261: Schindler’s List with Dan McMillan

00:02:58:10 – 00:03:11:16
Dan LeFebvre
Before we dive into some of the details of the movie, let’s take a step back and look at Schindler’s List from an overall perspective. What letter grade would you give it for historical accuracy?

00:03:11:19 – 00:04:01:01
Dan McMillan
I would say an “A” and about as many a pluses as you’re allowed to add. But I need to qualify that in the sense that in so many respects it actually deviates from what we know about the real Oskar Schindler. So you could say that it’s full of factual inaccuracies and errors. But on the other hand, it does what historical fiction does best and which which really surpasses what academic historians like myself are capable of doing because it it makes vivid, it makes it real, and it provides a plausible reconstruction of things of what we most want to know about history, which is what made these people tick.

00:04:01:04 – 00:04:22:22
Dan McMillan
Why did they do the things they did? How did they rationalize their terrible actions to each other? How did they feel about what they were doing? How did they talk to each other? The thing is that when you’re an historian like me, you’re chained to the documentary record and the documentary record. You know, it doesn’t give you the dialog in meetings.

00:04:22:22 – 00:04:58:11
Dan McMillan
The only time you get dialogs and meetings is just there were a stenographer present and all these conversations that are so important. For example, almost every conversation among perpetrators of the Holocaust was not on paper. The orders to murder were transmitted verbally rather than in writing. And there were there is a paper trail of many aspects of the Holocaust that in some ways the basic understanding that this is an order from Hitler comes to the highest authority, that the goal is to complete is to murder every person of Jewish ancestry in the continent of Europe.

00:04:58:14 – 00:05:26:08
Dan McMillan
That is, on paper only very rarely. And so the dialog in the film, almost all the dialog is pure fiction. And yet, on the other hand, if the director and the author of the screenplay do their research, do their homework in the documentary sources and in what historians have read, they can imagine dialog that, yeah, it didn’t take place that way, but it’s completely plausible and it brings it to life.

00:05:26:11 – 00:06:10:27
Dan McMillan
And you know, one of these is so disappointing to me. As you know, I wrote an article specifically about Schindler’s List and about the ways that I see it. Time Press images from my point is a story in and I read a number of the things that historians had written about Schindler’s List. And a lot of this stuff that is written by historians is really kind of petty, and all they want to do is find fault with this or that factual inaccuracy overlooking the fact that this film makes the Holocaust real to people in a way that our work as historians never will, and also gets at again these truths.

00:06:11:00 – 00:06:32:12
Dan McMillan
At the metal world of the killers and the mental world of the victims and of the bystanders in a way that we just can’t. And so to me, historical fiction is not just entertainment. It’s a form of history. It’s an adjunct. It supplements academic history. Now, a lot of historical fiction. Does this much better than other historical fiction.

00:06:32:14 – 00:06:49:19
Dan McMillan
This is the gold standard for historical fiction. I mean, I have to tell you, the more I look at every time I look at it, the more I look at it, I find something new to admire in it and to be impressed by it. And I at that time, I just I watched it twice in recent weeks to prepare for a conversation.

00:06:49:22 – 00:07:00:14
Dan McMillan
And my hat’s off to Spielberg, to the screenwriter, to everyone in that project. It is a stunning achievement. Everyone should watch this film and they should watch it many, many times.

00:07:00:21 – 00:07:19:27
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned the the order to murder, mostly being done verbally, but we know from history that, you know, that the Nazis documented a lot of things. Were they specifically not wanting to document those orders or was it just something that was just almost an implied everybody just kind of understands?

00:07:20:00 – 00:07:44:18
Dan McMillan
Well, everyone did come to understand and there were a lot of sources. But as far as the people in the SS who directed in the organizing carried out pretty much all the killing. We do understand that there were verbal orders transmitted down the chain of command from Himmler to his subordinates in the SS. Usually someone will involve himself or one of his deputies.

00:07:44:21 – 00:08:10:14
Dan McMillan
Reinhard Heydrich would actually go for example, to Auschwitz and speak Percy to Rudolf Hess, the commandant at Auschwitz, and brief him. There’s no paper trail of the meetings at which which would have been meetings really between Hitler, Himmler and Heydrich, at which Himmler Hitler reached his decision that the plan now is not that we’re going to kill Jews in the Soviet Union.

00:08:10:14 – 00:08:39:17
Dan McMillan
We are going to completely exterminate the so-called Jewish race on the continent of Europe. And in the back of everyone’s mind, I think was an understanding. If we become powerful enough to dominate the entire world, which I think is something Hitler wanted, then one of the highest order on their agenda would be to strike at every single Jewish community around the globe because they saw the Jews as a virus effectively.

00:08:39:17 – 00:09:06:19
Dan McMillan
You know, and if you can, you you want to stamp that out everywhere. I can never grow back. There’s a lot of debate among historians as to when this decision was reached, going all the way from, say, early 1941. Some people there are some historians and good historians who’ve argued that there was never even a point where it was decided and that it didn’t really become policy until March 1942.

00:09:06:21 – 00:09:34:00
Dan McMillan
The best reconstruction, however, in my view, and I’ve really spent a lot of time passing them, I think sort of the third week in October, second or third October of 1941, that is to say, about four months after Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, they’ve already murdered at least 500,000 people through the shooting squads. Work has already begun and construction of a couple of death camps.

00:09:34:02 – 00:10:09:26
Dan McMillan
But we just have little fragments of conversation that have survived and also very crucial for the dating. It was October 23rd of 1941. Himmler issued an order banning all further Jewish emigration from any part of German controlled Europe. Up until that point, the policy still had formerly been. Our goal is just to get get rid of the Jews and areas under our control and out of our society by abusing them so badly to flee.

00:10:09:28 – 00:10:18:18
Dan McMillan
And but at that point, it’s clear we don’t want to it any escape our grasp because we want to kill them all.

00:10:18:20 – 00:10:41:19
Dan LeFebvre
If we head back to the movie at the beginning, we are introduced to Oskar Schindler as a businessman. He is a member of the Nazi Party, and he moves to Krakow with one purpose to make money with the war. He takes advantage of the Nazi policy against Jews to use them as cheap labor. They say cheap labor. It’s really slave labor, because the movie points out that the Jewish workers don’t get paid anything.

00:10:41:19 – 00:10:52:18
Dan LeFebvre
The money that Schindler pays for being able to use Jewish workers goes to the Nazi government. How well does the movie do setting up Schindler’s Story and his reason for being in Krakow?

00:10:52:20 – 00:11:28:20
Dan McMillan
Well, actually, there it seems to do a pretty bad job. And I’m saying this comparing the story to what was at least at that time that the movie was made the best reconstruction we had, which is the time the novel was lost by Thomas Keneally, which is the main source that I read also when writing my article, which is about ten years ago, and Keneally was very took his job very seriously, although he’s not an academic historian, he’s a novelist, but he interviewed something like 50 people, 50 eyewitnesses.

00:11:28:23 – 00:12:08:28
Dan McMillan
And in the novel I was very impressed by the way that he separated that, which was definitely a fact that things that he fictionalized for whatever purpose and things upon which he speculated at engaged and educated guesses without being able to document. So I take the Keneally novel is pretty probably the most solid reconstruction we’ve got with Spirit from Keneally actually, is that Schindler already is wants to help Jews by the time he moves to Krakow and he bring that, he makes a point of employing them because he knows that he’s going to treat them better than any other German employer.

00:12:09:00 – 00:12:31:14
Dan McMillan
I mean, at that point in 1940, they’ve committed a lot of murders of Jews in Poland during the invasion of Poland, but it’s maybe 20,000. They don’t yet have a genocidal plan, much less a plan for murdering all Jews in Europe. So the fate of the Jews is unclear. On the other hand, their treatment of Jews has already been so bad.

00:12:31:16 – 00:13:02:19
Dan McMillan
And so, you know, the Schindler of reality was already really hostile to the Nazi regime. She came originally not from Germany, but from the west rim of Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudetenland. If you remember, the the confrontation in October of 1938. And there was a conference at Munich where the British and the French basically sold Czechoslovakia down the river and said, no, you’ve got to give up this.

