Then, as now, levels of knowledge about the Holocaust could be shockingly low. Holocaust survivors were getting older, and there was a push to record their accounts to debunk Holocaust denial Spielberg himself founded what’s now called the USC Shoah Foundation: The Institute for Visual History and Education in 1994 to do just that. (Indeed, it won Best Directing and Best Picture.) When Spielberg spoke of his own motivation for making the movie, he pointed to its educational value. Israeli daily newspaper Haaretz quoted a historian who called it “Spielberg’s Holocaust park,” while the German newspaper Die Welt described it as “the fantasies of a young boy from California who had never taken an interest in the Holocaust or the Jews before.” Others said Spielberg took on the project only because he thought it could win him his first Academy Award. Since no filmmaker has a track record like his, none has his power to encourage both a studio and the young mass audience to take a risk on a movie the subject of which is inherently repellent, not to say terrifying. “The Movie simply needed my clout to get it made,” Spielberg says, and he is not being immodest. The fact that it is a very good movie means it has a chance to lodge there instructively, and perhaps permanently. These factors alone would grant it an access to the mainstream public consciousness that no other movie on this subject has enjoyed. It is a high-profile, big-studio film, produced and directed by the most popular filmmaker of our era, possibly of all time (four of the top 10 grossing movies ever are Spielberg’s, including the biggest of them all, this year’s Jurassic Park. …Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List is a consequential event. The Holocaust especially had “been left mostly to documentarians and to Europeans,” but, he explained, that was changing: Until Schindler’s List hit theaters, depictions of history in films were often “essentially set decoration,” TIME’s then-film critic Richard Corliss noted in a feature when the movie was first released in 1993. The movie, starring Liam Neeson in the title role, is back in theaters Friday for a limited re-release timed to the 25th anniversary of a wider release in theaters on Dec. “I was a little girl, and it seemed like overnight, I became an enemy of the state,” Finder, now 89, told TIME in a recent phone call from her home in Framingham, Mass.įinder soon became one of the youngest Jewish workers in the enamelware and ammunition factory in Krakow owned by Oskar Schindler, a businessman whose story of saving more than 1,000 Jewish people during World War II was made famous by Schindler’s List, the 1993 Steven Spielberg film adaptation of Thomas Keneally’s 1982 historical fiction novel. That was when her father was accused of being a member of the resistance and arrested she never heard from him again. It was the beginning of a new, terrifying chapter in the life of the Jewish 13-year-old in Krakow, Poland. 31, 1942, was not a day for celebrating New Year’s Eve.
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