Schindler's List as Compassion Catalyst

A case study in restorative storytelling

In November, as war raged in Gaza, campus groups harassed and threatened Jewish students, and college professors declared Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel “exhilarating” and “awesome,” Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List quietly turned thirty. “Holocaust denial was on the rise again – that was the entire reason I made the movie in 1993,” Spielberg said in January 2023. “I have never made a movie that so directly confronted a message I thought the world needed to hear. … It had a vital message that is more important today than it even was in 1993, because antisemitism is so much worse today than it was when I made the film.” Ten months later, world events proved that Spielberg was more right than he could have known.

In telling the true story of Oskar Schindler, the Nazi manufacturer who saved the lives of over 1,200 Jews during World War II, the film was a history lesson delivered as entertainment. “My primary purpose in making Schindler’s List was for education,” Spielberg recalls. “The Holocaust had been treated as just a footnote in so many textbooks or not mentioned at all. Millions knew little if anything about it. Others tried to deny it happened at all.” On set, Spielberg told cast and crew that “We’re not making a film. We’re making a document.”

When Schindler’s List was released in 1993, it had a massive impact on public awareness of the Holocaust. Free screenings were held for millions of students, and videotapes of the film were given to every high school in the nation along with a study guide to help teachers lead discussion. The idea was that the film could not only cement cultural memory of the Holocaust, but also act as a gateway to broader education about the history of human cruelty. “It is important that the teachers make the study of Holocaust and issues of hatred and intolerance as relevant as possible,” Spielberg said, “so that it can have a real meaning and impact for every individual in their own lives.” Spielberg didn't stop at teachers. He let world leaders know that it was their job to ensure that nothing like the Holocaust ever happened again. And he used the profits to establish the USC Shoah Foundation, a visual history project that has since documented the stories of over 50,000 Holocaust survivors.

Released half a century after the war ended, Schindler’s List did over $300 million at the global box office, won seven Oscars, and ignited the field of Holocaust studies. Along the way, the film brought the Holocaust back into cultural awareness. It was an antidote to passive forgetting as well as active denial, and it ensured that the memory of the Holocaust would outlive those who lived through it. As such, the film is an example of what I am calling restorative storytelling — storytelling that restores history, restores memory, and with it restores our rightful relationship with one another, a relationship of compassion, peace, and care, rather than hostility, violence, and hate.

I. Film As Catalytic Cultural Event: How Spielberg Did It

How did Schindler’s List do what it did? What is it about this film that resonated so powerfully with audiences? That may seem like an easy question with an obvious answer. But that’s only because hindsight is 20-20. At the time, it wasn’t obvious that Spielberg was making a film that could change the world for the better. It wasn't even obvious that he was doing an ethical thing in making the film at all.

“Think that was about the Holocaust?” Stanley Kubrick scoffed; “That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. Schindler’s List was about six hundred people who don’t.” For Kubrick, Schindler’s List glorified a lone Nazi profiteer while minimizing the enormous scale of Hitler’s genocidal campaign. Jean-Luc Godard gave the film even less credit: “Nothing is shown,” he complained; “not even the story of this interesting German, Schindler. The story is not told. It is a mixed cocktail.” Kubrick thought Spielberg told the wrong story. Godard thought Spielberg failed to tell a story at all.

Both directors missed the point.

Clearly, Spielberg was telling a story — and clearly it was the story that was needed in a world where people were finding it increasingly easy to forget the Holocaust or even deny that it happened. In making Oskar Schindler the hero of that story, Spielberg was making a very a smart, if counterintuitive call. Far from glorifying the exploits of a Nazi mercenary, Spielberg charts the process by which a hardened man who thinks only of his own interests undergoes a total moral transformation. In the course of the film, Schindler evolves from someone who is exploiting the Nazi war machine for personal gain into a man of conscience. He becomes painfully aware not only of the horror of the Holocaust, but also of his complicity with it. Schindler’s arc is, in other words, that of a man who acquires the character traits he needs in order to remain human in the face of evil.

Crucially, Schindler’s arc is also the arc Spielberg wants his audience to have. The lessons Schindler learns in the course of the film are the same lessons Spielberg wants to teach the moviegoers of 1993.

Recall that in powerful storytelling, the audience not only identifies with the main character, but becomes that character. Neuroscientists call this process “transportation.” A brain that has been transported by story is a brain that doesn’t distinguish between self and other, truth and fiction. The transported brain is all in. It’s living through the hero, experiencing all their wants and needs. When we are transported, we feel as the characters do, and when a story does its work, we learn, evolve, and change right along with them.