00:13:02:21 – 00:13:26:19
Dan McMillan
The Sudetenland, where which was settled overwhelmingly by German speakers, and they were brought here to Germany. And that was kind of the last dramatic act of appeasement that gave Hitler so much opportunity. One of the probably one of the last best opportunities to stop Hitler already at that point. You know, Schindler is a native of the Sudetenland. He’s not happy about what has happened.

00:13:26:21 – 00:13:56:00
Dan McMillan
He becomes a Nazi party member because it’s convenient for his business purposes, establishes his credentials. But he’s already inwardly, to some degree, an opponent of the regime. On the other hand, the way that Schindler’s mode it the Schindler, the M.P. who hires says, okay, I’ll take Jewish labor because it’s cheaper for me that on the in the end was utterly typical of the overwhelming majority of German corporations which use Jewish slave labor.

00:13:56:03 – 00:14:26:20
Dan McMillan
And there was an enormous amount of it. The slave labor was usually in camps that were run by the SS when the conditions were absolutely savage were the death rate was very high. A rough guess of how many Jewish slave laborers died in these camps serving German industry is about a half a million, and these German managers, corporations, personnel were fully aware of what was happening and had no problem with it.

00:14:26:22 – 00:14:33:15
Dan McMillan
So Nansen Schindler check of the movie is a typical German businessman, but he wasn’t Oskar Schindler.

00:14:33:18 – 00:14:51:02
Dan LeFebvre
It was actually wouldn’t it be one of my questions to about that is if that was then plausible. You know, with Schindler’s playing in the movie using Jewish workers as slave labor to make money, it sounds like that was a thing that that did happen, even if it wasn’t Schindler himself.

00:14:51:04 – 00:15:15:16
Dan McMillan
That’s right. It’s that that was the norm in an enormous number of German businesses, happily took advantage of this very cheap labor. They had to pay the SS a very low rate for the benefit of having the slave labor. They knew that the turnover in these camps was enormous. That is, the attrition through malnutrition and just outright murder for sport.

00:15:15:18 – 00:15:39:11
Dan McMillan
And they were happy with it. I mean, that’s one of the things that’s so impressive. They showed a lot of courage in Spielberg’s part that he I mean, he he takes he makes he makes a film about Schindler, because Schindler did become a rescuer. On the other hand, he present Schindler in a way that is far more typical of most rescuers, because most rescuers weren’t born rescuers.

00:15:39:13 – 00:16:02:29
Dan McMillan
You know, very few people are born. Villains are born heroes. They evolve into one direction or another under the pressure of circumstances. They do have a measure of free will and they do make choices. But I think Schindler is more not that rescuer is is not a topic that I have focused on in my research, but everything that I have seen of them is that they were really were morally ambiguous.

00:16:02:29 – 00:16:28:26
Dan McMillan
People like Schindler, who did not act Schindler didn’t act become a rescuer out of high principle because he had no moral principles at least the Schindler of the film. Right, is he cheats on his wife every chance he gets. He’s corrupt and so on. You know, a lot of ways he’s not a very attractive is he’s he’s charming, but he’s not a really attractive person, you know, in moral terms.

00:16:28:28 – 00:16:54:19
Dan McMillan
But he becomes a rescuer ultimately because he loves people. He delights in people. He just has an affection for other human beings. And it’s this fellow feeling that under the pressure of circumstances, makes him into a rescuer. And I think that’s really kind of more characteristic of rescuers, of other rescuers in the Holocaust. That said, take that with a grain of salt.

00:16:54:21 – 00:16:58:25
Dan McMillan
There are people who specialize in the study of rescuers. I’m not one of them.

00:16:58:27 – 00:17:27:09
Dan LeFebvre
In Krakow, the way the movie shows, the Nazis rounding up the Jews for the Krakow ghetto, it shows it is not an immediate process. There are scenes of Jewish families wondering how long the schools will be closed. Then we find out they’re not able to own businesses and they’re given work details. Then, according to the movie, by March 20th, 1941, all Jews are ordered to relocate to a walled district that’s only 16 blocks.

00:17:27:14 – 00:17:42:16
Dan LeFebvre
That’s the ghetto. We see scenes of families being taken from their homes and forced to live in a single room with a dozen other people that they don’t know. Is that a good depiction of how the Nazis forced the Jews into the Krakow ghetto?

00:17:42:18 – 00:18:17:27
Dan McMillan
It is also the reality I think, in all these ghettos was far worse. One of the things I think also that that is very smart that Spielberg does is there are moments where he shows you Ferrer in just in an immediate in a way that’s just a gut punch. The scene, for example, that the one armed man whom each such Stern and Kingsley has rescued by bringing him to Schindler’s factory, he comes in, he brings the man up to to sanction what?

00:18:17:28 – 00:18:36:03
Dan McMillan
For saving his life. And she was furious at this, you know. So what do you mean? The guy, you know, And then a couple of minutes later, when the SS stop this group of Jews, make them get out to shovel snow, how can one armed man show snow and they execute him on a murder, him on the spot?

00:18:36:06 – 00:18:56:26
Dan McMillan
And, you know, you see him being shot in the head, There’s blood in the snow. But these are brief moments. One of these is Goldberg does is he doesn’t nanu by rubbing your nose in horror every single minute of the film because if you do that for too long to an audience, they just they get turned off. They can’t watch it.

00:18:56:29 – 00:19:34:12
Dan McMillan
They’re at home. They change the channel. And so she hands you the horror in moments that are absolutely unvarnished. And they’re brutality and very effective. But most of the time you don’t see it that harsh with regard to the ghettos, the squalor, the unsanitary conditions. Also, there was institution, food and sanitation, coal for heating in the winters. You had deaths from exposure in the early months of 1942 in the Warsaw ghetto, which at that point had a population of about 450,000.

00:19:34:15 – 00:20:00:26
Dan McMillan
I think at least 5000 were dying. A month was quite a death rate from hunger, from exposure. Some of the population had had been more well-off before they were crammed into the ghetto, had things like jewelry, gold and silver, better clothes that they could smuggle out, trade with people outside the ghetto for extra food, and maybe some call for heating.

00:20:00:26 – 00:20:34:12
Dan McMillan
You had better survival chances. People who had been poor by the time they went into the ghetto, then their chances of survival were terrible. And it’s the same with the sub slave labor camp. He shows some of the horror. He shows Amon Good, and this is very much something that good actually. Did. So picking off workers with his deer rifle, his hunting rifle and, you know, SS guards murdering Jews for sport, for amusement casually that happened all the time in these slave labor camps.

00:20:34:12 – 00:20:48:20
Dan McMillan
On the other hand, the life in these camps, there was so much more horror that Spielberg could have shown in that. But again, he did to just to not overwhelm us, to give us just enough horror that we could deal with it.

00:20:48:22 – 00:21:06:24
Dan LeFebvre
And that’s a great way of phrasing. I didn’t really think about that because you do show too much then you are going to get numb to it. Were the were the soldiers that were there doing that? Did did you think they almost got numb to it as well? Because they I mean, in The Real Story, they were the ones inflicting it.

00:21:06:27 – 00:21:38:05
Dan McMillan
There is a fascinating, you know, question from the sources that I’ve read. And again, the sources are fragmentary. There’s there’s a range of responses. It seems like and this is this is a percentage that you get from from psychological experiments and from observations of people in these positions of power in other contexts as well. It seems like about a third became out.

00:21:38:05 – 00:21:59:28
Dan McMillan
Now sadists who enjoyed took pleasure in what they were doing and often toyed with the prisoners. You know, maybe they didn’t shoot them, but like you know, Neal, I’m going to shoot you, but then not shoot you did this or that. It seems like the majority tried to just see it as a job, rationalize it away as well.

00:21:59:28 – 00:22:32:27
Dan McMillan
I’m following orders, not necessarily be enthusiastic, often deal with the ugliness of what they were doing, the trauma, what they’re doing by abusing alcohol in their time off. There be a much smaller groups to might displace very small, minimal, ultimately insignificant acts of kindness who are clearly troubled morally by what they were doing and tried to be or retain some measure of their humanity.

