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Schindler's Lesson

I am sitting here at my desk and before my computer screen trying to write about "Schindler's List," the new movie by Steven Spielberg. It's a film about the Holocaust, about which I have nothing left to say, and about Oskar Schindler, whose measure I cannot take. He was the German bon vivant, womanizer and decadent arriviste who saved the lives of some 1,100 Jews. After the war, he stumbled from one failed business to another until, when he was broke, he was forced to live on the charity of the people he had saved. Schindler is buried now in Israel, a German among Israelis, a Catholic among Jews -- in death as in life an odd man out. He had ordinary vices, but he was no ordinary man.

In a parody of capitalism, Schindler was an entrepreneurial camp follower. He came into Poland on the slipstream of the conquering German army, determined to profit from the war. He took an apartment expropriated from Jews and set himself up in the business of making enamel cookware. For employees, he used Jewish slave labor, paying the Nazi authorities -- but not his workers -- for their time.

His true talent was the corrupting of others -- of Nazi officials, of pretty women and even of his wife, who came to accept his dissolute lifestyle. He was a man who eschewed the generic. Wine had to have a vintage, cognac a brand and cigarettes a preferred manufacturer. His suits were of silk because that was the best. Over his shoulder and out the window, Jews were routinely being murdered, but Schindler professed indifference. They were, as a Nazi officer later said, "units." But Schindler saw them as people.

Thomas Keneally wrote about Schindler in 1982. Two years earlier, he had walked into a Beverly Hills shop in search of a briefcase and wound up talking to the proprietor, a Holocaust survivor named Leopold Pfefferberg, who had been saved by Schindler. Because he invented some dialogue, Keneally called his book a novel, but it's not fiction. It's as true as the hole left in Europe by the Nazi genocide -- a void that Holocaust deniers say they cannot see. That's why, I suspect, Spielberg ends his film at the Jerusalem hillside where the Jews saved by Schindler place memorial stones on his grave. If seeing is believing, then Spielberg is intent on making everyone believe.

I began this column the way I did because I am written-out on the Holocaust. I can think of nothing new to say, no fresh angle. Its meaning, if there is one, still eludes me. The more recent books and films supply additional evidence, voyages up this or that unexplored tributary of a vast historic river, asterisks to the story that previous to the Holocaust would have been the story itself. Spielberg, though, has succeeded where most others have failed -- not because he is wiser or smarter or has discovered a heretofore hidden meaning but because he is a brilliant filmmaker and his "page" is as wide as a movie screen. His camera has taken up where literature has proven insufficient.

The late Terrence Des Pres wrote an unforgettable description of Auschwitz-Birkenau; Louis Begley's novel, "Wartime Lies," contains scenes which for me will fade only when I do. Elie Wiesel's "Night" and various works of Primo Levi have their searing passages, but these writers were all humbled by the enormity of their material and constrained by the imperative to stifle their anger and respect the sensitivities of the reader. Levi, an Auschwitz survivor, was praised above all for his lack of bitterness. In the end, he killed himself. So did Des Pres.

Spielberg, too, had to control his anger. For all the horror he puts on the screen, he nevertheless had to omit much. But his recreation of the roundup of the Jews in the Cracow ghetto is a frank accounting of what happened there. It's not some sanitary, neat dragnet of people, a chalkboard exercise that ends with the gassing of the naive and the incineration of their bodies -- "processed," in Nazi-talk or, in the boast of the Treblinka death camp, "from door to door in 45 minutes." It is, instead, an unmitigated horror -- an indictment not just of Germans or of Nazis but of human beings. I have read of these events, walked their sites and tried to imagine them, but it was not until Spielberg showed them that I felt their immeasurable horror. Even then the reality was so much worse.

Schindler's Jews survived the war. He spent his fortune bribing the authorities in their behalf. His exploitation turned to benevolence and then to an audacity that only the heroic could attempt and only the corrupt could bring off. He brazenly entered Auschwitz itself, coolly treating a Nazi official there like a head waiter with his palm out. He became passionate in the protection of his Jews, the Schindlerjuden, moving them -- and his factory -- out of harm's way, ultimately relocating to Czechoslovakia, where they were liberated at the end of the war.

Schindler's wife once said that he had done nothing before the war, little afterward but the period in between was exceptional. So is the movie that tells his story.