(Spoilers! Please watch the movie first)
No film has ever expressed what a monster a human being can be. Battleship Potemkin came close but not like this.

This film stars Liam Neeson, Ralph Fiennes, and Ben Kingsley. This film is about the Holocaust but it has a major sub-plot beneath it. The sub-plot is about Oskar Schindler who is a bold, womanizing, business tycoon who got rich from the war. “His,” Jews work for him in his factory in the Nazi camps. Itzhak Stern is his accountant who tracks all of his money and expenses. And lastly Amon Geoth who I will be talking about later.

This film was directed by Steven Spielberg. He as a director leaves nothing off the screen. Every execution, every cry, is shown. In many points I was questioning if the things this film shows can even be put on film, but if anything was left out, it would make the movie be less than what it is. This needs to be seen. In one scene, a one armed man thanks Schindler for putting him in his factory, because the people in the ghetto believe that they survive in the ghetto. He then goes back to shoveling snow. Two guards grab him and the man says that he is a worker for Oskar Schindler and one of the guards says, “A one armed Jew? Twice as useless.” They then kill him leaving behind red snow while the other Jews say to just keep shoveling. It’s the moments like these where the film just kills you. But it doesn’t stop there.

The film doesn’t state an opinion. The white text that tells you what is happening while the characters say what they think is right or wrong. It is a lot like the book Alive where only the facts are stated because if it were to show opinion, it would pack less a punch. In the film, the one part that always gets to me and yanks out my heart is when there is a man who is begging a SS guard to take his wife inside a building because she is unconscious and then the guard shoots his wife in the head while the blood is spraying in his face and he gets pushed away and drops his wife and leaves her corpse on the ground. Or another scene where a boy runs away because his father and him are being taken away and then two SS guards run and get him. The guards go and grab him and while they have held up, another SS guard shoots at his chest. These scenes are the ones that make you feel the agony, the despair, the sadness of these people.

Amon Geoth. He planned the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. This man shoots people for fun. He shoots a woman walking down the street because she was not pleasing, or offending him. Yet he still keeps one Jewish maid named Helen who he loves. Yet he still beats her. He kills 20 Jews because they were standing next to the man who actually did the “crime.” He kills a 13 year old boy for not being able to take the stains off his bathtub. He shoots Jews that stop working, to tie their shoes. He does this because he likes it.

My closing thoughts about this film are that this shows the unexplainable living hell that humanity can cause. As I said before, you see everything in this film. This film won many awards including best picture. I can’t imagine how Spielberg felt making this movie and winning an award for it. This is truly an amazing movie. It is pure.