in this same kind of behavior. Earlier in the day I watched a video of some people getting attacked by settlers. The screams of the victims were the same, the body language of the assailants were the same, as was the tone and intention of their words. It’s really striking.

The basic plot of the film’s title character is that he comes to set up a factory (making pots and pans) on which he will become fabulously wealthy by exploiting the desperate situation of the Jews. He extorts money from some of them to provide the start up capital, then others he employs as slaves. Since there is a war on, he is able to sell anything he makes easily and for good prices by bribing those in charge of requisitioning. Through his interactions with the workers, especially the accountant Stern who does all his work for him, he is forced to notice they are human. Slowly he becomes protective of them. The film portrays him as consciously misleading other nazis to think he is just being possessive of his property, while the jews all knew he was secretly sympathetic even before he totally understood this himself. So over the course of it he grows from a greedy, self interested nazi into a figure kind of how confederates like to imagine slave owners. A kind, insightful leader forced by circumstances to take responsibility for all these people who depend on him, which entails exploiting them. (Nobless oblige.) By the end of the war, the factory’s production has switched to munitions, and he has turned so far around that him and Stern have a semi-public conversation about sabotaging the work so that they will avoid contributing to the war effort. (This is an unearned development, coming from nowhere.) Since they aren’t really making anything, Schindler spends all his money on keeping things afloat. Eventually there is Allied victory. He describes himself as a war profiteer, slaver and criminal in a very long and self congratulatory speech given to all the assembled workers and nazi soldiers. He and his wife (who is barely in the movie, never shown to do anything, although she is described as a collaborator in his treason/heroism) flee anticipated legal consequences. The film ends with a modern-day procession of the real-life surviving Jewish chacters (and some family) who were depicted in the movie, who are each laying a stone on his grave.

The “List” is a list of “essential workers” which Schindler instructs Stern to create of Jews who will be allowed to live. Since the start of it, he able to pick and choose people who are being brutalized, whom he takes possession of. Eventually, the Nazis are enacting the “final solution” and it becomes more difficult to hang on to the individual slaves he had become accustomed to, which bothers him. What the big bosses want to do is send the existing workforce to an extermination camp, and bring him a new workforce who would basically be in transit before their ultimate destination in the smokestacks. He does a bunch of wheeling and dealing to accomplish this.

The Jewish workers start to think of themselves as “Schindler’s Jews”, a status which affords protection from the increasing brutality and danger. The pretense of this status is that they are deserving by virtue of their productive ability although Schindler’s development is demonstrated by his relaxing of requirements. I found the parallel to being “chosen people” a bit disturbing, given what violence such self-conception has justified in the subsequent decades.

I found it very weird how on the one hand this film is very sympathetic to the Jews, showing them to be thoroughly, viscerally terrorized. On the other hand, the whole thing is ultimately to the benefit of the personal development of the German capitalist Schindler. Even the moments depicted away from surveillance, the Jewish characters were flat. Maybe it’s because so many of the people shown were based on real people who were still alive. There isn’t a moment of resentment, just pure gratitude. Resistance is not shown much, even for example in small ways like sabotage/theft, or a private joke making fun of him. It would have been much more believable if the relationship between Schindler and “his Jews” had a realistic amount of tension rather than the quiet trust which settles in immediately before being earned at all. On the two occasions when raids/clearances are depicted, it’s shown that people have hiding places planned, but nothing about how that happened, what the thinking was, is shown. They do show some people wrapping jewels in bread to swallow them in hopes of keeping some wealth, and mercy-klling the sick. Along the same lines, Schindler is able to have emotional encounters with Jewish characters entirely on his own initiative and convenience, they cooperate with him in what are apparently intended to be “real” moments of “shared humanity” across the chasm of interpersonal fascism. But it’s like reading about Thomas Jefferson’s “romance” with an enslaved woman. The movie really is about Schindler, and everything is his POV. He directly witnesses depraved torture of thousands of people. Why? If he didn’t, he would never have learned to be a human being. Despite what seems to be an honest effort, the whole thing is demeaning to the victims, using them so much as props. The holocaust itself, is a prop. You could make the same movie about someone who’s change of heart was occasioned by any number of situations. But then, out of swarm of other Nazis, he is the only one who cracks under even this intense moral pressure. So even at best, the message seems to be very bleak.

At the end, not sure what to do with themselves, the Jews then flee but not sure where to go. A Soviet soldier tells them: “You have been liberated by the Soviet Army! … Don’t go east, that’s for sure. They hate you there. I wouldn’t go west either, if I were you.” The idea of describing anything in the USSR as “hate” after a 3 hour horrordrama of Nazism is very obnoxious. The refugees march on the horizon, singing “Jerusalem of Gold”, a song which anachronistically memorializes the 6 Day War (Zionist aggression in 1967).

So even in this depiction, there is some kind of foreshadowing of the world class terrorists that would emerge from this situation, somehow. I mentioned it at the top, but I can’t say enough how much moment-to-moment this film bring to mind the ongoing genocide by Israel. I guess it is good filmmaking, that the Nazis are so very similar to videos and accounts of Israeli violence. The sadistic glee in sufferings large and small as essential energizing motivation to push people forward in grisly tasks. With the icing of taking properties, trophies and items of only personal significance from the victims, hoping keep them demeaned in material and spirit while their elimination is being implemented. The way the perpetrator believes themselves to be elevated, puffed up, by such interactions. I feel like you could remake the most intense sequences of this film by cutting together clips of Israeli violence in place of the Nazis.

One thing I have had in my mind for a while now, is how there is this whole line of post-WW2 apologia about how the citizenry of Germany and their allies “didn’t know” about the holocaust while it was happening, which limits culpability. This whole movie is about someone who is put in a situation of unusually close contact with the meat grinder, forcing him to grapple with his place in a nefarious system, which he is eventually compelled to resist to his own detriment. In contrast, no Israeli will ever be able to make such a defence. The population and territory are relatively small, so distance is not affordable. The level of personal involvement of all residents in the crimes is so much higher, and on top of that there is modern media so everyone can see whatever they don’t have their own hands in. Decades from now, even this strained “redemption” cannot be mirrored in a remake of this film.