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