Parents' Guide to Schindler's List

In SCHINDLER'S LIST, Steven Spielberg displays the virtuosity of a great documentary film maker: The Holocaust, in which six million Jews, political prisoners, Jehovah's Witnesses, and gays were killed, is too vast and too atrocious to fathom. So Spielberg searches history for the one true story that will make it comprehensible. He gives us Czechoslovakian businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), a grandiose, insinuating businessman bent on making a successful business on the backs of Jews who are robbed of their homes, jobs, property, and, many, their lives. The film follows Schindler's transformation from greedy war profiteer to humanitarian who eventually saves the lives of 1,100 people destined for death at Auschwitz. But there are two main characters in this film. If one is Schindler, the other, undoubtedly, is the Holocaust itself. Spielberg gives us the Holocaust in the names of the Schindler Jews, and uses real-life stories to make it real. We get Ihtzak Stern (played with quiet rage and dignity by Ben Kingsley), the Jewish accountant who runs Schindler's manufacturing plant. We get Helen Hirsch (Embeth Davidtz), the Jewish woman who serves as a Nazi commander's (played with icy sadism by Ralph Fiennes) maid and the object of his twisted adoration. We get, as the title implies, a list of people, of faces, of stories that make the atrocities of World War II real.