Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire.

Schindler’s List

In 1993, Steven Spielberg released a movie… But it was not just any movie. It was one of the movies. An incredible piece of cinema that stood out in a career full of moving blockbuster hits. This was the movie that would place him, forever, as one of the best directors of all time.

…Jurassic Park. 

Oh wait. Scratch that. Ahem. 

Let’s try this again… In 1993, Steven Spielberg released two movies. The first was Jurassic Park, and the second was Schindler’s List. 

“By day, he would shoot “Schindler’s List.” By night, he would return to his rented home in Poland and watch “dinosaur shots — sent from ILM to a big satellite dish in my backyard in Poland.” (Slashfilm)

In a film career consisting of pop culture hits like Jurassic Park, ET, and Indiana Jones, almost completely devoid of colour, Schindler’s List undoubtably stands out from the rest. 

The question stands, what compelled a director of dinosaurs and holy grails to make a movie about the Holocaust? And how does it still so resonate with the hearts of its audiences? 

In a recent interview, Spielberg says…

“It had a vital message that is more important today than it even was in 1993 because antisemitism is so much worse today than it was when I made the film.” (Deadline)

According to Statistics Canada, Jews are the religious group most likely to be targeted for hate crimes. They make up less than 1% of the population, yet were victims of 14% of hate crimes last year. One in six Canadians (16%) between the ages of 18 and 24 believe the Holocaust was exaggerated. 

We live in a world where media can be shared quicker and further than any other time in human history. With all this noise, the line between opinion and fact becomes blurrier. Although we are more connected than ever before, Social Media acts as an echo chamber, feeding us all our own opinions and driving us all further and further apart. 

(Real footage of me ranting about Social Media before I go on my daily 2 hour Instagram scrolling session.) 

Which brings us to the topic of our last Humanities project of Grade 12… The Holocaust and what it means to be an “upstander.”

Driving Question

“How can multi-modal communication enhance our ability to humanize and understand complex issues?”

If we held a moment of silence for every victim of the Holocaust, we would be silent for eleven and a half years. It was a genocide that systematically murdered an estimated 6 million Jews.

The word genocide combines the Greek root, geno- (race), with the Latin -cide (killing). It is defined as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.” It was created in the 1940s by Polish-Jewish lawyer, Raphael Lemkin, to describe the atrocities made against Europe’s Jews during the Second World War (Holocaust Encyclopedia) 

And 79 years later, the Holocaust, responsible for the murder of about two thirds of the European Jewish population, is still considered as the largest genocide in human history. The historical significance of this event is undoubtable, and yet, education about the Holocaust won’t be “mandatory” in BC’s education system until next year.

Of course, most teachers include Holocaust education into their classrooms anyways. But, it’s the principle that’s shocking, that it’s not mandatory. How many students get away with not learning anything about this topic? And what will teach them if not the education system? 

Which brings us to the main idea of this project: representation through different media. How are we educating and portraying these topics in widespread media (like Schindler’s List, Maus, The Diary of Anne Frank, Etc) and why it is crucial to create accurate and responsible content?  

Anyways, let’s get started. 

In the beginning of this project, we were exposed to different forms of media to better understand the escalation of the Holocaust. We read articles, like the Holocaust in Pictures, watched interviews with survivors, etc. For the assignment, we had to reflect on which we liked most and why it helped us learn. I chose a scene from “Band of Brothers,” because I’m very passionate about cinema. 

(Grade 9 Throwback… and shameless self advertisement…PLEASE WATCH MY MOVIE)

This is the reflection I wrote about this: 

(Click to Read)

However, this was before I (re)watched Schindler’s List, which stuck with me the most. 

“Schindler’s List was never a cure for antisemitism,” emphasizes Steven Spielberg. “It was a reminder of the symptoms of it.” (The Hollywood Reporter)

Schindler’s List was based on the novel “Schindler’s Arc,” written by Thomas Keneally in 1982. “The book tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party who becomes an unlikely hero by saving the lives of 1,200 Jews during the Holocaust.”  (Wikipedia)  

The movie version was directed by Steven Spielberg, who has direct ties to the Holocaust through his family. He won best movie and director that year, which isn’t a surprise due to the quality and effort put into this film. It was a 10 year process, from purchasing the book rights to the big screen. However, it was also this long, because Spielberg himself didn’t feel ready to create such a film. 

