How could Jews be that submissive?

Rating: 9/10 (22 October 2007)

This film was and still is a revolution in our approach of the Shoah, the Holocaust, the extermination of the Jews during the second world war. It reveals in shocking images the tactics used by the Nazis to capture the Jews, here in Poland, in order to seize their possessions and to transform them into slaves. In each city of some importance all the Jews of a region were compelled to regroup and live entirely within the militarily controlled limits of a ghetto. Then the Nazi Party imposed the election or appointing of a Jewish Council to manage the ghetto, that is to say to implement the orders from the Nazis. Then some businessmen, essentially industrialists came to provide the Jews with work and there the Jews became consenting even if forced slaves and later on the ghettos will be liquidated and forced labor camps will further transform the Jews into inmates forced to work for the businessman and kept in order by some SS unit. The value of the film comes from the fact that the industrialist concerned in Krakow, Schindler himself, comes from previously independent Czechoslovakia and is a member of the Nazi party with important connections in Berlin that gives him the upper hand even on the SS. It is unluckily slightly difficult to believe it since the connections are not brought within our knowledge. Who could in Nazi Germany be more powerful than the SS? The film will show how much money this man was able to make with that slave labor. Real fortunes that enabled him to double his political influence with financial corruption. But there it shows how the Jews from the very beginning (the order to go and live in the closest ghettos) right to the very end (either their being sent to Auschwitz to be gassed or being saved and freed by Schindler) will always disbelieve the worst news they could get and always believe in some kind of higher order that will either sacrifice them or save them, that order being from another dimension of time and space. Is it divine, is it a God, is it some kind of cosmic force? No one knows which one, but it is a force against which you cannot do anything. You have to submit and survive if it so pleases this force. This submissiveness is never questioned and hardly contrasted to some Jewish individuals, and only individuals, who would have thought of resisting, or at least escaping. No matter what happens, they sing a song of lamentation or a song of thanks, but they were reduced to a herd of cattle and they submitted to that fate. It is pathetic to see how Schindler's Jews do not protest against any violence or whatever. They just, on arriving in Auschwitz, call the name of their "Nazi Master", Schindler himself. They have been reduced to being Schindler's herd. The vision is absolutely disquieting, disturbing, sickening. That definitely is the worst part of such a war. And that absolute alienation is constantly brought back by any war, be it in Palestine, in Lebanon or in Iraq. That's were the film is poignant and at the same time finds its limit. The film avoids all other types of exterminated group, ethnic or not, because all these other groups produced another attitude: rebellion, refusal, fight, struggle. It is also important to see that even in Poland, even in these ghettos, even within these Jewish Councils there was some refusal, rebellion, even a rebellion in the name of freedom in spite of it meaning immediate death: better die than submit to the final degradation, alienation, internalized victimization. Stephen Spielberg hence does not reflect the whole historical truth but favors one approach only. That explains why the film feels as having aged with time and the end definitely becomes morbidly sentimental: love and gratefulness for the one who made them slaves and only saved them because they were his property that he bought with the money they produced. He is only saving his own possessions, like a rancher would protect his herd. The ending thus is too positive to be acceptable. If the Jews had been able to massively move into rebellion, resistance, guerrilla warfare or even plain warfare, the war could have been different. We are speaking of more than two million Jews just in Poland. To run down such a human wall you need time and quite a lot of tanks and planes. Hence it does not bring in any profit but cost a tremendous amount of money. Could Hitler have afforded it without having to cut some further actions short? A beautiful black and white film but that only shows one side of the picture.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University Paris Dauphine, University Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne & University Versailles Saint Quentin en Yvelines