00:22:32:27 – 00:23:11:24
Dan McMillan
This sort of yeah, kind of 30% sadists, you know, 60% kind of neutral and 10% somewhat more humane. You see that, for example, in the Stanford Prison experiment, I think of Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiments. Also, what we’ve seen in there was a very good study of a shooting squad of 500 men, reserve police, Battalion, 101, One of the best books I know, very readable for the general public called Ordinary Men Reserve Police Battalion 101.

00:23:11:24 – 00:23:30:16
Dan McMillan
And the Final Solution, followed by Christopher Browning, who is, I think, the finest living Holocaust historian. And that also you see kind of a similar division and Rudolf Hess, the commandant of the Auschwitz death camp, made a similar tradition among his guards.

00:23:30:18 – 00:23:59:00
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned earlier that the camp and among good and in the movie, we see it’s almost the the impression that I get, you know, from the Jews in the Krakow getaways. They think, oh, well, things can’t get any worse. And then they do because we see a Mangold get introduced. He organizes the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. All the Jews are forced to move to the newly built forced labor camp in Plaszow, and then Goods is overseeing that camp.

00:23:59:06 – 00:24:13:14
Dan LeFebvre
And inside the camp, the conditions are even more brutal than in the ghetto. Murder. Murder is an everyday thing. And it sounds like, from what you’re saying there, the movie does a pretty good job of showing the way things were in Plaszow camp.

00:24:13:16 – 00:24:42:13
Dan McMillan
It shows a good range of this, of the brutal things that can happen. But it doesn’t rub your nose that deeply in the horror that then there are these moments, for example, and this is one of the most, most brutal scenes and really essential that he does this is the selection that’s conducted, if you remember, is that it’s Gert is on his balcony getting his semiannual physical job.

00:24:42:16 – 00:25:07:09
Dan McMillan
And below him in the camp, you have a group of SS doctors sit up at these tables and all the prisoners are running around in front of the doctors and they’re trying to look healthy because they know that the ones who are deemed to be insufficiently healthy are going to be sent to Auschwitz and murdered. They may not exactly know what outfits is, but they know that they’re sent.

00:25:07:14 – 00:25:35:19
Dan McMillan
If they’re transported away, their lives are over. If you are also in the barracks, the women puncture their fingertips with needles and smear blood in their cheeks as rouge to look more healthy, more robust. And that selection process is something that’s done all the time, calling those who are less capable of labor or are incapable labor. And in the same scene, that’s when they transport the car away.

00:25:35:19 – 00:25:58:10
Dan McMillan
Almost all the children and a few of the children. It’s a minority. The children, but a few of the children understand. I don’t want to be in that truck that’s taking me away and they run for hiding places and one of them ends up jumping into the sewage pit of a latrine, which is something that didn’t in fact happen, that the Jews trying to escape being murdered sometimes.

00:25:58:10 – 00:26:27:26
Dan McMillan
Did it hide in sewage that’s in this way. And that has been documented whether they happen to splash up or not, I don’t know. And that’s an example where in a very brief moment, it’s 30 seconds. Nonetheless, he you know, he really hammers home just the the absolute the degree, the complete degree to which the killers dehumanized their victims, how hard it was to survive, the lengths you had to go to to survive the depths of the horror.

00:26:27:26 – 00:26:34:20
Dan McMillan
But again, he gives you 30 seconds instead of rubbing your nose in it for 15 minutes when you can’t handle that.

00:26:34:23 – 00:26:56:15
Dan LeFebvre
Looking back at it from a historical lens, the idea of the Nazis going from restrictions on the Jews to then putting them on the Krakow ghetto and then sending them to the forced labor camp, it wasn’t like they just sent everybody to the forced labor camp at once. Do we know why they imposed these restrictions gradually?

00:26:56:18 – 00:27:25:08
Dan McMillan
Well, the German policy C toward the Jews evolved in a series of steps, and a lot of it was improvised because it wasn’t, for example, at the time that were were which would began on the 1st of September 1939. Even Himmler had no idea that he was going to order the murder of all the Jews in Europe. At that point, they were still thinking in terms of explosion.

00:27:25:10 – 00:28:03:23
Dan McMillan
Then they conquer all of Western Europe. Suddenly they’ve got control of a larger Jewish population. They know that other countries are not going to accept this many Jewish refugees. They begin to think in terms of solutions that are clearly have a genocidal aspect. One thought they had is they’re going to round up all the Jews that are within their area of influence in Europe, some six and a half million, and ship them to the island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean, which is relatively cannot support a population at that size, that ideas then abandoned because, you know cheap air superiority over the British Isles in the in the battle of Britain.

00:28:03:26 – 00:28:35:22
Dan McMillan
So they decide not to invade Britain since the British control the sea lanes, the Madagascar plan is out. A Hitler pivots to the plan to invade the Soviet Union. At that point in early 1940, there’s an idea they’re going to expel all the Jews of Europe to beyond the Ural Mountains to every part of the Soviet Union, that that they don’t actually annex and make part of Germany with the expectation that the majority are going to die out, you know, of starvation, exposure and so on.

00:28:35:24 – 00:29:13:27
Dan McMillan
And so they evolved to genocide in increments. You already see at the beginning, after they’ve conquered Poland, they are forcing Jews to move from the countryside and they concentrate them in cities, they take their names and so on. Then they moved them into ghettos. And a lot of that is preparation. The idea that we’re going to deport them to some kind of, again, reservation, some sort of part that’s away from us where they can’t contaminate or damage our society and where there are a lot of them are going to die as far as when the ghettos are actually liquidated and forced into.

00:29:13:28 – 00:29:38:20
Dan McMillan
And their inhabitants in some of the ghettos are liquidated and those who can work are put into labor camps like Flash mob and the rest. They show the scene where they go through the ghetto and they’re just savagely, brutally shooting people right and left, you know, And that’s completely, completely accurate. That is that is a terrific depiction of how that process happened.

00:29:38:22 – 00:29:58:02
Dan McMillan
It’s interesting. They don’t really make a point of showing that those are among those that tens of thousands who are not seen as likely candidates for slave labor. Those people would all have been shipped off to Auschwitz, but they don’t really show that. And a lot of the ghettos were liquidated where everyone is sent immediately to a death camp.

00:29:58:08 – 00:30:09:13
Dan McMillan
The liquidation of the Krakow ghetto was in March of 1943. I think it was it was in 43 that they show it. And that just kind of depended on local circumstances.

00:30:09:16 – 00:30:30:07
Dan LeFebvre
That is something that I guess is something good to keep in mind when talking about or watching Schindler’s List that it is focusing on the one camp, but like you’re mentioning there, don’t show people being shipped out to Auschwitz as much because following the storyline almost, you know, of certain people and where they go from the ghetto to this one particular camp.

00:30:30:09 – 00:30:34:21
Dan LeFebvre
But it is a much bigger picture. There are other camps there. You know, there’s there’s a much bigger picture.

00:30:34:21 – 00:31:10:28
Dan McMillan
And the other thing that’s that’s good about focusing on it, because they’re all also showing just what the Jews of Krakow were able to know because the Jews of Krakow didn’t have the full picture in Europe. And that, in a way, is also a sign of good historical thinking, because one of the things that you can make mistakes that a lot of people, including historians, can make in looking at the past as we project our own knowledge back into the past, it’s really important to always step into the shoes of the people you’re studying and ask yourself what information did they have?

00:31:11:01 – 00:31:12:19
Dan McMillan
How did this look to them?

00:31:12:21 – 00:31:37:05
Dan LeFebvre
As we shift back to Schindler, There is a transition moment in the film for Oskar Schindler. He’s going horseback riding one morning, and it happens to be the same day as the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto. And he watches as people are murdered in the streets. And we kind of see this transition almost happening. Nothing to in dialog necessarily, but that’s kind of when the transition seems to happen in the movie.

00:31:37:05 – 00:31:44:07
Dan LeFebvre
Is it fair to say that that is around the time when Schindler started to evolve beyond the mindset of just making money?

00:31:44:10 – 00:32:19:27
Dan McMillan
It’s interesting. I mean, I think that’s that’s clearly a turning point. He’s very troubled. His mistress is distraught. The first rescue, actual rescue in the film is at least a good 20 minutes later, if you remember in splash of deep good, the re finds character goes into the workshop. There’s a man making hinges. He accuses the man of not working fast enough, takes him outside, tries to murder him and two of his pistols malfunction.

