282 SCHINDLER’S LIST
1999, p. 67). No less an authority on Holocaust cinema than Claude Lanzmann
(Shoah) voiced a similar view: “ There is this building of bridges now. Very strange.
A film like Schindler’s List builds bridges. It is an absolute distortion of historical
truth, despite the fact that the story of Oskar Schindler is true. It is not what hap-
pened to the vast majority of Jews. The truth is extermination. Death wins” (quoted
in Fisher, 1999).Reel History Versus Real History
Published 11 years after Schindler’s List, David M. Crowe’s authoritative biography,
Oskar Schindler: The Untold Account of His Life, War time Activities, and the True Story
Behind the List provides a revisionist portrait that reveals some fairly serious inac-
curacies perpetrated by the film. The movie paints Schindler as nothing more than
a hedonistic carpetbagger when he arrives in Kraków, but Crowe fills out the back-
story, noting that Schindler was actually a spy for the Abwehr (German military
intelligence) in the late 1930s who compromised Czechoslovak security in advance
of the Nazi occupation and was sent to prison as a result. Schindler was also the
de facto head of a unit that mapped out the Nazi invasion of Poland. Crowe points
out that there was no “Schindler’s List”; in an interview, Crowe observed that
“Schindler had almost nothing to do with the list” because he was in jail for brib-
ing Amon Göth, the brutal SS commandant played by Ralph Fiennes in the film
when the list was composed. Crowe contends that the legend of “the list” partly
originates with Schindler himself to embellish his heroism when he was trying to
win reparations for his war time losses (Smith, 2004). Schindler’s man ag er, Itzhak
Stern (Ben Kingsley), was not even working for Schindler at the time. Furthermore,
there was not one list but actually nine of them. The first four were drawn up pri-
marily by a Jewish clerk named Marcel Goldberg. A corrupt assistant to the SS
officer in charge of transporting Jews, Goldberg took bribes of diamonds from
wealthier Jews to get their names put on the list. Crowe notes that Schindler sug-
gested a few names but did not even know most of the people on the lists. The
authors of the other five lists are unknown. Crowe also dismissed some scenes in
the book and film as my thol ogy. For example, the film shows Schindler horse back
riding with his mistress on Kraków’s Lasota Hill in March 1943. From that van-
tage point, Schindler watches the clearing of the ghetto and sees the little girl in
the red coat, aimless and alone, seeking shelter. He later observes her corpse on a
wagon. Crowe calls the scene “totally fictitious,” noting that it would have been
impossible to see that part of the ghetto from the hill. The girl in the red coat is, in
fact, based on a real person— Gittel “Genia” Chill (1939–1943), a four- year- old Jew-
ish girl murdered during the liquidation of the Kraków Ghetto— but Schindler
never saw her that day. Crowe contends that Schindler’s moral transformation was
more gradual; even before the ghetto was cleared he was appalled by the Nazi mis-
treatment of the Jews. Another scene, fabricated for its devastating emotional
impact, is the Auschwitz shower scene. Holocaust survivor Ernest S. Lobet notes:
“Oskar Schindler’s Jews almost certainly did not arrive at the Auschwitz- Birkenau
gas chambers, and Edith Wertheim, whom you quote, is mistaken if she thinks
the shower room in which she found herself on arrival was the gas chamber. Such