Schindler Comes Home

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Memory is all we have. And when the memories are dreadful -- when they hold images of the pain we have suffered or, perhaps even worse, inflicted -- they are what we try to escape. The Nazi scheme to exterminate Jews and other undesirables is one such nightmare image; and Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's drama about the man who saved 1,100 Jews from the Plaszow death camp, is essentially a plea by a preeminent popular artist that to remember is to speed the healing. Last week that moving Holocaust memorial became a mobile one, as the film opened in Germany, Poland and Israel -- the three countries where the atrocities were planned, executed and most poignantly commemorated.

Thanks as much to its persuasive craftsmanship as to its wrenching theme, Schindler's List has already touched U.S. audiences. New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman has arranged screenings as an intended antidote to hate crimes. But no audiences could feel a higher emotional stake in the subject than those last week at premieres in Frankfurt and other German cities, in Tel Aviv and Krakow. Viewers wept. Afterward many could not eat or sleep or talk. Some had been afraid to see it. Others said it should be seen by everyone. Spielberg, less a promoter for his film than a proselytizer for a spiritual unification of Germans and Jews, agreed. "I feel it is time in Germany for this generation to teach its children," he said. "Education is the way to stop another Holocaust from happening."

With President Richard von Weizsacker in attendance, the film premiered in Frankfurt, the city where Schindler died in poverty in 1974. Then it moved to local theaters across the country. In Cologne's Cinedom, half a dozen young women collapsed sobbing in the arms of friends or parents. "I have never seen an audience behave like this," said Wolfgang Rohrig, a 26-year-old student. "It was as if they were in church. It was as if something sacred had happened."

What happened was the belated restoration of Oskar Schindler. In Israel, where he is buried, Schindler was a hero. In Poland, where he connived to save lives, he was a footnote in a history book. In Germany, where he was once sued for punching a man who called him a "Jew kisser," he was an embarrassment to all those who knew something and did nothing. And because amnesia is the most convenient placebo for collective guilt, Schindler was essentially a nonperson. In the '70s Artur Brauner, a German Jew, tried to make a movie about Schindler but could not raise the money. Now, with the release of Spielberg's film and several documentaries on the subject, Schindler has become a strange kind of celebrity, gnawing from beyond the grave at Germany's restless conscience.