00:32:20:00 – 00:32:48:27
Dan McMillan
And Ben Kingsley tells Schindler about this. And so Schindler at that point gives Kingsley, I think is a wristwatch or a lighter. It’s like a silver plated cigaret lighter, which is used as a necessary bribe. It’s actually a thing to the Jewish police. And in the flash of camp, to get this man transferred to the safety of Schindler’s factory, To me, that’s the first rescue.

00:32:48:29 – 00:33:01:22
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned the Jewish police there. And that was something I wanted to ask about, too, because we do see there’s a police force of Jews that are paid to help the Nazis in all of this, I’m assuming. Was that really a thing?

00:33:01:24 – 00:33:32:10
Dan McMillan
No, absolutely. And in the ghettos, it’s interesting whether it. One thing that puzzled me and I can’t say whether I know that this is true or not, whether they still retained the Jewish police in the camps is opposed to just letting the SS guards do all of those functions there. I’m actually a little skeptical, but in this in the ghettos, basically the Germans would have a Jewish community of elders.

00:33:32:10 – 00:34:04:04
Dan McMillan
The Jewish Council would essentially oversee the government of the ghettos of the Krakow ghetto, the ghetto in large and every other ghetto for as long as the ghettos existed. And they had a Jewish police that managed so that the Germans did very little administrative work in the ghettos and which then put these, these elders and Jewish police in a in a terrible position where they might perceive themselves or be perceived by the people around them as collaborators.

00:34:04:04 – 00:34:35:00
Dan McMillan
On the other hand, they are also in a position, perhaps to do favors to try in some way to mitigate the harm done by the Germans. And it’s not unreasonable for them to see themselves that way because they had all the Jews in the ghetto refused to cooperate with the Germans by setting up this Jewish government sanction. The Germans would have just gone in and killed everyone right on the spot, you know, or they would have sent everyone to a death camp right on the spot.

00:34:35:00 – 00:35:10:22
Dan McMillan
So it was actually rational thing to do. And that’s not to say, however, that members of the Jewish police in many ghettos and Jewish self-governed Jewish councils and ghettos were perceived as traitors. And some of them, in one account I read, were in fact murdered, you know, by some of the some of the other members inhabitants of those ghettos because they were perceived as traitors by on the other hand, I personally cannot find it in my heart to judge them.

00:35:10:22 – 00:35:14:23
Dan McMillan
They’re put in an absolutely impossible situation that they did not create.

00:35:14:25 – 00:35:36:22
Dan LeFebvre
In the Krakow ghetto. While that scene is going on, I wanted to ask because there’s the movie is almost entirely black and white, but there is an exception that Spielberg makes in the crack. I’ll get on this. A little girl in a red coat, Schindler’s watching her as she wanders the street. People are being murdered around her. Eventually, she makes her way into a house and hides under a bed.

00:35:36:28 – 00:35:40:12
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know if she was based on a real person.

00:35:40:15 – 00:36:21:11
Dan McMillan
Lawless, morally certain that she’s a fiction, that she’s a metaphor of some kind? I don’t know what the metaphor is exactly. I mean, the decision to film in black and white altogether is is an interesting, very interesting decision. I am inclined myself to see this again as another way. Part of the strategy that I talked about earlier of not rubbing our nose too often in the horror so that we can take an we have enough distance that we can appreciate the horror to give us the horror and dose that we can manage so that we are suitably horrified.

00:36:21:13 – 00:36:49:29
Dan McMillan
And I kind of feel like the black and white that makes that that establishes distance for us. You show it, you know, you show the blood in color when somebody’s shot in the head. It’s a little different from black and white. And it’s almost is kind of I think I kind of see the girl in the red coat is as a way, a subtle way of of reminding us, kind of flicking us back into the present.

00:36:50:02 – 00:37:10:18
Dan McMillan
This is not this is not some black and white dissection. This really happens. And then you also see you see her one point later when they’re when they burn all the bodies that they dig up, you see that she did not survive and her body is carried on a conveyor belt. Her face rotted away. That you see the red coat, the color.

00:37:10:20 – 00:37:17:00
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a great point. It helps bring you back to this is this was reality.

00:37:17:03 – 00:37:44:13
Dan McMillan
And also to remind you that the Jews are not an undifferentiated mass of victims. They are individuals with agency. We also see, I guess about her is she’s a plucky little girl separated from her parents who goes and seeks safety on her own by hiding under a bed and the courage of the victims is also something that is, I think has become more and more appreciated in recent research.

00:37:44:13 – 00:38:14:22
Dan McMillan
I would say, but is something that isn’t always. We don’t always internalize, shall I say, I don’t mean this is a criticism of anyone, because in fact, they were fundamentally powerless to change their fate in 99.9% of the cases. That does not mean, however, that they were became completely passive, that they were robbed of agency, that they did not show courage or that they did not resist because they did in all kinds of ways.

00:38:14:24 – 00:38:38:01
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah Yeah. You mentioned earlier the man with the hinges. And if we go back to the movie, there is another time where we see Schindler saving somebody there. I wanted to ask you about there’s this Jewish woman named Regina Perlman who comes to beseech Schindler on behalf of her parents. And at first, he’s kind of taken aback because she comes in and she mentioned something that everyone says that your factory is a haven.

00:38:38:03 – 00:39:01:09
Dan LeFebvre
And that seems to be the first time he’s heard of this. And I don’t know how much he actually believed in the movie, but he says something along the lines of she’s trying to entrap him to doing something illegal. But then later he does use his wristwatch to bribe the guards to or the Jewish police. I don’t remember which one it was to bring her parents to the factory.

00:39:01:12 – 00:39:04:01
Dan LeFebvre
How much of that really happened?

00:39:04:04 – 00:39:32:25
Dan McMillan
I doubt that that I don’t remember that from the Keneally novel. It’s entirely plausible. I think that if someone came to a man Schindler’s position and said, We hear that you’re factory saves and that no one dies, there, that he might well see this as a provocateur working for the Gestapo and would then make a point of shouting at her.

00:39:32:28 – 00:40:06:26
Dan McMillan
And he does also appear to be well he’s had is upset by this because then 2 minutes later he’s berating Ben Kingsley, who has been saving people, has himself been bringing to Schindler’s factory people who would likely be murdered at plow shop because like the man with only one arm and so on. And they had this whole conversation about am and good about I think it’s at that scene, you know, in peacetime he wouldn’t be such a bad fellow, but war brings out the bad in people.

00:40:06:28 – 00:40:41:20
Dan McMillan
And then, you know, Kingsley tells him the story about good where a prisoner is escaped from a work detail of 50 men and good shoes for them, 25 is walking around with his pistol getting blood all over his own face. And, you know, Kingsley says, Yeah, he really likes killing. And there’s a shift. And that’s when he gives the gives the want to to Ben Kingsley, to Yitzhak Sharon to to rescue the Perelman’s that’s and that’s interesting.

00:40:41:20 – 00:41:10:08
Dan McMillan
It’s kind of right after that point that he comes to see him, embraces the idea that he’s a rescuer and is proud of it because after that he’s at the party. I think it’s for good spirit day at the villa and he has a conversation in the wine cellar with Helena Hirsch. And that’s the personal servant, the maid from Amman.

00:41:10:08 – 00:41:38:12
Dan McMillan
Good for him. Good develops these romantic feelings and she’s very frightened. And he and and Schiller says, You know who I am? I’m Schindler. And because he realizes because he was told only three or 4 minutes earlier in the film by Regina Perlman, they say you were good. And he’s the sort of he likes that. He likes the idea that he’s good.

00:41:38:19 – 00:42:02:02
Dan McMillan
And then he he says all these things to comfort her. And he offers he gives her a bar of chocolate. You know, she she can build up her strength or she can trade it for something. And You know, she’s terrified. She talks about how good there’s no rhyme or reason to who he murders in his shot, someone she happened to be walking by.

00:42:02:02 – 00:42:27:18
Dan McMillan
She’s going to shoot me. And she says, No, he won’t shoot you. He enjoys you. That’s another one. But the thing that’s so fascinating about the film, how hard it is to to pinpoint when he becomes a rescuer. And then I guess for me, that’s the moment when not only has he become a rescuer, when he takes pride in being a rescuer.

