Thursday, November 19, 2009
To the Editor:
Re "Schindler's Jews Find Deliverance Again" (The Week in Review, Feb. 13): Should those of us who were there nit-pick at inaccuracies in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," or remain silent and not distract from the film's power? I think it is important to point out inaccuracies, lest Holocaust revisionists do it for us.
Oskar Schindler's Jews almost certainly did not arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, and Edith Wertheim, whom you quote, is mistaken if she thinks the shower room in which she found herself on arrival was the gas chamber. Such a mistake is understandable, since none of us who arrived at Auschwitz and survived the initial selection at the "ramp" knew where we were or knew that death by gassing was the Nazi method for bringing about the "final solution."
Arriving Polish Jews had a stronger premonition that they might not leave the place alive than Jews from other countries, yet they too did not know gassing was the preferred method. The system of annihilation by gas could only be carried out if the victims believed they were going to the showers to be "disinfected."
The gas chambers had no plumbing for showers (though they had dummy shower heads) and no pipes that could deliver gas or water, as Mr. Spielberg's film implies. Zyklon B crystals in canisters were injected into the gas chambers by small openings in the ceiling or on the side, depending on which gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau was used.
Only a contingent of Czech Jews in 1944, who for Nazi propaganda had been allowed to live about six months in a separate enclave in Auschwitz before being sent to the gas chambers for "special treatment" (the Nazi euphemism for gassing), knew of their fate in advance, and they were literally whipped into the chamber.
Those of us who survived the initial selection and were deemed able to work for at least a short while found ourselves herded naked, with heads shaved, into showers, where, after brief contact with cold water, we were thrown some filthy zebra-stripe uniforms to start our new lives as concentration camp inmates.
It is impossible to portray in a movie the horror of Auschwitz or any other death camp. But Mr. Spielberg's film gives a new generation at least an inkling of what the Holocaust was about. ERNEST S. LOBET Glen Cove, L.I., Feb. 15, 1994
Re "Schindler's Jews Find Deliverance Again" (The Week in Review, Feb. 13): Should those of us who were there nit-pick at inaccuracies in Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List," or remain silent and not distract from the film's power? I think it is important to point out inaccuracies, lest Holocaust revisionists do it for us.
Oskar Schindler's Jews almost certainly did not arrive at the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chambers, and Edith Wertheim, whom you quote, is mistaken if she thinks the shower room in which she found herself on arrival was the gas chamber. Such a mistake is understandable, since none of us who arrived at Auschwitz and survived the initial selection at the "ramp" knew where we were or knew that death by gassing was the Nazi method for bringing about the "final solution."
Arriving Polish Jews had a stronger premonition that they might not leave the place alive than Jews from other countries, yet they too did not know gassing was the preferred method. The system of annihilation by gas could only be carried out if the victims believed they were going to the showers to be "disinfected."
The gas chambers had no plumbing for showers (though they had dummy shower heads) and no pipes that could deliver gas or water, as Mr. Spielberg's film implies. Zyklon B crystals in canisters were injected into the gas chambers by small openings in the ceiling or on the side, depending on which gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau was used.
Only a contingent of Czech Jews in 1944, who for Nazi propaganda had been allowed to live about six months in a separate enclave in Auschwitz before being sent to the gas chambers for "special treatment" (the Nazi euphemism for gassing), knew of their fate in advance, and they were literally whipped into the chamber.
Those of us who survived the initial selection and were deemed able to work for at least a short while found ourselves herded naked, with heads shaved, into showers, where, after brief contact with cold water, we were thrown some filthy zebra-stripe uniforms to start our new lives as concentration camp inmates.
It is impossible to portray in a movie the horror of Auschwitz or any other death camp. But Mr. Spielberg's film gives a new generation at least an inkling of what the Holocaust was about. ERNEST S. LOBET Glen Cove, L.I., Feb. 15, 1994
Schindler's List" opened across Germany last Thursday, after a gala premiere in Frankfurt attended by Steven Spielberg and President Richard von Weizsacker, who said its lesson for his compatriots was the need for vigilance and open-mindedness as the best defense against intolerance.
Mr. Spielberg, who had received an anonymous death threat during the Vienna premiere last month, was given tight security, though a bomb threat forced one theater in Karlsruhe to delay the opening half an hour. Forty-eight theaters began showing the film Thursday, most to sellout crowds, according to the producers.
In Frankfurt, where Oskar Schindler lived in obscurity until his death in 1974 and where some of the Jews he saved from the concentration camps still remember him in their prayers, city authorities said they were considering sending all schoolchildren to see the film.
The director also shepherded openings last week in Cracow, where much of "Schindler's List" took place and was filmed, and in Israel. Most German theaters show the film as Mr. Spielberg made it, though voices are dubbed in German.
While elsewhere the film had been criticized for making a German the hero of a story about the Holocaust, in the country responsible for it the central point was this: Why only Schindler? Why did so few other Germans try to stop the death machinery? As Dieter Trautwein, a German Protestant minister who befriended him in the 1960's, asked after seeing the picture, "Where was everybody else?"
Perhaps because that question is so difficult to answer, Germans have shied away from dramatizing the subject themselves and, as with the "Holocaust" television series in the 1980's, are once again eagerly hearing and seeing how others see it, and them. CRAIG R. WHITNEY
Mr. Spielberg, who had received an anonymous death threat during the Vienna premiere last month, was given tight security, though a bomb threat forced one theater in Karlsruhe to delay the opening half an hour. Forty-eight theaters began showing the film Thursday, most to sellout crowds, according to the producers.
In Frankfurt, where Oskar Schindler lived in obscurity until his death in 1974 and where some of the Jews he saved from the concentration camps still remember him in their prayers, city authorities said they were considering sending all schoolchildren to see the film.
The director also shepherded openings last week in Cracow, where much of "Schindler's List" took place and was filmed, and in Israel. Most German theaters show the film as Mr. Spielberg made it, though voices are dubbed in German.
While elsewhere the film had been criticized for making a German the hero of a story about the Holocaust, in the country responsible for it the central point was this: Why only Schindler? Why did so few other Germans try to stop the death machinery? As Dieter Trautwein, a German Protestant minister who befriended him in the 1960's, asked after seeing the picture, "Where was everybody else?"
Perhaps because that question is so difficult to answer, Germans have shied away from dramatizing the subject themselves and, as with the "Holocaust" television series in the 1980's, are once again eagerly hearing and seeing how others see it, and them. CRAIG R. WHITNEY
MONDAY -- Emilie Schindler, the widow of Oskar Schindler, will be honored at the Plaza in a program with Dr. Frank Field of WCBS-TV and with Rena and Louis Fagen, who were saved from the Nazis by the famous Schindler list. The dinner-dance begins with cocktails at 6:30 P.M. The evening will benefit Shenkar College of Fashion and Textile Technology in Ramat Gan, Israel. Dietary laws observed. Tickets, $500, from (212) 947-1597. Foundling Hospital Dinner
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Spielberg's Framing of Oskar Schindler in the Movie
Another short clip about the framing of Oskar Schindler in the movie.
Spielberg's Framing of the Nazis in the Movie
Here is a short clip we put together concerning the film's framing of the Nazi soldiers.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
