Director Steven Spielberg has produced many acclaimed films, but to this day he still can’t answer a question about the title character of his personal favorite work.
Schindler’s List is still considered one of Steven Spielberg’s masterpieces and won seven Oscars in 1994, including the trophies for Best Director and Best Picture. The difficult subject matter of the Holocaust made the historical drama a film that Spielberg was afraid of in the run-up to its release, but it paid off because the director later described it as “the best movie I’ve ever made”. There’s just one thing about his work that he still doesn’t understand
“Why?”: Schindler’s List still baffles Steven Spielberg to this day
Steven Spielberg’s biographical film follows the industrialist Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson), who manages a factory with around 150 Jewish workers in Krakow during the Second World War. To prevent them from falling victim to the Nazis, he passes off untrained employees as qualified specialists. He ultimately saves the lives of over 1000 Jewish people by saving them from deportation to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
(Steven Spielberg with Liam Neeson on the set of Schindler’s List)
In a major interview with The Hollywood Reporter recently, Spielberg looked back on Schindler’s List and revealed:
The biggest mystery I could never solve [in Schindler’s List] is this: Why did Schindler do it? Why did he risk his life and sacrifice nine percent of his accumulated money to buy his workers out from Amon Göth and finally release them to freedom?
The unanswered question in Schindler’s List still bothers Spielberg to this day
Did the businessman Oskar Schindler discover his conscience and charity in the face of the terrible deeds of the Nazis? According to Spielberg, the man’s motivation remains in the dark, even in the heavily fact-based book Schindler’s Ark * (in German: Schindlers Liste *) by Thomas Keneally.
(Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler in Schindler’s List)
Spielberg showed how much this still concerns the filmmaker even after 30 years with a comparison. He draws on another famous work of film history, in which one word at the end of the movie sums up the main character:
‘Every time I see my Rosebud sleigh hanging on the wall, I think, ‘I never had that Rosebud moment that Orson Welles found for Citizen Kane in Schindler’s List.
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Oskar Schindler died in 1974 in Hildesheim, Germany. It is not known whether he ever gave specific reasons for his actions. In 1967, he was honored by the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem with the prestigious “Righteous Among the Nations” award for rescuing forced laborers.
