I've been familiar with the story of "Schindler's List" for a long time, owing to Steven Spielberg's Oscar-winning and already-popular film. Later, while browsing Goodreads, I discovered that the film was based on Thomas Keneally's book of the same name. I immediately began reading the work, and now, many years later, I have finally read the original of the classic story about humanity and the journey of a German who rescued thousands of people, including his fellow Jews, from a horrible end in the notorious Nazi concentration camps.
We do not need to debate the horrors of the Holocaust, one of the darkest chapters in human history, or the so-called "Final Solution," the Nazi campaign to genocide and exterminate the Jewish population during World War II. But, when it came to the novel, nothing I had read or known about the Holocaust had prepared me for the chilling and meaningless experience, horror, and inhumanity of the Holocaust. In the film "Schindler's List."
The story begins in Cracow, Poland, where terror gradually emerges as Nazis herd Jews into ghettos, vulnerable ramparts that could buy more for the Jewish population. Before the genocide began, I obtained a passport. Then there were the Aktions, the deceptive, persecuted, and outright murder of Jews who thought they were safe in the ghetto, and no one could imagine the horrors of the "bloodbath" intended. Purge in the middle of the street. The shots were fired mercilessly; dead people were piled on top of each other, forming pyramids of broken limbs; infants were snatched from their mothers' arms and smashed against the wall; patients were given cyanide by the doctor because death by poison seemed to be the most gentle and happy departure before the tragedy that other Jews were suffering; men and women were bitten by SS dogs; separated families, children without parents, and the red-shirted shadow of the bright and naughty little girl (who has watched the film will never forget this scene) has averted the scythe death of the terrible SS - the red that plagued Oskar Schindler himself.
The Aktions only served to send Jews to the next level of hell, with Forced Labor Camps, concentration camps, gas chambers, and horrifying crematoriums. And death hung in the air, meaningless and unexpected deaths from the beastman Amon Goeth, Commandant of Plaszow Forced Labor Camp. He had made taking human life as simple and insignificant as going to the bathroom or writing a letter. Human life in comparison to daily activities I have shed tears of anguish for the innocent people who died as a result of the inhuman Aktions, and I continue to cry for the innocent people who were forced to die suddenly and without warning. Finally, Amon Goeth felt compelled to shoot one of the Jews he had terrorized one fine morning.