The Battle of 'Schindler's List' Quiz

Answer: 'Schindler's List' was a fictionalization

Spielberg was accused of trying to represent the unimaginable. The idea of having actors portray Holocaust victims in a movie designed to play to the masses strikes many as disrespectful. Many, however, argue that the cultural elitism of the documentary purists has allowed deniers of the Holocaust to gain ground.

Answer: of Nazis: Schindler and Goeth

While there are scenes that focus on all these characters, the movie as a whole is told from the perspectives of Schindler and Goeth, both members of the Nazi Party. Portraying the Holocaust through the eyes of its perpetrators, rather than focusing solely on its victims, rankles many people.

There are also complaints that the Jews are stereotyped and that Stern in particular is painted as a weak, emasculated character compared to the German Schindler. There is, however, no consensus: many argue that the Jewish characters are differentiated and well-drawn, and that anyone who argues that Stern is weak-willed has not seen the movie.

Answer: all the main characters survive the Holocaust

Although there has been criticism of the health of the actors and the fact that 'Schindler's List' is a movie, the main criticism here is that all the main characters survive. As a movie about survivors in a time when so many millions died, 'Schindler's List' dangerously depicts the Holocaust as less horrific than it actually was.

However, a few major characters -- such as the elderly one-armed man and the boy who works for Goeth -- do die in the film, and most viewers find that the quantity of atrocity scenes obviously indicate that Schindler's Jews were the exception and not the rule of the Holocaust.

Answer: the shower scene at Auschwitz, in which characters believe they are about to be gassed

While auteurs criticized the girl in the red dress (the rest of the movie was black-and-white) on artistic grounds, and while there were objections to the graphic violence, no scene sparked as much controversy as the shower scene, when the camera follows several dozen women into the showers at Auschwitz, where they believe they are about to be gassed but only water comes out of the faucets. Even some of Spielberg's supporters said that when the camera crossed that threshold, the movie for the moment crossed the line between social commentary and sensationalism.

Answer: never again

By telling its story from the perspective of two Nazis -- one who sacrificed everything to save Jews, and another who casually murdered them -- 'Schindler's List' forces viewers to examine what THEY would do. There is a tendency to view the Nazis as monsters of pure evil, but this is dangerous: they were humans, like us, and the things they did can and have been done again (by Pol Pot of Cambodia, for example). To view the Nazis as wholly separate, a historical fluke, is to wilfully ignore the historical lesson of the Holocaust. 'Schindler's List' is not as simplistic a film as its detractors make it out to be: it addresses a facet of Holocaust remembrance too often ignored by the media today. (As you may have guessed, I'm a defender of 'Schindler.')