A Victory for Remembrance

A Roper poll last spring found that 22 percent of respondents felt it was "possible" that "the Nazi extermination of the Jews never happened."

One would think that after only 50 years, the largest systematic attempts at genocide would not be so easily forgotten. To many Americans, however, it is just another page out of history. And many Americans don't know history.

Now more than ever, there is a desperate need for education about the Holocaust. Steven Spielberg's most recent film, "Schindler's List," fills a critical gap in educating America about this monumental tragedy.

Jewish groups, like B'nai Brith, have applauded the movie as an powerful tool for education. And the national media as a whole has given extensive, and valuable, exposure to the movie. In addition, the U.S. Holocaust museum held a ceremony posthumously awarding a Medal of Remembrance to Oskar Schindler. A spokesperson for the museum added that Spielberg's movie "makes a big contribution to American awareness of the Holocaust."

Not all of the reviews have been so glowing, however. Critics have mourned the fact that Hollywood is now the arbiter of truth in American culture. A review last month in The Forward, a Yiddish newspaper in New York, complained that the movie did not show the gravity of the disaster, and that the movie's uplifting, "happy" ending detracts from the horror of the Nazi Holocaust.

Leon Wieseltier lamented this development in The New Republic: "'Schindler's List' proves again that, for Spielberg, there is a power in the world that is greater than good and greater than evil, and that is the movies."

It is indeed sad that Americans have come to rely upon Hollywood to bring them the truth. But it is reality. There is no shortage of documentaries and historical research on the Holocaust. If most Americans made use of these materials, then we would not be facing such startling ignorance about the Holocaust, partially fueled by Holocaust deniers posing as legitimate "revisionist" historians.

Educated Americans who are already aware of the Holocaust are not those in need of seeing "Schindler's List." It is the rest of America that needs to be educated, and it is this segment of the population that the film addresses most effectively.

In order to reach his audience, Spielberg had to focus on some of the positive aspects of the Holocaust, namely an exciting story of heroism. But Spielberg does not fabricate anything, and he does not omit anything either. The movie graphically displays mass shootings, the liquidation of a Polish ghetto and the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

Spielberg had to strike a balance between a completely commercial movie that would reach most of America and a straightforward PBS documentary. He chose to sacrifice the completeness of a full documentary in order to give his audience a glimpse of the evil of the Holocaust. Some argue that such compromises trivialize the evil that occurred, but Spielberg's presentation was the only possible way to educate the uninformed. It is better that they get an accurate, but abridged, tale of the Holocaust rather than none at all.

In addition, the compromises were minimal. "Schindler's List" is hardly designed from the pre-fabricated formula for box-office success. The movie is, after all, three and a half hours long and shot entirely in black and white.

It would be nice if "Schindler's List" could be all the things that people want it to be--a shocking portrayal of the Holocaust in all its atrocity, a movie that will reach every person in America, a film that in one blow will demolish all ignorance about the Holocaust.

But this is not the way the world works. Schindler's List is one more victory in the long battle to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.

And the battle is far from over. In the words of the Talmud: "It is not for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."