00:42:27:20 – 00:42:56:25
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. And which which kind of leads at least according to the Schindler in the movie, leads him to being okay with stepping outside the bounds of the law or the rules in place or, you know, the accepted norms of the Nazi Party to do what’s right. Yes. Yeah. You mentioned Helen Hirsch, and I wanted to ask about her because we do see a man good kind of having this starting to have feelings for her.

00:42:56:25 – 00:43:17:18
Dan LeFebvre
We don’t see the extent of them necessarily, but we know that, you know, she’s a Jewish woman, that he’s forcing to work in his house. And he has this one line where he says that she’s not a person in the strictest sense of the word. And that really stood out to me. Was that something that Nazis really believed about Jews or women or both?

00:43:17:21 – 00:43:43:13
Dan McMillan
Not about women. It’s actually been argued that in some ways the Nazi racial project empowered and valued German women since they were the breeders of the nest of the next generation of genetically superior Germans, they had a special role that had gone unappreciated before the Nazis came to power and in other ways. And women also there were women were very active in organizations of the Nazi Party.

00:43:43:13 – 00:44:14:25
Dan McMillan
There were also female concentration camp guards where there were female prisoners. Some of them got executed for their crimes after the war. But as far as seeing Jews, no, not as a person, not as human. You’re not a person of the strictest sense. The word. To me, that’s kind of the single most powerful scene in the entire movie because, you know, he’s lonely and he says, I would so much like to reach out to you and touch you in your loneliness.

00:44:14:28 – 00:44:41:04
Dan McMillan
But she’s not the one who’s lonely. She’s connected with other human beings. He, on the other hand, he is he is cut himself off from humanity because he’s made himself a monster. He’s himself inhuman by denying her humanity, by denying the humanity of this huge branch of the human family. And it’s so she stands there, she trembles a bit clearly.

00:44:41:04 – 00:45:04:21
Dan McMillan
She’s frightened and with good reason. Since he murders people, it’s also to she’s so disgusted with it because she’s in the presence of a monster of something inhuman. And he tries to connect with her and he has this conversation with her. It’s a monologue that he wants to be a conversation at one point like he’s talking or he says, I know this is awkward because strictly speaking, you’re not a person.

00:45:04:25 – 00:45:26:22
Dan McMillan
You’re not a person in the strict sense of the word. And then he says, Well, you’ve got a good point there. Imagining a guess that she said, Well, that’s how you treat me, you know. And then he says, But maybe the problem isn’t us, you and me. Maybe the problem is this meaning like the war or Nazism or my job that cuts no ice with her.

00:45:26:24 – 00:45:54:01
Dan McMillan
And it’s, you know, all she cared about were her survival. She would have, you know, play nice with him, you know, or even agreed to become his mistress. And instead she just she rejects and she refuses to acknowledge his humanity, just as he refuses to acknowledge he he’s tried to acknowledge hers because, in fact, she is a human being, you know, And he’s you see him balancing on.

00:45:54:02 – 00:46:15:11
Dan McMillan
He looks at her, he says you know, they call they call you rats and vehement, which is how he calls them and sees them. But are these the eyes of a rat? And then there’s a line I think it’s actually from The Merchant of Venice by Shakespeare hath not a Jew eyes, you know. But he can’t go that far.

00:46:15:13 – 00:46:44:05
Dan McMillan
And he moves in to kiss her. And then he says, I don’t think so, you Jewish bitch, You almost you, you almost talked me into it. She didn’t say a word. You almost got me into it. And then he just. He erupts in rage, but also in pain. I mean, he’s screaming like a wounded beast, and he hits her and he pulls down the the case of wine bottles on top of her.

00:46:44:07 – 00:47:12:19
Dan McMillan
I mean, the man’s a sadist. You know, He enjoys toying with people. He enjoys shooting people at random. But in this case, he’s like he’s like a wounded beast. And in a way, he’s I know you can say that it’s karmically good. I mean, he has gotten his reward for denying the humanity of other human beings. If you deny the humanity of others, you deny your own humanity.

00:47:12:19 – 00:47:37:27
Dan McMillan
That’s what he’s done. And and she knows it. And on some level, he knows. She knows. And the courage that she displays in the scene. I mean, a Jewish woman in that scene has so little agency is so powerless. They have the Germans have the ability, as Gert says in another scene, to kill arbitrarily. That’s why the terrorist we can kill the two when we kill whenever we feel like it.

00:47:38:00 – 00:47:54:17
Dan McMillan
Nonetheless, she does precisely that which is going to enrage the most, and that is superhuman courage. I just you know, every time I see that, I just have such admiration for that character. And that’s another reason why that scene is just so moving to me.

00:47:54:19 – 00:48:02:13
Dan LeFebvre
She doesn’t say anything, but she still manages to show us who it, who, who the real person is.

00:48:02:15 – 00:48:18:18
Dan McMillan
Exactly who is the human in this conversation, who has dignity. And I mean, she won’t even meet his eyes. What do you make Eye contact with him? Just stare his head in space. It’s is very impressive.

00:48:18:20 – 00:48:35:12
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned this briefly earlier with with the party. And there is a sequence. It’s sad for the party, but we see Schindler getting arrested and put in jail for violating what they call the Race and Resettlement Act. Yeah. And it has nothing to do with the Pearlman’s or any of the other Jews that that up to this point in the movie, Schindler has health.

00:48:35:12 – 00:48:57:23
Dan LeFebvre
But because at that party, Schindler kissed a Jewish girl and but then according to the movie, like she’s not in jail for long. Good is somebody who kind of helps and some other Nazis help speak on Schindler’s behalf to get him out of jail. Can you explain a little bit more what the Race and Resettlement Act was? And did Schindler get arrested for violating it like we see in the movie?

00:48:57:26 – 00:49:25:07
Dan McMillan
Well, it’s you know, it was one of a countless of laws that basically affirmed the belief set that Jews were were not human, were less something less, not only not human, but that really a kind of vermin in human form. You know, again, a virus that we want to stamp out. Well, first of all, I’m highly skeptical that Schindler would have been so stupid as to just to kiss that woman and surrounded by SS.

00:49:25:07 – 00:49:55:23
Dan McMillan
Then secondly, I doubt very much that he would have been in danger of criminal punishment or that he would have locked up. But it’s a way of just making a point. It’s just it’s a good short way of conveying the extent to which the the regime and particularly the members of the SS who prided themselves on their commitment to Nazi, racial, racial ideology, that they took this belief that they would that they would lock you up for kissing a Jewish girl in prayer.

00:49:55:23 – 00:50:26:06
Dan McMillan
And in this act there were SS men who had Jewish mistresses and they were not punished for it. I mean, I’ve read sources like I won’t swear to the veracity and the hierarchy, you know, because some accounts you get at what went on in death camps, there’s so few surviving witnesses, you you need to be careful. But I did read one reference to your host coming out ousted stabbing a Jewish woman that he kept locked up in a cell that he would visit periodically to take his pleasure.

00:50:26:09 – 00:50:52:08
Dan McMillan
I read another account of a guarded Treblinka who supposedly, quote unquote, fell in love with a Jewish girl in the camp and that they carried on a an affair. He wasn’t punished, but his colleagues, the other guards, sent him on leave for three days while he was gone. They shot her. I mean, it would have been plausible if they’d shown in the sun the girl that he just getting executed by him.

00:50:52:08 – 00:51:12:03
Dan McMillan
And Gerd was something that’s plausible. But the point is, this is another example of, you know, Yeah, okay, so maybe that particular event didn’t happen. I’m pretty sure that it did not. On the other hand, it’s a great way of briefly conveying one of the essential truths that we really need to know about the Holocaust.

00:51:12:06 – 00:51:34:23
Dan LeFebvre
Well, in the movies timeline, we’re up to April of 1944 now, and there’s a new horrific thing that the Nazis are doing. They’re forcing the Jews to exhume and burn the bodies of over 10,000 Jews who were killed at Plaszow and during the Krakow ghetto massacre that we saw happen earlier. And Good says something to Schindler like, as if I don’t have enough to do they come up with this?