“I hadn’t made what I’d call my first “adult” film, and I was terrified of Schindler’s List being my first, because what if I wasn’t mature enough? I was certain I wasn’t ready to deal with the gravitas of that subject matter, morally or cinematically, and I felt I lacked the wisdom to be able to discuss the story in the inevitable conversations that all of us have after our films are ready to be released.” (The Hollywood Reporter) 

What I find most interesting about the film is its choice to be in black and white. Colour is used powerfully in the film, and Spielberg had this to say about it.

“I said, “If I make it in color, it’s going to do what shooting Color Purple in color did to Color Purple.” Color Purple should’ve been in black-and-white. I was accused of beautifying Color Purple because it had such a bright palette for such a dark subject. I said, “Except for George Stevens’ footage of the liberation of Dachau, everything that anyone’s ever been exposed to about the Shoah has been in black-and-white. I will not colorize the Holocaust.” (The Hollywood Reporter) 

I may be going off topic here, but I found these quotes to be very intriguing. They demonstrate the power of these decisions in the impact of the film, and reflect the intricacy of film as a medium. 

What I like most about this film is how it wasn’t afraid to show things as they were. Spielberg showed the brutality of the Holocaust in a way that felt personal to the audience. It also represented the influence of chance and luck in these things, that the difference between life and death wasn’t about who “deserved” to. As Art Spiegelman, the author of the next piece of media I will talk about, says about the portrayal of his Holocaust survivor father…

“I find this a lot richer than if I had a far more exemplary father because if I did, then I’d have a book, maybe, whose ultimate moral would be – and if you lead a virtuous, exemplary life, then you, too, can survive the Holocaust. And that’s not the point. The point is that everyone should have survived the Holocaust. There should never have been a Holocaust. And that kind of assumption of some kind of supernatural picking of who would survive and who wouldn’t wasn’t based on ethics. And it wasn’t based on goodness, nor was it based on being especially evil, which is, I guess, the flip side of the way one might try to perceive somebody who comes through a situation of extremis.” (NPR) 

Speaking of Art Spiegelman, his portrayal of the Holocaust is a lot different from Spielberg’s. And to expect that all experiences with this topic would be the same is problematic. In order to understand an event like the Holocaust, you must see it through different lenses. He comments…

“It actually leads to a larger issue for me, which has to do with sentiment in literature and especially in this kind of literature. It’s actually one of the banes of so-called Holocaust literature that when you’re reading it, you hear violins in the background, you know, and, like soft, mournful chorus sobbing. And, well, I’ve met some survivors who work toward that, and I’ve met other survivors who just are much spunkier than that in a way.” (NPR) 

(…Cough, cough. A beautiful piece by Hans Zimmer, but I understand that it’s not for everyone.) 

This reflects in his choice of medium for his graphic novel, “Maus” (which was the first- and only- graphic novel to win a Pulitzer Prize.) In this particular example, I find that there’s a certain amount of frankness (and authenticity) that comes with the territory of being a graphic novel. In having to draw every single panel, an artist must concise things, and it results in a product that is very much “as it is.” Whereas, cinema is typically  fabricated, and every moment is intricately made. Both mediums are beautifully made, but in different ways. 

This might be a bad explanation, but in comparing Maus and Schindler’s List, it’s what I find most profound. 

Maus was a very personal novel. It had this level of “realness” where Spiegelman was not afraid to show things as they happened, no matter how flawed they were. 

I’d love to say more about this, but I’m running out of time and words (goodness, I’m not even at the final product.) 

I implore you to check out the literary critique I wrote about the author’s psychological involvement in the creation of this story…

(Click to Read!)

What is an upstander? 

It is “a persons who speaks or acts in support of an individual or cause, particularly someone who intervenes on behalf of a person being attacked or bullied.” 

For our final exhibition product, I teamed up with Ariane to create a multimodal exhibit that presented an “upstander.” We decided on Frida Kahlo, because we were intrigued by her artwork. 

In particular, I was drawn to her mixed racial background, and how her artwork reflected that. 

Through some research, we discovered that through being truly herself and showing that through her artwork, Kahlo inspired the most people. Her pride and security in her own identity is what shone through the most. To show this, we painted this version of Frida:

And we paired it with this explanation (which connected it to our BCFP projects, so that we could present this at the exhibition):

Driving Question

“How can multi-modal communication enhance our ability to humanize and understand complex issues?”

Through this project, we were given the opportunity to listen to the Holocaust symposium at UBC, and hear from a Holocaust survivor. The comment above is what I said it response. 

I think through being able to see things in different ways, in different medias, we are exposed to different interpretations of events that allow us to enhance our understanding. Being able to watch Schindler’s List, read Maus, and listen directly from a Holocaust survivor, allows us to paint a better picture of what happened, and to prevent it from reoccurring in the future.