Schindler's List

nothing beats experiential learning when it comes to history. even for someone as ignorant and nonchalent as me, when i am here in europe, little pieces of history just start to piece together.

didnt finish last night. continue. i hate it when a single blog gets broken up into 2 segments because the feeling is totally different coming in from a different day.

schindler's list is probably a relatively non-blockbuster by steven spielberg. and it attempts to as accurately as possible depict the time of the holocaust when Nazi Germany invaded a huge part of europe. it depicts the life of the Jews particularly in Poland and Czechoslovakia. and there was this Nazi German by the name of Oskar Schindler who went to poland in search of his fortune and he did make it in the end, thriving on the war by providing pots and pans for the army, and utilising cheap jewish labour.

as more and more jewish were sent to the Ghettos each day and being killed, he made use of his connections with powerful people in the German army to continue to allow the jews in his factory to work for him, in the name of them being skilled labour.

in a massive turn of events he had to sacrifice his fortunes to buy each of the 1200 people working in his factory. and just before the war ended, he finished his entire fortune bribing German officials to let them live. he came up with a list of people and thus the name of the movie.

he is a modern day Hero in which many of the jews he saved are still alive today even tho he is not himself.

the movie probably will bore even the most atentive of people but it had special meaning to the group of us watching it because we just came back from the Auswicht concentration camp from krakow, where spielberg shot a huge portion of the film. it was also where 1million jews perished over the war period. 42 to 45. and many of the images in the film were eerily representative of the real thing we saw in the camp. thus to watch it in film and hear the testimonies of the many survivors kept us all glued to the film and even the bonus tracks at the end.

to this day, many jews regard themselves as Schindler Jews because they wouldnt have survived if not for this man.