Schindler's Legacy

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Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ couldn't seem farther apart. Gibson's film is accused of fanning hatred against the Jews; Spielberg's, which won the Best Picture Oscar and six others in 1994, dramatizes the toxic effects of that hatred, and the ability of one man — the gentile factory owner Oskar Schindler — to save 1,200 Jews in Poland during the Nazi Occupation. The two movies are kin, though, as serious, violent historical dramas made against great odds — and as personal testaments that, their directors have said, transformed them as artists and men. On the new DVD of Schindler's List (Universal Video; $26.98), Spielberg declares, "It changed the course of my life."

Schindler's List did more than earn Spielberg some long-overdue respect as a serious filmmaker. It spurred him to create the Shoah Visual History Foundation, through which survivors of the Nazi Holocaust bear witness to the ordeals they suffered, the families they lost, the ideals they held high. He continues that good effort in this DVD's extras, particularly a 77-min. documentary, Michael Mayhew's Voices from the List, which assembles recollections of the Schindlerjuden and others who outlived the Nazi madness.

The film remains a potent document, in gritty, memorial black-and-white, of malevolence and heroism portrayed in the starkest terms. Schindler (Liam Neeson) is a reluctant savior. "He didn't come to Poland to save Jews," survivor Leon Leyson says in Voices from the List. "He came to Poland to make his fortune." Keeping his Jewish workers alive was at first just good business, then a matter of stubborn pride and finally a humanist crusade for which his beneficiaries are ever grateful. "He was life, he was maybe future," says Rena Finder. "He was God for us."

In another DVD extra, narrator Morgan Freeman insists on the role of these survivor-storytellers in teaching the young about bigotry. "Could it change the world? The Shoah Foundation knows it can." That seems an impossible quest. But what Schindler accomplished, Spielberg hopes to carry on.