My Take | What can Schindler’s List teach the world that we live in today?
- Spielberg’s masterpiece film, now 30 years old, supposedly offered timeless lessons about the Holocaust. If only that were true now …

Schindler’s List, Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, turned 30 on December 15, the date of general release in the United States. I first watched it when it came out in Canada. So many members of the audience were in tears, some audibly sobbing.
I was quite shaken. Sure, I had watched Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1956) and the first hour of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), which was nine hours long. Both are documentaries, but nothing like a Spielberg movie. Kudos to TV Ontario, which once ran Shoah in its entirety when I was in Canadian high school. Watching it was for a school project. Night and Fog, by contrast, was only about half an hour.
Spielberg broke a Hollywood taboo about avoiding the Holocaust, and turned it into a major movie. Since then, for better or worse, the Holocaust has become a major film genre. It’s hard to remember that across North America at the time, Schindler’s List wasn’t just a film, but a cultural phenomenon. Everyone felt obligated to watch it; it was considered part of a civic education.
The lessons from the film seemed, at the time, obvious enough. It was shot in black and white, and its depiction of human behaviour had no moral ambiguity; it was good vs evil, heroism vs depravity, Oskar Schindler vs Amon Göth, the psychotic Nazi.
There was nothing to argue or debate; you just had to learn the lessons from history, well, as taught by a Hollywood filmmaker. If, as they say, those who don’t learn from history are condemned to repeat it, can Schindler’s List help us not to repeat it today? I doubt it.
Over the years, I have read up on the history of the movie itself, as well as Spielberg’s other, arguably related movie, Munich, about a group of Mossad agents tasked to assassinate Palestinian terrorists responsible for the murders of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics. Spielberg has made no bones about making both movies because he is Jewish. If the one is about redemption and hope, the other is about vengeance and justice.