Schindler

What could cause hundreds of people, human beings, to lose their humanity?  What could so possess them that they lost the understanding of what it means to be a person, a son, a mother, a friend?

This is a question I am sure I will never know the answer to.  To me it is utterly impossible, but I know it to be true.  How else do you explain what the Germans did to the Jewish people during World War II?

Tonight I watched Schindler's List for my WWII class.  If ever there was a movie that was so much more than actors on a screen, this would be it.  It is more than a story.  It is history, it is real, it is true, it is unbearable.  I can never know what that time was like.  No matter how many movies I watch, books I read, or personal accounts I listen to, I will never know.  And it makes me sick to think that the people of today's world have little desire to know.  Do we remember?  Do we think about the more than six million lives lost?  About the millions of descendants that would never exist?  Do we take time to recognize how significant a single life is?  One person is linked to hundreds, thousands, millions more — and if they were to die, all of those would be lost.  Do we think about that?

Near the end of the film, Schindler is leaving the workers he saved.  He must flee because he is a member of the Nazi party and therefore, at the end of the war, is considered a criminal.  As he leaves, he looks at his car and says, "The car could have given me 10 more people.  Why did I keep the car? And this pin, it could have been two more people! Or at least one! I could have done more! I could have saved more!"  He breaks down in tears, of regret, of fear, of pain.  His friend looks at him and says simply, "You saved 1100 people.  1100 people are alive because of you.  You did enough."  At that moment I wanted to scream at Schindler that he saved more than 1100 people! He saved thousands of their descendants.  He saved generations of people —mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, friends, loved ones.  All alive now because of the "few" 1100 he did save.  At the very end writing scrolls across the screen and tells us that there are fewer than 4,000 Jews left in Poland today, but that there are 6,000 Jews who are descendants of "Schindler's Jews."  Remarkable.

More than anything, what I want to know is how.  How? How did those people — not just Schindler's 1100 but the other survivors as well — how did they find the sunshine?  How did they find the will to go on?

<3 Mel