Genocide vs. Schindler's List

Genocide is a documentary on the holocaust, a time in the war where Jews were rounded up and executed. Schindler's List is a movie interpretation of one event in it. Both succeed in displaying the enormity of the situation in the war, using different ways of presenting information to you.

Genocide, the documentary, is the one that hits you with cold, hard statistics. The sheer weight of numbers forces you to think about the situation. 9 million Jews slaughtered in death camps, only 4,000 Polish Jews left after the war. Just the thought of the huge amount of people being basically manufactured into ashes really hits you. Interviews with people that have experienced the horrors of the trains to the concentration camps, the screams of the women being executed in the gas chambers and even the silence afterwards, they describe these with astounding clarity, giving you the chance to use your imagination to see what they went through. Schindler's list however makes use of some very clever directing and simple effects to take you to the years of the holocaust. Although the movie was made recently, it is in black and white. This creates a sombre and dark setting for the movie, visually taking you to the time of Hitler. Another reason for the black and white film is that the in one instance during the film you see a girl in a bright red coat running through the streets of the town and hiding under a bed. Later on in the film you see the same child dead, heaped on a cart like garbage, waiting to be thrown on the fire.

I believe that Genocide is a more accurate account, not because it is a documentary and therefore has to be more accurate but because of the way that the director and writer of Schindler's List has taken a fairly biased view of the way Schindler was saving the Jews. After he becomes the "good guy" it is as if he can't put a step wrong. However he may well have been only saving his own skin when he heard that Germany was losing the war. I really don't think this is true but you never know it might be a possibility. Genocide doesn't really have room to be biased seeming as though it's a documentary, and gives an accurate, detailed description of the events both strategically and physically happened in the war.

Despite what I have just said about Schindler's List being less accurate I believe it affected me the most as a viewer. The way you could see that the Germans treated any other person around them that wasn't German like dirt, and the way that there was no amount of pleading that could save a person was really harsh and affected me greatly. Also the visual executions of many people that opposed the Germans was very disturbing, the way they just lined them up and shot through them was really bad.

As for Schindler I do think that he was helping the Jews, the way he pretty much threw away his entire fortune was pretty valiant. I don't think that many people would do that if they knew they would be killed on sight if anyone heard that he was helping Jews escape the executions. He also had an effect on many other of the Nazi's urging them to water down the carts or set slaves free, I think he was a "saint".

I definitely think that the holocaust should be part of the curriculum taught to today's high schoolers since it pays to know what has happened in our history so that it may never, ever, happen again.