<i> A look at noteworthy addresses in the Southland. </i>

On the Holocaust’s Relevance “The reason (Schindler’s story) appealed to a novelist was that Schindler was so paradoxical. He was a great contradictory character and novelists like paradoxes and contradictions. The scoundrel/savior, virtue emerging in unexpected areas, these are the very subjects that novelists salivate over. Oskar was a great contradictory character and he remains contradictory to this day. . . .

“They say that there’s a moral failure in the West now over Bosnia. And possibly there is. There’s a great deal of bona fide confusion, too, about what to do because we’re not actually at war with Serbia. The question of what to do about what goes on in sovereign territories is one that’s perplexed even people of good faith all along. But there seems to be something akin to the Holocaust in operation now in Bosnia, at least in intent. Because as Spielberg said on the set of ‘Schindler’s List’ in Poland, ‘I knew you wanted this film made earlier, but this is the best time to make it, because this is the first time since World War II that the term ‘ethnic cleansing’ has emerged again on the lips of government officials.’ Not on the lips of some lout on a street corner, but on the lips of government officials. . . .

“There are similarities between the Holocaust and what’s happening in Bosnia, even though the Holocaust was the most thoroughgoing process of race-hate that we’ve probably seen in Europe and is morally unique specifically because of . . . the reduction of the process to a banal industrial mechanism.

“Oskar somehow dissented from that process, not only dissented but went to a lot of trouble to dissent, this imperfect, flawed man. And he, to talk about moral ambiguity, moral confusion and moral failure, he was one who didn’t participate in what was a massive moral failure by the industrialists of the German empire. . . .

“Emilie Schindler, who is now 86 . . . was a hero, or heroine depending on your politics. She went forth and bought semolina with Oskar’s money and hand-fed a lot of people. The women who came out from Auschwitz, many of them had typhus, many of them had dysentery and most of them were skeletal. A number of them remember being hand-fed by Emilie. . . . These were the only few square acres of Europe where these people were safe. Oskar’s factory was shamefully, shamefully one of the few places in Europe where that sort of feeding was available. . . .

On Remembering the Past “Let’s look at companies which are still in business and which were guilty of war crimes. German business had a great opportunity to dissent from what the SS were doing, but only a few factory owners did. . . . Look at Krupps, in whose plant at Auschwitz/Monewitz 25,000 young people died, generally teen-agers or people in their early twenties. . . . What did they die of? They died of exemplary beatings, they died of malnutrition combined with illness, they dropped on the factory floor, beaten where they fell, and so on. That’s why chief executives of Krupps, and indeed the son of the Krupps empire, went to prison after World War II to pay for those crimes against humanity. . . .

“It doesn’t behoove us to put pressure on the Jewish population to forget, because we all remember things that are much older. We remember Gettysburg, we remember, the Australians . . . Gallipoli . . . that’s 1915. It ill behooves us to put pressure on the Jews to forget something that’s so recent and a phenomenon of which Europe and indeed some Americans have not yet repented, that is, anti-Semitism.

“I would hope that the Holocaust demonstrates to Gentiles, like probably most of the people in this room, that anti-Semitism is a dead-end. That anti-Semitism is not the answer to anyone’s problem. That human problems are immensely more complicated. That economic rationalists are more responsible.

Looking Ahead * Wednesday: Mike Davis, author of “City of Quartz,” and Kevin Starr, author and historian, will discuss “The Next L.A.” at the Sheraton Grande Hotel in Downtown Los Angeles, at noon. Their discussion will be sponsored by the public issues forum, Town Hall Los Angeles, (213) 628-8141.

Announcements concerning prominent speakers in Los Angeles should be sent to Speaking Up, c/o Times researcher Nona Yates, Los Angeles Times, Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles, CA 90053