Oskar Schindler's List Essay

Victor Frankl once said, “Any person, regardless of the circumstances, can decide what shall become of them – mentally and spiritually.” This is true for Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth, who both had very different reactions to World War II. Human goodness is when one sees the truth, accepts it, and makes rational decisions based on the truth. Human evil is irrational decision-making, and when a person sees and understands the truth but choses to defy it. In Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, philosophers Kant and Rahner would agree that Schindler is a representation of human goodness, and Goeth represents human evil.

Throughout the novel, a miniscule act of heroism goes a long way. While working for Oskar Schindler, a Nazi, at his factory, Schindler portrays kindness. Leyson informs us that, ‘A true Nazi observing such an action, such humane treatment of a Jew, would have murdered them both’ (141). By simply making

The Holocaust during World War two is a significant part of history. During the Holocaust, many Jews and other groups of people were tortured and exterminated. The book Night by Elie Wiesel and the movie Schindler’s List are both placed in a setting during the Holocaust. The book Night explains the horrors of a young boy’s (Eliezer) experience as a jew during the Holocaust. The film Schindler’s List is about a man who does his best to save Jews from being placed in concentration camps by hiring them to work for his business. These Jews that Schindler saves become known as Schindlerjuden. The Schindlerjuden and Eliezer’s experiences that are portrayed throughout the movie and book are similar because they all did their best to do what they

One day Schindler and his mistress were on top of a hill overlooking the town. Schindler is riveted by this little girl in her red coat. Schindler's eyes follow her as she walks through mad chaos, hoping nothing happens to her. Later on, the SS officers exhumed the bodies to destroy evidence of the killing of the Jews. Later on, as he’s walking by, he sees the innocent little girl in a wheelbarrow passing him.

It was very rare to come across someone that wanted to help, but it was even more of a rarity to find that a righteous person was also a victim of the Holocaust itself. Within Schindler’s List, it is brought to the viewer’s attention that Itzhak Stern was both a victim and a person part of “the righteous”. Oskar Schindler chose Itzhak to be the accountant for his enamelware company in Krakόw and, also, help run the company. Itzhak is an example of Jewish resistance because he was known to help Schindler come up with the list of people to save, now famously known as “Schindler’s List”. Because Itzhak helped save hundreds of Jewish lives, he serves as evidence which proves that the Jews fought as hard as they possibly could to save one

Oskar Schindler faced many conflicts in his life. The main conflict he faced was overcoming the Nazis and saving over one thousand Jewish People. Schindler, with out a job at the time, joined the Nazi Party and followed on the heels of the SS when the Germans invaded Poland. This is when Schindler took over two previously Jewish owned companies that dealt with the manufacture and sales of enamel kitchenware products and opened up his own enamel shop right outside of Krakow near the Jewish ghetto. There, he employed mostly Jewish workers, which saved them from being deported to labor camps. Though twice the Gestapo arrested him, he got released because of his many connections and with many bribes. Most

In December 1939, as the German-occupied Poland was being torn up by the events of the Holocaust, Schindler took his first steps in becoming a Holocaust hero. “If you saw a dog going to be crushed under a car,” he said later of his wartime actions, “wouldn't you help him?”(“Oskar Schindler,” Jewish Virtual Library).

This story reminds us of the struggles we face today for fairness and kindness in this world. We see how Oskar changes from someone who only cares about making money to someone who risks everything to help others. The movie makes us think about how important it is to fight against hate and prejudice wherever we find it. Schindler's friendship with the Jewish workers he saves shows us the power of understanding and working together to overcome hard times. We learn from Schindler's sacrifices that even in the darkest moments in your life, there's still hope for change and goodness.

