Oskar Schindler Essay, Research Paper

Oskar Schindler was a wealthy German industrialist, who made much of his wealth by employing Jewish men and women in his various factories. In the Movie ?Schindler?s List? it starts off with Schindler is a restaurant with many high ranking Nazi officers eating there. He starts off by buying a officer a bottle of expensive wine, but it does not end there. Before the night is gone he has boughten dinner for all of the officers. This is how he made friends, friends with power.

At this point the War was already underway and Schindler seized an opportunity to make some money. Thinking ahead he hires a Jewish accountant that he believes is very qualified for that position. At first this accountant is careful the way he acts around Schindler because Schindler is a member of the Nazi Party and fears for his life.

The point of the movie in which Schindler starts to view the Jewish people differently is when the Nazis start to flush out the ghettos. From a hilltop he watches especially a little girl walking through the streets like she is abandoned. At this time he starts to pull his favors from those officers he treated to dinner a while back. He meets Geoth, a SS officer that is known for his cruelty in the Concentration Camps. Schindler starts to gain the trust and admiration of Goeth and he takes advantage of that friendship. He tells Goeth that he will pay him a certain amount of money for each Jew to work for him. As an excuse he tells the officers that it is merely ?cheap labor? to be used in his enamelware factory. For each person on the list he has listed also their specialty.

Later he starts another factory, but this time the workers make bullets and shells. Once again he uses Jews as the workers but this time he is making no profits because the shells the workers make do not work. Schindler adjusted the machines to do so.

By this time the war is almost over, so Schindler took to the road like many other Nazi officials. At his departure all his workers are present and they give him a paper with all their signatures with a short letter in case he is captured by one of the allied powers. From their he starts to break down saying that he could have saved more lives by selling his car and gold Nazi pin. Soon he gets into his car and starts to journey to another place. At the very end of the movie it shows all the ?Schindler Jews? and they all place a rock on his tomb.

I believe that the Holocaust should never be forgotten because it should never happen again. This story, which was first told in a book called ?Schindler?s Ark?, had a great affect on me because it was so graphic and I will probably never see anything like it again for the rest of my life. For that reason it will also be a lasting one.

The small girl in a red coat that Schindler was watching was only one of four places in the movie that had color. I believe that the meaning of the color was meant to show the harshness of the Nazi?s during the Holocaust. Near the end of the movie it shows the same girl with the colored coat laying on the wagon dead with many other people also.

I think Oskar Schindler was a great hero if the movie was true, but his wife who is still alive thinks otherwise. In a interview with her she stated that her late husband really isn?t all that he?s cracked up to be. But the fact is that he saved many people and that alone would make someone a hero. The Schindler Jews definitely think he is a hero because after the war Schindler tried opening up other business, but they all failed miserably. He ended up going bankrupt. The Schindler Jews found out about that and invited him to Jerusalem and gave him money to help him survive. Their is also a memorial of him on a famous street in Jerusalem.

I think Steven Speilberg?s reasons for making the movie and the project are that he believes that no one should ever forget what happened in those concentration camps during World War 2. Together with the movie and his on going project he will make sure that it will not be forgotten.