Schindler's List

Schindler's List is a movie that is about a Nazi party member, Oskar Schindler, that owns a cookware factory and employs Jews that were forced into the ghettos or the concentration camps. He, at first, insists that he employs them because it is cheap labor. But soon, he befriends his accountant. But soon he gets word that his factory is a safe haven for people wanting to get out of the camps. Oskar comes off annoyed by this, but when he witnesses the Jews being forced out of their Krakow ghetto to go to the concentration camps he is saddened. Co-operating with his accountant, he ships Jews to his factory for them to work. In the end he orders an influx of Jews to work for his factory, only to make his factory a non-productive place. He bribes Nazi officials for months (to make sure they don't tell Nazi leaders that it's just a safe haven), until he goes bankrupt. The war ends, and he has to flee in order to not be held in captivity.

This movie means to me the human and inhumane side to people. I believe that one of the drives in the human psyche is the need to either feel dominant or submissive. I think Nazi Germany was built off of economic humiliation and the unfortunate miracle of everybody feeling submissive to a dominant figure. Schindler's notion on power is to be in the popular in order to save the minority. That way, he has a lower chance of being punished. Goethe accepts the bribe from Schindler, which implys that he is abusing his power (given from an unmoral system). Schindler does abuse his power, by going against party platform to buy Jews.

I thought this movie was vary effective because of the girl with the red jacket. This is a devise that makes the viewer remember a specific person. The crowds of people in the movie of Jews dehumanizes the crowd, making the lives of the Jews killed anonymous and apathetic. We see them as a group under discrimination from a political group as opposed to humans being killed. The girl in the red coat forces the viewer to sympathize and remember a girl (resembling innocence and defenselessness) caught in the cloud of Jews that seems unknown and distant.