A Reminder of Evil--and an Appeal to the Good in Us

Last week, after taking myself to the movie everyone’s talking about, I drove home feeling outraged by the world’s injustices and depressed because the human spirit seems eternally captive to its darker side.

In the aftermath of “Schindler’s List,” I tossed around the notion of personal responsibility in areas large and small: What, I wondered, can one person do about Bosnia? About the semiautomatic gunfire we hear at night in our neighborhoods? About a parent who slaps a child in the grocery store?

How we behave with each other every day adds up. There may be no cosmic score card, but we do have to face ourselves in the mirror.

On Monday, flyers describing acts of violence against Jews were discovered in lockers at two La Canada Flintridge schools. In the weeks before that, we read about the anti-Semitic comments of a Louis Farrakhan aide and about high school-aged moviegoers in Oakland who snickered as Jews were blown away by Nazis in “Schindler’s List.”

Maybe it’s silly, maybe it’s maudlin, but I walked out of the movie determined to be as good a human being as I can.

And isn’t that the most you can ask of a movie?

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“Schindler’s List” is not the best film I’ve ever seen. (Steven Spielberg’s sentimentality stuck in my craw here and there--the girl in the red dress was a needless manipulation. Schindler’s syrupy last words to his workers were jarringly out of character. And factory manager Itzhak Stern’s story was slighted.)

But it is certainly one of the most powerful.

And because of its power--and popularity--it has conjured more than its share of controversy.

Three weeks ago in this paper, Rabbi Eli Hecht lit a fuse when he wrote that “Schindler’s List” should never have been made.

“I am wondering,” he wrote, “why Jews in Hollywood are singing the praises of ‘Schindler’s List’ and its sanctifying of Oskar Schindler. He should be shown for what he was, a war profiteer, an opportunist, a carpetbagger of the worst kind, and not a ‘righteous Gentile.’ . . . There is no enlightenment to be gained from seeing Jews as victims over and over again. . . .”

That’s not how the movie struck me. In fact, at this moment, when we have all internalized the psychotherapeutic vernacular, “Schindler’s List” shines a high-intensity beam on the line separating “victim” and “survivor.”

We love survivors.

We do not love victims.

So when you have been victimized, you must shout about it, you must teach it, film it, sing it, dance it. You tell, you tell, you tell. You don’t forget, because bearing witness to pain and loss--when it’s safe to do so--is how you become a survivor.

The Holocaust was not just a Jewish disaster. It was a human disaster. “Schindler’s List” is not about victims--it is about how victims became survivors.

Nor is it merely the story of more than 1,100 Jews saved from death by an amoral enigma of a man. It is about human nature, about the cruelty people inflict on each other in the most casual ways, about the “banality of evil,” in historian Hannah Arendt’s famous words, but also about the banality of good.

How else to understand Schindler’s comment after his last-moment rescue of Stern from a train bound for the death camps: “What if I’d gotten here five minutes later? Then where would I be?”

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If we are willing, “Schindler’s List” can remind us of--can inspire us toward--what is good in ourselves--empathy, compassion and courage.

The Oakland high school students ejected from a theater for laughing during the movie were not laughing at the Holocaust. They were laughing at what they perceived to be less-than-realistic scenes of death on the big screen.

These are kids who know. And to their credit, they came back days later with a courageous public apology.

“We hope to learn more, plus develop more sensitivity and compassion,” said one of the students, Mirabel Corral. “We hope we get a second chance to make a good impression by preparing to see the film again.”

They learned, they understood.

Reminders of the Holocaust--whether as movies or museums--are not an insult or an anchor around the spirit of a people. They are ballast.

“If for a moment you think that there is a moral lesson to be learned from ‘Schindler’s List,’ ” wrote Rabbi Hecht, “tell it to E.T.”

Rabbi, can you spare two dimes?