Schindler's List

     I watched "Schindler's List" yesterday.  It was a requirement for a class and so I watched it.  It's a three-and-a-half hour movie, but it took me a full 6 hours because of the amount of breaks I needed.  Afterwards, I proceeded to be in a grumpy, sort of depressed mood for the rest of the day.  I've seen my fair share of movies.  This one was too graphic.  Steven Spielberg directed the movie, and he said that he wanted to make some scenes of it "unwatchable".  Right -- well, he succeeded.
     The movie is very important.  Oskar Schindler is a German businessman, member of the Nazi party, and opportunist who uses Jewish people for labour in his government-sponsored factories during WW II in Moravia, a Nazi occupied country.  At the start he is simply hoping to make money, but he ends up saving over a thousand Jews from the Holocaust through employment in his factories.  In the end, his operation is a model of inefficiency in producing arms, and is simply there to protect Jews from extermination.  Even so, he remains a member of the Nazi party to the end, and has to flee when peace breaks out.
     I realized while watching this movie the differing value put on human life by various characters.  In one particularly vivid scene, an SS officer barges in on a Jewish boy washing his car.  The boy trembles as he tries to explain why he can't clean the vehicle fast enough.  The officer comes just short of hitting the boy, and ensures the boy that he will if it isn't cleaned quickly.  In this scene, a car was more important than harm to a human being.
     Where are the examples in Canada of us drastically undervaluing human beings?  We don't have to look far.  There are a lot of "disadvantaged."  People who are different in some way.  Easy targets.  What was so disconcerting in the movie was being drawn as an audience into the world where humans are capable of being evil en masse, as a dominant society.  I think the director was looking for us to dig deep, to feel how hard it would be to stand up to the pressure and fear, but still to shout, "No! I would not be a part of this!"  Just like Schindler courageously rejected the Nazi agenda.  Just like we have opportunity to do in our worlds as well.