00:51:34:25 – 00:51:39:19
Dan LeFebvre
Why would the Nazis go through the effort of doing something like that?

00:51:39:21 – 00:52:06:18
Dan McMillan
They were losing the war and they wanted to conceal the evidence of their crimes. For example, three of the death camps ls Sobibor and Treblinka were were blown up, dynamited, you know, bulldozed over, I think already by the end of 1943, they dynamited the got the gas chambers that now sits all but one of them. In 1944, as the Red Army was closing in.

00:52:06:20 – 00:52:29:04
Dan McMillan
So they did have they did have special details, says that went around exhuming the bodies of mass shooting the victims of mass shootings and, you know, people who were killed in death camps and burning them. And that that would have been the purpose. There are two things about that scene that I want to highlight that I think are really interesting.

00:52:29:04 – 00:53:00:17
Dan McMillan
One is how good refers him because he doesn’t refer to them as bodies. He calls them rags. And in fact, testimony. This is just eyewitness testimony from the cloud, a lot of spun. So Shoah, which is this documentary that is consists almost entirely of eyewitness testimony. When they did this in Latvia or Vilnius, where they they dug up the bodies of so many Jewish victims who’d been shot into mass graves.

00:53:00:19 – 00:53:36:07
Dan McMillan
The Germans specifically forbid the Jewish prisoners who are the surviving Jews business, who are digging up and helping burn the bodies from referring to them as bodies or corpses. They were directed to refer to them as rags, blocks of wood or shit. And this is just another way. And the other thing that was kind of interesting, there’s a brief moment and it’s not commented on, but it’s it’s they’ve got a conveyor belt that is just taking these these remains and dumping them on top of the giant heap where a fire is burning.

00:53:36:09 – 00:54:00:16
Dan McMillan
And this SS man stands in front of it and he’s just kind of screaming and howling, but not a distress. It’s kind of more in excitement and with abandon. And then he turns and points his pistol at the burning heap of corpses and fires a few shots at it with no purpose. And it’s kind of I mean, I’m stretching here.

00:54:00:16 – 00:54:29:01
Dan McMillan
I’m speculating there’s a wide range, you know, that you need to have between what you know with certainty and what you just want is just an educated guess. But one of the things that is not commented on nearly enough about the Holocaust, I think, is the the pleasure is a pleasure and transgression, large and small. There’s a pleasure that a child might take in shoplifting on a dare.

00:54:29:03 – 00:54:52:20
Dan McMillan
And there’s pleasure there was pleasure for the killers in the transgression involved in murder because it’s liberating and it it can make you feel it can give you this sort of it seems to have given some of them a kind of godlike feeling that I am subject to the moral constraints. I dispose of life and death. I am the arbiter.

00:54:52:20 – 00:55:18:18
Dan McMillan
I am the master of life and death. Sometimes they call themselves masters of death. Here is this scene. It’s like right out of the inferno. It’s from the pit of hell. And this SS man is sort of saying, Who knows, you know, how you could put into words in a number of ways, none of which are probably accurate, you know, I stand at the gates of hell or I am abandoned.

00:55:18:18 – 00:55:56:24
Dan McMillan
Hope you enter here. I am the master at this nightmarish scene. I am above and beyond all morality in all together. That was one of the features of the Nazi regime, and particularly in the SS, the people who saw themselves as the most devoted followers in adults. Hitler. There was a feeling that all moral constraints have been broken and we can do anything we want because Hitler was believed to be infallible.

00:55:56:27 – 00:56:25:29
Dan McMillan
Nothing that he did was subject to moral sanction. He was he stood outside history of East above and outside all history, all morality. He was a creature of superhuman or even supernatural faculties is who changed the course of history. He operated in a norm free space. So did we as doers, said he was bidding, and there was even a term for it.

00:56:26:02 – 00:56:52:14
Dan McMillan
US tower. That is the intoxication of the East. Because you’ve got east of the borders of Germany and all this German occupied territory where all the natives were thought to be genetically inferior to Germans who had literal value. You could kill anyone at will, and particularly if you’re involved with the murder of the Jewish people, you have transgressed the ultimate norm, which is murder.

00:56:52:16 – 00:57:15:25
Dan McMillan
And that was intoxicating. And the soldier in that scene is screaming, We’re obviously not distress with the form of glee or excitement with the body of, you know, sneaking, you know, burning corpses behind him. That candy that’s the and maybe that’s the act house, the intoxication of the east.

00:57:15:27 – 00:57:37:02
Dan LeFebvre
They have the feeling of being above morality and not even calling them bodies or corpses. But at the same time, the whole reason why they’re doing that is to cover up. What if they were covering it up? They had to have at least somewhere in Nazi leadership. They knew that they were doing something wrong, that the rest of the world was not going to like.

00:57:37:05 – 00:57:55:16
Dan McMillan
What they knew, that the rest of the world was not going to like it. I think they knew that any of them who got captured after the war might be tried for their crimes. So they were destroying evidence in the sense that any murderer destroys evidence that they know that that meant that they thought that what they did was wrong.

00:57:55:18 – 00:58:00:16
Dan McMillan
They just knew that other people were not going to share their view of what they were doing.

00:58:00:18 – 00:58:31:04
Dan LeFebvre
Right. Yeah, I guess. I guess I’m thinking also of the people who are carrying this out, Like they’re just they’re just doing their job, you know, the SS officers or whoever may be. And I’m kind of speculating here too, but the idea of on one hand, they’re doing the they’re murdering people and they’re not calling them actual people and bodies or corpses, but they’re also covering this up because, well, maybe then what we’re doing actually is wrong.

00:58:31:04 – 00:58:45:12
Dan LeFebvre
And, you know, there’s there had to be that kind of contrast almost there, especially specifically in this part here, because they are covering things up because they know other people don’t agree with their ideology, but they seem to be all in on that ideology anyway.

00:58:45:12 – 00:59:09:29
Dan McMillan
Yeah, well, it’s it’s an interesting question. You know, I mean, you obviously they have to be aware and I think they’re aware even even before they know the war as loss, that there is a dramatic contrast between how they see what they’re doing and how the rest of the world sees what they’re doing in a deed. Probably had their families back home in Germany would see what they’re doing.

00:59:10:00 – 00:59:32:01
Dan McMillan
You raise such an important question, and there’s so much that about their mental state that we can’t know. I guess one other thing that I would say that’s that’s so valuable in understanding human behavior, not only about this group and about, yeah, I see this in history, I see this in the human beings I’ve known over the course of my life and in myself.

00:59:32:01 – 00:59:56:28
Dan McMillan
This is the ability of people to sustain contradictions in their minds and to believe, believe multiple things that really don’t square logically, because we’re not perfectly logical. And people do things for a mixture of motives, and we all have potential in multiple potentialities and we have we all have potentiality to do bad. We have potentiality to do good.

00:59:57:00 – 01:00:45:15
Dan McMillan
Our free will with choices you make play a role, circumstances play a role. The behavior of the people around us do a lot to shape our behavior. I guess one of the things that’s so fascinating to me about the Holocaust, why I have felt so compelled to study it is that these such extreme situations, how much they reveal about the multiplicity of our potentials and how much they reveal about how malleable we are, you know, how our notions of morality, of what’s right and wrong, how quickly these notions can change and how drastically, depending on when the circumstances change compared to what the people around us are doing.

01:00:45:18 – 01:00:58:25
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned the family back home and that reminds me of something during that part of the movie where we see them, you know, exhuming and burning the bodies. We see what looks like snow falling in Krakow.

01:00:58:27 – 01:01:00:05
Dan McMillan
Yeah.

01:01:00:08 – 01:01:15:25
Dan LeFebvre
But then when Schindler picks it up, of course, the movie is in black and white. But we can see it’s not snow, it’s ash. And that’s when Schindler goes to find the source of the ash. We just talked about that. But the movie doesn’t really show any of the other people who are also seeing the same falling ash.

01:01:16:00 – 01:01:20:15
Dan LeFebvre
Did the citizens of Krakow realize what was going on outside of town?

01:01:20:18 – 01:01:24:18
Dan McMillan
Well, it really wasn’t even outside of town. Plaza was just a neighborhood of Krakow.

