Survivors’ discussions of Schindler’s List variously affirm and challenge its narrative.
In 1997 I was attending a conference on responses to the Holocaust, when a man raised a provocative suggestion about video interviews of Holocaust survivors. At the time, the USC Shoah Foundation was in the process of making recordings for its Visual History Archive (VHA), now the largest collection of video interviews with Holocaust survivors, and other organizations had been making similar videos for over a decade. The man commented that a colleague of his had been watching videos of survivors and claimed he could tell what Holocaust histories or novels they had read and what films or television programs they had seen because these works informed the way the survivors told their stories.
These videos reveal how Holocaust survivors have reflected—in some cases, for decades—on what it means to recall this harrowing chapter of their lives.
This claim resonated with an observation I’d made two years earlier. A student told me that her grandmother was a Schindler Jew—that is, she was on the list of Jews Oskar Schindler had rescued from Nazi persecution during World War II. After the film Schindler’s List premiered in 1993, her family persuaded the grandmother to travel with them to Poland to see where she’d grown up and spent the war years. On the trip they made a video, which my student shared with me. I found it especially intriguing at one point, when the family visited the site of the Płaszów labor camp, where the grandmother had been a prisoner. She recalled worrying about being conscripted to work in Schindler’s factory, because every time her circumstances had changed, it had been for the worse. Then one of her sons asked: “That scene in Schindler’s List, when the Jews presented Schindler with a ring—was it really like that?” The grandmother replied that she didn’t know; she wasn’t there when it happened. Her son seemed disappointed and asked another question about the film; then a different relative asked another one. It soon became clear that, for some family members, the grandmother’s story did not stand on its own but was engaged in relation to Schindler’s List—not altogether surprising, given that the film had motivated the family’s trip to Poland to begin with.
These observations sparked my interest in studying the impact that representations of the Holocaust have on survivor narratives, and the VHA makes this possible in a singular way: Initiated in the 1990s, at a threshold moment for both Holocaust memory and new media, the VHA exemplifies the cultural possibilities and challenges now being addressed in digital humanities. Its database lists over 100 Jewish survivors, including some Schindler Jews, who mention Schindler’s List during their interviews. These interviews provide a rare opportunity to hear a sizeable number of survivors reference the same work, shortly after its premiere, while telling their personal histories. These moments reveal thoughtful and sometimes surprising insights into the workings of memory.
Survivors mention Schindler’s List at various points while being interviewed. Sometimes they invoke the film as a point of reference; knowing that their interviewers recently saw the film, these survivors describe their wartime experiences in relation to events it depicts. Schindler Jews compare specific wartime recollections with their portrayal in Schindler’s List. Thus, Roman Ferber claims he was the boy shown in the film hiding in a sewer during the liquidation of the Cracow ghetto (“You’re looking at him right now,” he explains) but then challenges the film’s account: “There were two of us and three girls. But we didn’t ever jump in ... we just hid in the toilet.... Had we jumped in, like it’s shown in the movie ... I would have been dead today, because it was about sixteen, eighteen feet deep.”
Some Schindler Jews grapple with disparities between their own history and the film’s narrative. Helena Jonas Rosenzweig reports her family’s disappointment that she is not mentioned in the book by Thomas Keneally, on which the film is based. Rosenzweig rationalizes that everyone involved in the actual events could not be included as a character, “otherwise the book would never end and the story would never end.” Of her absence from the book and film, she remarks, “It doesn’t matter, the story is there.” Several survivors comment that Schindler’s List does not portray the full extent of horrors they witnessed during the war and wonder whether any film could—or should—do so.
Some Schindler Jews grapple with disparities between their own history and the film’s narrative.
Toward the end of their interviews, some survivors mention watching Schindler’s List as a memorable event in itself. George Hartman recalls crying when he saw the film and describes this as a “curious” response. “When ... seeing the reality you don’t cry, there’s nothing to cry about, you know you’re going to die tomorrow probably.... It’s only when I see it now, when ... everything is normal, and I look at this horrible film ... it’s much more emotional than actually being there.”
Several survivors claim that seeing Schindler’s List motivated their decision to talk publicly about their wartime experiences. (See, for example, the clip from the VHA interview with Celina Biniaz, below).
For others, reflecting on the film prompts them to consider the implications of transforming experience into narrative, such as the challenge of relating, in a few hours, events that occurred over several years. Israel Arbeiter explains that Schindler’s List was the “closest that I have ever seen to the truth of what happened in Auschwitz, [but] it gives you only five, ten minutes—I went through this five years. There is not someone who can put the actuality on film or [in a] book, how can you do it? Day in and day out? How can this be shown?”
Survivors’ discussions of Schindler’s List variously affirm, elaborate, or question its narrative. The film inspired some survivors to tell their own stories, others to ponder the challenges of doing so. And Schindler’s List is not the only work about the Holocaust that survivors mention during their interviews. They also reference other films, telecasts, and books, as well as museums and other institutions dedicated to Holocaust remembrance. Some of these survivors clearly paid great attention to the many public presentations of Holocaust narratives made during the half century between the war’s end and the time when the interviews were recorded.
As a result, the life histories in the VHA may well be, when compared to other survivors’ personal narratives, among the most extensively informed by other such accounts. This in no way undermines these interviews’ significance, though it challenges expectations that they offer “pure” or “unmediated” memories. Rather, it points to the value of the VHA’s recordings as richly layered palimpsests of remembrance.
These videos reveal how Holocaust survivors have reflected—in some cases, for decades—on what it means to recall this harrowing chapter of their lives, knowing it is part of one of the most extensively represented episodes of modern history. The VHA is thus both an important resource for learning about the Holocaust and a significant work of Holocaust remembrance in itself. Initiated in the 1990s, at a threshold moment for both Holocaust memory and new media, this archive exemplifies the cultural possibilities and challenges now being addressed in digital humanities.
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