Whoever saves one life
A film to remind us of compassion
Image: Ben Kingsley plays the accountant.
RTBF is showing a film. A film … for Easter, perhaps. It’s not very Easter-like and it’s not really about Christianity or Jesus. It’s a film about Jews, and it’s a film that is relevant to everyone: it’s about compassion. It’s a film for reflection, an old film, in black and white, about some things that happened long ago.
In it, one race persecutes another race. Confines them in a small part of the town they live in, and then one day comes and sorts the people into the useful ones and the useless ones. They put the useful ones to work, and the useless ones get shot. In the head, in the heart, sometimes twice by two different soldiers. The first race has all the weapons, and the other race doesn’t have any weapons, so they can’t shoot back. The first race are in high spirits and joyful as they kill the other race. They know that, as the first race kills the second race, they are terminating 600 years of history. That, when they’re done, those six centuries will be nothing but a rumour. It will be as if the second race had never been there.
The commander of the first race shoots a woman from the steps of his home. He shoots the woman from the steps because she meant nothing to him. The film asks us to consider who are those people who mean nothing to us. Are they the ones we never saw, never met, never knew the name of, or those who’re unidentified whose story has touched us?
“The truth is always the right answer,” says the commander to his house maid. “I realise that you’re not a person in the strictest sense of the word. Maybe what’s wrong is not us (he means him and the maid) …. it’s this,” (he means the wretched, cruel situation in which she is the subordinate and he is the commander). “I mean, when they compare you to vermin, to rodents, to lice … Is this the face of a rat, are these the eyes of a rat? Has not a Jew eyes? No, I don’t think so. You’re a Jewish bitch. You nearly talked me into it, didn’t you?”
At one point the first race separate off all the second race’s children and load them up to take them away and kill them. Mothers and fathers scream in despair for their children, who innocently wave and sing as they’re carried off to be exterminated. The first race shoot guns into the air to dissuade the parents from saying goodbye. No, not goodbye—farewell, to their children, and their futures.
“I violated the Race and Resettlement Act, though I doubt anyone could point out the exact provision to me. I kissed a Jewish girl.”
“Did your prick fall off?”
One member of the first race screams wildly, shooting into a massive pyre of bodies, cadavers of members of the second race that the first race has slaughtered, simply for being of the religion of which they are. He feels paroxysms of ecstasy as he pointlessly fires his bullets into the heap of burning corpses.
“I know the destination, these are the evacuation orders. I’m to help organise the shipments and put myself on the last train.” says the accountant of the second race.
“That’s not what I was going to say. I made Göth promise me he’d put in a good word for you. Nothing bad’s going to happen to you. You’ll receive special treatment.” says the businessman of the first race.
“The special directives coming in from Berlin mention special treatment more and more often. I’d like to think that’s not what you mean.”
“Preferential treatment, all right? Do I have to invent a whole new language?”
“I think so.”
Do we have to invent a whole new language? I think so too.
“Some day this is all going to end, you know?”
Well, has it ended?
In the final scene, the first race must flee, because they have lost a war. The businessman laments that he could have so easily saved more lives than those of the people whose names figured on the list he made, the ones he already saved.
It’s at this point that the audience realises how very easy it actually is. To save lives. You don’t need a pert butt packed into Lycra swimming trunks, or a padded armless anorak, still less a breath-freshener boiling. All it takes to save lives is to not shoot. The businessman, Oskar Schindler, saved so many Jewish lives and yet castigated himself that he hadn’t saved more. He could in fact still save more, however. He died in 1974, but his memory is cherished to this day, and perhaps those who cherish it could still give thanks to him. Maybe the descendants of those he saved could save more lives, on his behalf.
By asking for the shooting to stop. So that, one day, this will all end.
Schindler’s list was a sheaf of papers. Nothing more. But it represented life. The lives of 1,100 people, whose descendents today number over 6,000. That’s 6,000 grateful Jews who know the value of life and who know by what a tenuous, fragile thread it hangs, this precious gift of God. They know the value of life and they know the power of compassion: they wouldn’t be here otherwise.
Their forebears knew groundless persecution and dehumanisation. Oskar Schindler did more than save lives, Jewish lives: he saved humanity. Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire. Schindler saved eleven hundred worlds entire. Now they must be saved again.
I first saw Schindler’s List with friends in Antwerp. When we emerged from the cinema and reached for our cigarettes, Mario said, “Every kid needs to watch that movie.” He’s right. Even after the genocide has changed so many people’s views and stances, and so much has been written about Zionism and war crimes and crimes against humanity, they need to see it. It reminds us what never again means, why the phrase was even dreamt up, and why we need to embrace it now. We need that reminder.
It’s a movie that, through its unrelenting horror and cruelty, dehumanises the people who are the film’s subject matter. As we watch that process, we are horrified. And then, bit by bit, they are re-humanised. And that process gladdens our hearts.
What Israel as a nation has done, by its genocide and the almighty snoot it has cocked at law and propriety, is dehumanise not only the Palestinians whom it has targeted, but itself into the bargain, the way the Nazis dehumanised the Jews in order to exterminate them, and thereby dehumanised Germany in its entirety. There comes a time when one descends so low that, even if the flesh is prepared to stoop even lower, the soul, be it of the individual or of a nation of individuals, yearns to rise again.
Every kid, every adult; every gentile, every Jew; we all need to watch Schindler’s List: to remind ourselves of what compassion is.