01:01:24:20 – 01:01:29:10
Dan LeFebvre
Oh, wow. Okay. I guess I thought it was a little bit a little bit of ways from from Krakow.

01:01:29:16 – 01:01:52:26
Dan McMillan
As I understand it, from one thing to Z. It’s one of the scenes where there, I guess after the selection of the camp, they’re putting the people who’ve lost a lot the selection lottery on the train. That’s for Schindler says, let’s take a firehose and, you know, water down the cars to give water to them. You can see right in the background the the sign of the station.

01:01:52:26 – 01:02:18:24
Dan McMillan
It says trash. It says Krakow Hyphen Plaza. You know, a plaza was a neighborhood of Krakow. And even if it were a little outside the town, yeah, there’s no way that the citizens of Krakow were not fully informed about what was going on. They also knew about clearing the ghettos. They knew that Germans murdered, Jews on site with no compunction in Poland generally.

01:02:18:24 – 01:02:27:06
Dan McMillan
I think there was a pretty good understanding among the Gentile population of what was being taught to the Jews.

01:02:27:09 – 01:02:42:16
Dan LeFebvre
Again, it’s hard for me to put myself in that position of knowing what it was like for people there. But looking back on it, yeah, I don’t know how anybody would not know what’s going on at all.

01:02:42:18 – 01:03:10:05
Dan McMillan
No, particularly also, the Polish population was treated so brutally by the Germans. Also not quite as bad. You mean there was no German plan to exterminate the Poles and the other hand, an estimated 1.8 to 1.9 million poles, that is Christian Poles, died during the German occupation. In addition to the 3 million or so Jewish Poles, Polish Jews who are murdered, a lot from allied murder, a lot from starvation.

01:03:10:05 – 01:03:39:03
Dan McMillan
When their food supply was cut, skated a ship back to Germany, having seen how brutally they were treated and knowing that the Jews were lower down the scale, I don’t think it would be at all difficult for them to to understand. There’s also a scene, if you recall, when the when the the women get diverted by mistake to Auschwitz at the end as they’re on their way into the Ashford, you see a Polish child looking at them and he draws a finger across the street.

01:03:39:03 – 01:03:57:12
Dan McMillan
He’s saying to them, You’re dead. You’re going to be killed. And that also has been a that that’s something that’s been documented also in some of the testimony in Shoah, if I remember correctly, there’s some Jewish prisoners who talk about seeing, you know, Poles by the side of the tracks.

01:03:57:15 – 01:04:18:05
Dan LeFebvre
You mentioned this earlier with the when we do see that the Jews leaving Plaszow to go to run, let’s believe by two trains, there’s one with men and another with women, and their paperwork gets mixed up accidentally, according to the movie, at least that you know, the women Strange sent to Auschwitz. And then we see that scene where they’re forced to take a shower.

01:04:18:05 – 01:04:37:29
Dan LeFebvre
It makes you think again, looking back on this, you know, with the knowledge that we have watching a movie now of what happened in the Holocaust, they’re being forced to take a shower. We think they’re all going to die. Thankfully, that seems to actually be a shower for them. And then Schindler catches the mistake in time and with another bribe, gets everything fixed.

01:04:38:02 – 01:04:40:09
Dan LeFebvre
How much of that actually happened.

01:04:40:11 – 01:05:04:00
Dan McMillan
That, you know, then I’m a little unsure as to whether that actually happened. But I think it was valuable that they did it just to give an impression of what the experience would have been like. Jews living in Poland brought to the camp. And, you know, earlier in the film, at least an hour earlier, there’s a scene where they’re in the barracks.

01:05:04:00 – 01:05:27:01
Dan McMillan
I can’t remember outside the actual barracks of the barracks at the Schindler factory, where one of them says she’s, Heard about the murder process. They take us in, they cut off their hair, then they take our clothes. They tell you you’re going to go into a shower and it looks like the shower room. And then they poison you know, they poison them with gas.

01:05:27:03 – 01:05:58:06
Dan McMillan
And a lot of that information, those stories by that point in time, because we’re talking late 1944, would have gotten around to what remained of the Jewish communities in Poland. That scene is so powerful because they’re seeing all these steps confirmed. And so they’re even more terrified than, say, a group of Jewish prisoners brought in from, say, Holland in 1942, had no information about the camps.

01:05:58:08 – 01:06:33:16
Dan McMillan
And so that’s very powerful. One thing that was kind of that didn’t show about the scene, when they get off the train, they didn’t go through a selection at a real selection on the camps. At the rail sighting. The Nazi doctor would have sent all the children and their mothers to the wrong side, to the gas chambers. I mean, according to the testimony of Hearst, the Auschwitz commandant, because Auschwitz had about 40 satellite slave labor camps, and the inmate resident of the inmates were constantly being worked to death and starved to death.

01:06:33:18 – 01:06:59:09
Dan McMillan
And they were being replenished with a fraction of each trainload that came in. And has said that out of each trainload, typically 25 to 30% were deemed fit to work and sent to replenish the supply at, say, labor camps, the rest going to the gas chambers. This particular train load doesn’t doesn’t go to a selection. But, you know, that’s who knows?

01:06:59:12 – 01:07:04:27
Dan McMillan
You know, that’s unfortunately that’s one point where I’m going to have to say I’m not entirely sure.

01:07:05:00 – 01:07:26:05
Dan LeFebvre
The movie focuses mostly on one camp, the camp. And then we get to see here. And so even though it does focused mostly on the partial camp, it is good to see that they’re showing some other concentration camps because it wasn’t just like we’ve been talking about throughout. You know, it’s not just things happening at this one camp.

01:07:26:05 – 01:07:40:28
Dan LeFebvre
It was a much larger thing overall. Do you think the things that we see happening in the Plaszow camp or here in this scene in Auschwitz, do you think it does a good job of capturing the essence of what happened across all the camps?

01:07:41:01 – 01:08:13:20
Dan McMillan
I think the film does a terrific job with the qualification that he doesn’t you know, Spielberg doesn’t overwhelm us with the daily horror, the squalor, the living conditions, the starvation, the disease that is so characteristic of all the slave labor camps. And that’s just a very intelligent decision, because, look, this is not a documentary. The goal, however, is to make it real.

01:08:13:23 – 01:08:24:21
Dan McMillan
And if you if you overwhelm and numb the audience with too much horror, then you cease to make it real. You fail in your objective. And I feel like he got the balance right.

01:08:24:23 – 01:08:46:07
Dan LeFebvre
The entire movie is filled with sad moments as as we’ve talked about. But there is one scene at the end of the movie that really it brings us all together. It makes me cry every time I see the movie, no matter how many times I’ve watched this. You know, it happens after the war in Europe and you’d think that finally there would be cause for some happiness because they’ve survived.

01:08:46:09 – 01:09:06:09
Dan LeFebvre
But Schindler realizes that as a member of, the Nazi Party, he’s a war profiteer. He needs to flee. And then before saying his goodbyes, Schindler starts questioning why he didn’t do more if sold his car to good, then he could have saved ten people with that money. He looks at the Nazi Party pin. It’s made of gold. That’s two people.

01:09:06:09 – 01:09:29:26
Dan LeFebvre
Or maybe one. But again, that’s just one more person. And he just breaks down, sobbing, almost like this is over. And now he starts to look back on the decisions and the money that he’s wasted over the past few years on things that could have saved more lives. Sharon there consults him and reminds him to look around. You know, there’s 1100 people here who are alive because of what he did do.

01:09:29:29 – 01:09:35:11
Dan LeFebvre
Do we know what Schindler’s mindset was like at the end of the war?

01:09:35:13 – 01:10:09:05
Dan McMillan
From what I? Remember of reading the Keneally’s novel? I don’t remember that particular scene, which does not, however, mean that it did not happen. I’m kind of pleading ignorance here. I’m kind of punting a bit on this question, but I think it’s also nonetheless valuable because it’s a way of reaffirming, it’s a way of reaffirming the value that we need to place, the absolute value we need to place on human life in the Holocaust.

01:10:09:08 – 01:10:54:15
Dan McMillan
You know, it’s the only historical event that frightens us, the only event that people feel a strong desire deny happened, and that tens of millions of people around the world do, at least to some degree, deny happened. And I think it’s because it was the most absolute categorical negation of the intrinsic value of human life. And this is another way to inform it, to say because he’s kind of saying, you know, if I had ordered a cheaper bottle of champagne and all these dinners I had with these, you know, Nazis or, you know, if my I spent less money on my mistress, I would have had more cash by the freedom of more people.

