Aug. 2, 2026

Schindler’s List (1993) — The Witness

Show Notes
Transcript

Schindler’s List was the film Steven Spielberg spent years avoiding because he feared he was not ready to make it. The result became one of the most important historical dramas ever filmed and transformed Spielberg’s reputation as an artist. In this episode of Spielberg Reloaded, we examine the true story of Oskar Schindler, the Holocaust, and Spielberg’s deeply personal connection to Jewish history. We discuss Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, black-and-white cinematography, filming in Poland, the emotional toll production took on Spielberg, and how Schindler’s List reshaped Holocaust education and historical filmmaking for generations.

A.I. was used to help with narration and creative elements of our scripts.

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Callaroga Shark Media.

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There is a moment near the end of Schindler's List

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where Oscar Schindler looks at his car and his Nazi

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pin and understands for the first time that he could

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have saved more people, that the car was ten lives,

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that the pin was one. He collapses, He cannot speak.

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Liam Neeson plays the scene in silence, and it is

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one of the most devastating moments in the history of

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American cinema. Steven Spielberg, the man who made e T

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and Raiders of the Lost Arc and Jaws, made that scene.

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This is Spielberg reloaded episode ten, Schindler's List nineteen ninety three.

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For most of the nineteen eighties, Spielberg had been offered

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the rights to Thomas Kanneely's nineteen eighty two novel Schindler's Arc,

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The true story of Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who

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saved over one thousand Jewish lives during the Holocaust by

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employing them in his factory. He kept passing. He said

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he wasn't ready, he said he was afraid. He passed

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it to other directors Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, Sidney Pollock,

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all of whom eventually passed it back. He finally said

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yes in nineteen ninety three. He was forty six years old,

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and he had spent a decade understanding that this was

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the film he was most obligated to make and least

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equipped to make it. Both things were true at the

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same time. The film was shot over roughly two months

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in Krakoff, Poland, in black and white on handheld cameras.

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Yanushkaminsky shot it to look like documentary footage, grainy, unstable, immediate.

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There are no establishing shots that announce themselves as beautiful.

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The film resists the sentimental cues Spielberg had mastered elsewhere.

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Spielberg stripped away every instinct he had developed over twenty

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years of filmmaking and replaced them with one get as

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close to what happened as cinema would allow. The screenplay

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was written by Steven Zalien, adapted from Kanely's novel. Liam

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Neeson plays Schindler, charming, corrupt, self interested, gradually and then

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suddenly transformed by what he witnesses. Ben Kingsley plays Izak Stern,

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Schindler's accountant and the moral architecture of the film. The

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Man who understands what Schindler is becoming before Schindler does

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finds plays Amen Guth, the s S commandant who runs

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the puash Off labor camp, and his performance is the

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most frightening in the film, not because Gouth is a monster,

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but because he is recognizably human. He has desires, insecurities,

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a terrible need to be liked. He shoots prisoners from

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his balcony the way another man might have a second

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cup of coffee. The banality of his evil is the point,

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and Spielberg never lets you forget that Gouth and Schindler

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inhabit the same world, drink the same wine, wear the

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same uniforms. The distance between them is not nature, it

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is choice. That parallel between the man who chose to

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save and the man who chose to destroy is the

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film's moral spine. Schindler is not a saint. He is

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a war profiteer who arrives in Krukoff to get rich

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off Jewish labor and stays to save Jewish lives, and

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the film refuses to make that transition feel clean or complete.

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He saves who he can save, he cannot save everyone.

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The film does not forgive him for that. And it

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does not forgive the audience for needing him to. John

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Williams wrote the score. He told Spielberg after seeing a

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rough cut, that it deserved a better composer. Spielberg told

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him there was no better composer. The violin solos, performed

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by Izak Pearlman, don't accompany the film so much as

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mourn alongside it. The film runs three hours and fifteen

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minutes and does not feel long. Every scene is load bearing.

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There is no moment of relief that isn't immediately revoked,

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no gesture of humanity that isn't shadowed by what surrounds it.

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Spielberg made a film about the Holocaust that does not

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look away, not from the shootings, not from the gas chambers,

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not from the specific methodical bureaucracy of mass murder. He

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had never made anything like it. He would never make

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anything quite like it again. Schindler's List was released in

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December nineteen ninety three, the same year as Jurassic Park.

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It won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director,

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Spielberg's first. When he accepted the award, he said he

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was the luckiest person in the room. He meant it

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in the specific sense that he was alive and the

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people whose story he had told were not. The film

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made ninety six million dollars in the United States, significant

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for a three hour black and white film about the Holocaust,

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but not remarkable by blockbuster standards. What was remarkable was

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everything else. President Clinton asked Americans to see it. Schools

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organized screenings, The German government made it required viewing. It

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played in countries that had never shown a film about

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the Holocaust before. Spielberg donated his entire director's fee to

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the USC Choah Foundation, which he established to record the

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testimonies of Holocaust survivors. As of its last count, the

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foundation holds over fifty five thousand testimonies in sixty languages.

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The film was not the end of his obligation. It

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was the beginning of it. The critical question that followed

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the film and has followed it ever since, is whether

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the Holocaust can or should be depicted in mainstream cinema

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at all, Whether representation is inherently a form of estheticization,

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Whether the craft required to make a watchable film about

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atrocity is itself a kind of falsification. Spielberg was aware

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of this argument. His answer was the film itself, specifically

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its refusal of the conventions that make difficult subjects palatable.

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There is no redemptive arc for the victims. There is

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no moment where the horror is resolved into meaning Schindler

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saves eleven hundred people, six million were not saved. The

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film holds both of those numbers at the same time

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and does not pretend that one diminishes the other. The

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single element of color in the film, a little Girl

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in a Red Coat, seen twice, has been analyzed more

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than almost any other visual choice in modern cinema. She

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is alive in the crowd during the liquidation of the

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Crackoff ghetto. She is dead on a cart later, her

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coat the only color in a landscape of ash and

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black and white. Spielberg has said she represents the wilful

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blindness of the world, that the Holocaust was not invisible,

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that the red coat was there to be seen, that

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the question the film is asking is why so few

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people chose to look. Schindler's List changed what was expected

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of Stephen Spielberg. It changed what was expected of popular

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filmmakers generally. It demonstrated that the apparatus of mainstream Hollywood

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cinema stars, score, wide release awards. Campaigns could be applied

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to the most serious subject matter in human history without

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diminishing either the subject or the cinema. Whether it fully

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succeeded is a question serious people still disagree about. What

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is not in dispute is that Spielberg tried with everything

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he had to be worthy of what he was showing.

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That attempt sustained over three hours and fifteen minutes of

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filmmaking at the highest level of craft, is itself a

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kind of moral act. He has said that making the

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film gave him his identity back. He had spent his

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career telling other people's stories. This was his people's story.

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He was the right person to tell it, and he

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had been afraid to, and then he wasn't anymore. The

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little Girl in the Red Coat, the pin that was

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one life, the car that was ten. Next time, we

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go to Normandy Saving Private Ryan, the film that made

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war look like what war actually looks like, and change

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the deal between Hollywood and violence permanently.