Stars of David by Abigail Pogrebin Page A

there are unspeakable acts of horror and bloodletting—all based on the facts. But this was obviously a film— especially to Universal Studios—that was not going to make its money back. And I have to give credit to Sid Sheinberg, who had the courage first to buy the book, but more importantly to give it to
me
—a person who had just made a movie about a friendship between an alien and a human. For Sid to even have thought that someday in the future I could have been the right filmmaker for this—that’s the most courageous thing Sid ever did— giving it to me and not Sydney Pollack or somebody else who had already proved themselves worthy of telling a story like that. But he gave it to me; I’ll never forget him for that. Also for allowing me to make this picture in black and white, R-rated, over three hours long, with no punches pulled, and saying, ‘I don’t care if it does cost twenty million dollars’—which is how much the film cost to make—‘if we lose every penny, it will have been worth it just to have released that picture.’ That’s what Sid said to me and that’s why he’s my hero.”
    I ask Spielberg how it felt to be the one to resurrect scenes of unspeakable horror—for instance, the scene where hordes of women are corralled into the “showers.” “I felt shame,” Spielberg recounts. “I felt shame for being a witness with my clothes on, in relative safety—standing in the shadow of the camera—while a hundred women disrobed, actually had their heads shaved, and were forced into these shower rooms. These actors portrayed women who didn’t know whether there would be Zyklon-B gas or cold water coming from the taps. At Auschwitz, when the women were first taken off the transports, they didn’t know whether it was going to be gas or water, because by then the rumors were all over that these were death camps.
    â€œAnd it was also the feeling that I wanted to save everybody. I wanted to run in there and say, ‘You don’t have to take your clothes off, you don’t have to go into the shower, this doesn’t have to happen; the Holocaust
never should have happened.
’ And then finally stopping those words from reaching my lips and realizing that we were here because the Holocaust
did
happen, and maybe we can do something about it never happening again, if I can be so pretentiously bold in making that statement. Because I really felt that if this film changed ten minds, it would have been worth the effort. If it could turn ten deniers into people who accept the statistics of the six million, it would have been worth the effort. If the film lost all its money—all twenty million dollars and all its marketing costs and everything else—but one teacher decided to show the film to his or her class, it would have been worth the effort. And that emboldened me to tell the story as powerfully as I knew how in 1993.”
    The film not only garnered Spielberg the kind of respect he’d had yet to earn from critics and from the Hollywood community (the film won the Academy Award for best director and best picture), but it was an unambiguous commercial success, grossing $100 million at the domestic box office and more than $320 million worldwide. “It was a complete affirmation of the fact that people
were
paying attention,” he says. “They weren’t going to forget about the Holocaust. And it also opened the door to the Shoah Foundation, which is now the reason I realize I made the picture. I didn’t know why I made
Schindler’s List
, but only in retrospect can I say I made it so the Shoah Foundation would exist.”
    The Shoah Foundation—Shoah means catastrophe in Hebrew and has become a synonym for genocide—was created by Spielberg to preserve the stories of Holocaust survivors from all over the world and to catalog them for use in schools and