01:10:54:18 – 01:11:11:28
Dan McMillan
Is it a fair rebuke that Schindler can make to himself? I don’t think so. The guy was a hero, but it’s in a way, it’s a good rebuke to all of us to remind us that the value that we place in human life is something that we can never take for granted, that it’s fragile.

01:11:12:00 – 01:11:30:11
Dan LeFebvre
That’s a great point. I mean, it’s a a reflection at the end. You know, he’s reflecting on everything and the decisions that he made almost it’s not his his deathbed, but you think of you know the on your deathbed, you think of, you know, the life flashing before your eyes and what sort of you know, what decision did that make?

01:11:30:11 – 01:11:39:05
Dan LeFebvre
You know, what could I have done better and that sort of thing. That’s when I was this scene. That’s kind of the impression that I got, you know, for him, you know, at the end.

01:11:39:08 – 01:11:59:07
Dan McMillan
I never thought of it that way. But in a way, you know, it’s, you know, at the end of our lives, particularly if we don’t have a firm religious faith, and I personally don’t have that. I’ve often wished that I did. But you kind of have to ask yourself, you want to feel that the world was a better place because you were in it.

01:11:59:10 – 01:12:05:03
Dan McMillan
And so that’s the kind of question that a man like Schindler would ask himself at the end of his life. And it’s a good one. Yeah.

01:12:05:10 – 01:12:28:19
Dan LeFebvre
Yeah. Well, thank you so much for coming on to chat about list every time I watch this film, we’ve talked about this, but it reminds me that the events leading up to the Holocaust were gradual. The Nazis didn’t start just immediately murdering people in gas chambers. They identified the Jews, you know, enacted different laws for them, segregated and forced them to resettle away from others and so on.

01:12:28:26 – 01:12:50:23
Dan LeFebvre
There’s a lot more complexity, of course, but something that I think is unique about the Holocaust is it’s both. It’s simultaneously difficult to wrap your head around the reasons why it happened, while also being able to assume that an atrocity on that scale could never happen again. So I thoroughly enjoyed your book called How Could This Happen? Explaining the Holocaust.

01:12:50:28 – 01:13:10:13
Dan LeFebvre
It does a great job explaining and unraveling some of the historical complexities to get a better understanding of how it happened also gives examples of how it’s not the only large scale genocide that has happened. I will, of course, include a link to your book in the show notes for this episode so anyone listening can get their own copy.

01:13:10:13 – 01:13:20:21
Dan LeFebvre
But before I let you go, I saved perhaps the biggest question for last How can we learn from history to, avoid this sort of atrocity from happening again?

01:13:20:23 – 01:14:00:29
Dan McMillan
Well, I would I would argue that to a very large degree, we have learned we’ve learned a lot. And in the most fortunate countries on earth that is ours, that that is what we would call the world’s first the first world countries, you know, the world’s wealthiest societies. That is our country. And, oh, about three dozen other countries that are basically our friends and allies, that is to say the other the world’s other prosperous democracies, because we’ve learned that it’s the value of the democratic form of government, because, you know, democracies don’t perpetrate genocide.

01:14:00:29 – 01:14:25:29
Dan McMillan
Dictatorships perpetrate genocide. We’ve learned that racism is bad. We’ve learned that human life there is only one race but a human race. And we’ve enacted that into law, for example, in our own country. It took a little it took later than it longer than it should have. But the civil rights laws of 64 and 65, we’ve also come to evaluate the human life far more highly.

01:14:26:02 – 01:14:51:26
Dan McMillan
Yes, there is still war. I mean, there’s war of aggression in the heart of Europe, Russia invading Ukraine again, Russia’s dictatorship. That’s not something that the countries of NAITO would never have launched an invasion of Russia or of Ukraine or any other any nonaligned country out of a greed for territory. We know that’s wrong. And major warfare is an almost indispensable precondition for genocide.

01:14:51:28 – 01:15:21:09
Dan McMillan
We in the world, you know, Western societies have by and large avoided major warfare. I feel that the human community has, in fact, all told, made tremendous moral progress since 1945. That said, on the other hand, in the decades to come, I see the possibility for famine, war and genocide on the scale that it could make the Second World War look like a garden party.

01:15:21:09 – 01:15:42:05
Dan McMillan
Not because we haven’t learned lessons, but because, you know, you have so much of what we think of as the third world population growth is outrun. The carrying capacity of the land is supply. It’s too hard and water is already inadequate. You have more and more extreme weather events, drought and hurricane and flooding and so on that are in a negatively impact.

01:15:42:05 – 01:16:25:24
Dan McMillan
The supplies of the food and water have corrupt and unstable governments, dictatorships rather than democracies. We’re going to see war as full and civil war is fought over resources. So the potential is absolutely horrifying and there will be plenty of genocide. But on the other hand, I think in a country like ours, for all the ugliness we see in our politics, I don’t I don’t see I don’t see how an advanced society like art, like us, like Germany, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Holland, Japan South Korea, any of the world’s countries, democracies, they’re aligned with us.

01:16:25:24 – 01:17:07:02
Dan McMillan
I don’t see that any of us is remotely capable of propagating genocide, whereas Germany was in so many respects the most advanced of human societies. So I think we’ve actually learned how to not do this again. The problem, however, is to what extent can we help the rest of the world also not do it? And unfortunately, because the politics, political systems of all those countries are so badly dysfunctional and kind of beyond our power to fix our ability to help is going to be limited And there’s a lot, I think, about it as little as possible because that it’s hard to sleep at night.

01:17:07:05 – 01:17:30:21
Dan McMillan
I guess the final thing I’d say is, you know, progress in human affairs is a case of, you know, often two steps forward, one step back. Holocaust was 20 steps back. But over time. Now, you know, one thing about human beings is if you look at our history, the desire for progress is inherent in our nature. Is it’s essential to all.

01:17:30:21 – 01:17:55:12
Dan McMillan
The idea of moral progress is essential to all the world’s religious traditions. I look particularly just our country in the last two and a half centuries, for all the ugliness and unfairness and injustice in our society compared to two and a half centuries ago when our our founding owned slaves and thought it was okay, I see mass in progress.

01:17:55:15 – 01:18:22:07
Dan McMillan
And so for me, as an historian who’s seen the long view human history for the long term, I see a very bright future for humanity and in a way, studying the Holocaust, coming to terms with it has kind of cemented that optimism because the Holocaust was the strongest argument anyone ever showed me to be optimistic about human nature and the human future.

01:18:22:09 – 01:18:50:23
Dan McMillan
And what I thought I learned from the book, I think the biggest takeaway that I want people to take is that for this to in such an advanced society, it wasn’t enough for one thing to go wrong or two or three. It took about a dozen things that had to come together. It was almost impossible. Perfect storm. And therefore, having sort of come to terms with one in some ways was the worst thing we’ve done.

01:18:50:25 – 01:19:15:12
Dan McMillan
My faith in human goodness and in our capacity for moral progress is now at a rock solid and unassailable. I don’t want to be guilty of giving a feel good interview about the Holocaust. But on the other hand, you know, there’s so much pessimism in the world today. In our country, it’s so fashionable. And, you know, I think pessimism is intellectually bankrupt.

01:19:15:18 – 01:19:27:14
Dan McMillan
It also doesn’t bring out best in us and it does also pessimism does not make future genocide less likely. It makes it more likely because it encourages to give up, not have faith in ourselves.

01:19:27:18 – 01:19:42:27
Dan LeFebvre
It’s good to be optimistic. But, you know, kind of the takeaway there is we can’t let our guard down. I mean, because we’re, you know, always it took a perfect but you know, not give not being pessimistic, not giving up.

01:19:42:29 – 01:19:46:24
Dan McMillan
Thank you. It’s great minds think alike, Danny.

01:19:46:26 – 01:19:49:04
Dan LeFebvre
Thank you again so much for your time. Dan.

01:19:49:06 – 01:19:59:01
Dan McMillan
Thank you so much for having me.