Schindler’s List

I watched Schindler’s List alone.

That was not planned. I had a borrowed DVD, an evening without plans and the vague assumption that I knew what kind of film I was about to see because I already knew the historical subject.

Knowledge of history did not prepare me for the scale becoming personal.

Dates, camps and numbers are necessary, but very large numbers eventually exceed imagination. The mind can understand six million arithmetically without being able to picture six million individual absences.

The film repeatedly moves in the other direction.

A name.

A face.

A child.

A worker trying to remain useful for another day.

The girl in the red coat becomes unforgettable because the film has removed most color and because crowds are constantly threatening to turn individuals into mass. For a brief period, one child is visible.

Later she is visible for a different reason.

That movement is terrible.

Oskar Schindler makes the moral story more complicated because he does not begin as a saint. He likes money, status, influence, good clothes and useful relationships. The transformation matters precisely because transformation is required.

We prefer moral tales in which good people were always good. This protects the audience. If heroes are a separate species, ordinary people need not compare themselves too closely.

Schindler is less convenient.

He sees more.

Then he changes what he is willing to risk.

The bureaucratic elements of the film disturbed me as much as the explicit violence. Lists, forms, work assignments, transport records, permits—objects of administration become instruments of life and death.

Bureaucracy has no moral character by itself.

It receives one from the system it serves.

That is frightening because evil often looks more ordinary once organized. A terrible goal can be distributed into small professional tasks. Someone keeps records. Someone schedules transport. Someone signs a document.

No single desk has to contain the entire crime.

Near the end, Schindler looks at his possessions and calculates how many more people might have been saved. The scene is unbearable because success becomes insufficiency. He has done something extraordinary and can see only the remainder.

After the film ended, I did not turn on music or check email. I put the DVD back into its case more carefully than necessary and sat in the quiet room.

The next morning everything looked normal again.

Desk.

Computer.

Coffee.

Traffic outside.

That normality bothered me.

History contains events after which the world seems as though it should remain visibly altered.

It does not.

The ordinary world is extremely good at continuing.

Remembering therefore cannot depend on atmosphere.

It has to be deliberate.