Geographers Watching Movies: Schindler’s List.
The Good Nazi or The Good Capitalist?
I have decided to finally watch Schindler’s List. I watch lots of movies so my list of “absolute classics I haven’t seen yet” is quite limited. This was in fact one of those movies, always high on my bucket list.
Not that I was not interested in movies describing the horrors of the Holocaust. In fact, some time ago I had quite of an obsessive relationship to the topic, having watched everything that I could find, including the 9-hour long classic documentary called Shoah, created in the 1970s by Claude Lanzmann or the very first documentary about the death camps called Night and Fog.
Also, being born and raised in Poland, I feel a deep sense of an uneasy connection to the atrocities committed on the occupied territories of where my ancestors lived. After all, in every documentary about Holocaust, you will hear people talking in Polish, in every Hollywood movie about it you will people screaming in Polish. Sometimes these are the voices of victims, sometimes accomplices.
Now, the time came to watch Schindler’s List, a movie about a good Nazi entrepreneur who, at first, discovers the opportunity to exploit Jewish business and labor (doesn’t hide it, really) and then decides to actually help save the people. Juxtaposed with him…