At the beginning of the film Oskar Schindler is represented as an enigmatic, egotistical, and greedy war profiteer. This is strengthened by Spielberg’s directorial choices within the Itzhak Stern requirement scene. Within this scene, Schindler requests Jewish fortunes for the purposes of war profiteering. Here, the director exemplifies Schindler’s enigmatic nature through lighting techniques. A shadow is cast upon half of Schindler’s face suggesting a mysterious intent or hidden agenda. The use of a close up shot assists viewers in identifying Schindler’s enigmatic nature and greedy endeavour. Spielberg’s further characterisation of Oskar Schindler through filmic device is identifiable through the parallel editing of the Ghettoization scene.

Thus, it can be concluded that in the beginning of the movie Schindler does not fully grasp the tragedy at hand, and consequently does nothing attempt to aid the Jews. Schindler's realizations of the horrors of the holocaust begin in one scene near the middle of the film. During this infamous turning point of the movie, Schindler, on top of a barren hill, traces the path of a young and helpless Jewish girl who wanders haphazardly through the streets of a devastated camp. Her lone image personalizes the slaughter. Schindler tries to track her progress as she invisibly makes her way, aimless and alone, past the madness and chaos in the street - a woman is machine-gunned behind her. He loses sight of the small figure as she walks behind a building, but then he glimpses her again, walking by a file of Jews being herded down a sidewalk. During the roundup, a German soldier fires at a single-file lineup of men, killing five with one bullet. Distressed and stricken by the nightmare below and the plight of the little girl in red, Schindler sees her entering one of the empty apartment buildings. There, she climbs the stairs and crawls under a bed for cover in a ransacked room. Her safety is only temporary, for later she will be hunted down and cold-heartedly murdered, forgotten to the world, destroyed by her own people.

The story of Schindler’s List covers the life of Oskar Schindler. Starting with Schindler being a millionaire supporting the Nazi party to make more money, to Schindler’s change of heart and realization of the Nazi evil and Jewish innocence, and to the end of the war where Schindler has an emotional breakdown because he thought could have saved more people. One of the central themes in Schindler's List is the theme of good vs evil. The film is brimming with parallels contrasting good vs evil, light vs dark, right vs wrong. One of the main ways this theme is shown is through the characters of Oskar Schindler and Amon Goeth. Both of these characters need to confront the war and settle on decisions on how they respond to it. In the end, Schindler

Schindler's List is one of the most powerful movies of all time. It presents the indelible true story of enigmatic German businessman Oskar Schindler who becomes an unlikely saviour of more than 1100 Jews amid the barbaric Nazi reign. A German Catholic war profiteer, Schindler moved to Krakow in 1939 when Germany overran Poland. There he opens an enamelware factory that, on the advice of his Jewish accountant Itzhak Stern, was staffed by Jews from the nearby forced labour camp at Plaszow. Schindler's factory prospered though his contacts with the Nazi war machine and its local representatives, as well as his deft skill on the black market. Then, somewhere along the way, Schindler's devotion to self-interest was

The inhumanity exercised by Schutzstaffel was the primary cause of the suffocating agony, but the society without conscience and empathy, parched and burnt, was the fatal pain that tormented the Jews. An absence of sympathy devastated lives, relationships, and society. Yet, it still was a sympathy that saved numerous individuals and their abject fates from abysmal hopelessness. From the mound overlooking the ghetto, the chaos of cruelty and inhumanity, Schindler encounters the influential experience. It pigmented the bottomless despair and the painful outcry of the Jews from the disparate world into his mind. Evidently, the true sympathy he felt from that experience led him to become the savior of hundreds of

The novel describes his family life in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and his rebellious teenage years in the newly created state of Czechoslovakia. The novel informs the reader of Oskar Schindler’s relationship with his

Schindler got a visit from a young woman by the name of Regina Perlman, who wanted him to bring her parents from Russia to his factory, so they would not be killed because of how old they were. Schindler didn’t agree at first but after talking to Stern he brought her parents to work in his factory, he gave up his watch as an exchange for them. Schindler tried to move his Jews to his factory and found out that they were sent to a different camp. He had to buy some of his Jews