II Schindler’s List Solved Our Compassion Problem

In my last post, I wrote about the compassion problem that is built into adulthood. Small children experience compassion easily, and readily act on it. Maturity complicates that: growing up involves learning that attempting to ease another’s suffering costs us something. We find ourselves calculating what we lose by helping someone, and we don’t like it. We don’t like weighing our convenience against our desire to be kind, and we really don’t like seeing ourselves do what, statistically speaking, we usually do: choose our own comfort over that of someone else. And so we tell ourselves stories — about how the suffering other may not be suffering all that much, or may need to suffer in order to grow, or may deserve to suffer; about how we don’t want to interfere; about how someone else will surely step up if help is truly needed; about how, in other words, we do not really need to feel compassion in the moment, about how it’s okay, even morally correct, to be unmoved and to do nothing when confronted with someone else’s pain.

Our hardwired compassion problem is particularly acute in times of heightened tribalism. Hatred arises in the absence of compassion and thrives on it. Political polarization, lethal mass partisanship, and rising antisemitism are evidence that we are in a crisis of compassion, that compassion is an emotion we are finding it all too easy not to feel. We are, in other words, losing touch with an emotion that we must learn young and preserve throughout life if we are to live together peacefully — if, indeed, we are to survive at all.

Schindler’s List allows us to reconnect with the evasive but vital emotion of compassion. In the course of the film, Oskar Schindler evolves from an amoral profiteer, someone who cynically uses the Nazi war machine for his own gain, into someone who ruins himself for the sake of the Jews working in his factory. His character arc charts the evolution of his capacity to feel compassion and to act on that feeling. At first, Schindler is a pure mercenary — he wants Jews to work in his factory because he can pay them less than Poles. As the war ends, though, Schindler is overwhelmed with guilt and grief that he didn’t save more people. “There will be generations because of what you did,” Stern reassures him; “You did so much.” But Schindler knows it wasn’t enough. Surrounded by newly liberated workers, he falls to his knees and weeps, lamenting how many more people he could have saved if he had sold his fancy car, bartered his gold Nazi pin, and so on. The people do not judge him. They put their arms around him, and they weep with him.

In this scene, we see the contagion of compassion as one man’s feeling for the suffering of others inspires reciprocal feeling in those others for him. We also “catch” that contagion ourselves. The scene is overtly sentimental and strategically so — the sight of tears brings us to tears, and storytellers have been using this fact to work on audiences for as long as stories have existed. Here, Spielberg uses tears to connect us both to Schindler’s pain and the workers’ beautiful moment of empathy for him. When we cry during this scene, and we all do, we are crying both ways: We are Oskar Schindler, reckoning with the cost of his choices, and we are also the workers, thankful beyond measure for all he did do.

This is what restorative storytelling looks like. Schindler’s List refuses to allow toxic historical lies to stand, and so restores the truth about the past. It is also storytelling that restores us to one another, that reconnects us through compassion, rather than further separating us through hate. And it costs us nothing (or nothing more than the price of a movie ticket). All we have to do is sit on our butts, watch the screen, and feel.

III You Had To Be There: Young People Need a Comparable Moment

When Schindler’s List was released in 1993, 200 million people saw the film in the theater. 25 million of those were American. On a Sunday night four years later, the film aired on NBC. More than a third of the televisions in the United States tuned in and 65 million Americans watched it. The film ran without commercials and it was not edited for television. The violence, the nudity, the graphic depiction of cruelty — everyone watching saw all of it, including the kids. The broadcast was a moment of shared, national witnessing, a distinctly American vigil of remembrance held by families watching TV together in their living rooms, and it amounted to a sort of vow, a way of saying, “We will never forget. And nothing like that will ever happen again — not on our watch.”

We’ve struggled to keep our promise. According to a recent Economist poll, Holocaust denial isn’t a problem for older Americans. People simply know what’s true and what isn’t. But the same cannot be said for young people. According to the poll, one in five Americans aged 18-29 “think[s] that the Holocaust is a myth” and another 30 percent “do not know whether the Holocaust is a myth.” Another way of putting it: half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 — 27 million people — doubt or disbelieve that the Holocaust happened.

And here’s the part that has me by the throat: The oldest members of this group were born in 1994 — the year after Schindler’s List was released in theaters. There are over 100 million Americans aged 29 and under. They weren’t here for the film, they didn’t benefit from the work it did, they are learning something else, something toxic and wrong, about history, and their confusion is causing enormous damage.

Steven Spielberg made Schindler’s List as a bulwark against hatred. He succeeded — for a time. Now, antisemitism and Holocaust denial are on the rise again, in large part because of bad actors who are weaponizing story in the service of violence and chaos. That is unlikely to change unless we reclaim story in the service of a far more humane and compassionate world than the one we live in today. We need to tell better, more compelling stories than the ones that being sold by the world’s professional haters. We need more Schindler’s Lists. And we need them now.

What do those new stories look like? What must they do? Thoughts on that in forthcoming posts.