Steven Spielberg, just past his 46th birthday, is the most successful filmmaker in the history of motion pictures.
Four of the films he directed are among the all-time top 10 hits: His "Jurassic Park" is the highest-grossing film ever, with his "E.T." in second place.
Spielberg’s latest movie, "Schindler’s List," represents a radical change and a calculated risk.
Based on the book by Thomas Keneally, the film tells the story of Oskar Schindler, a veteran Nazi party member who came to Krakow shortly after the German conquest of Poland in 1939 to make his fortune as a freewheeling entrepreneur.
Schindler employed 1,100 Jews in his enamelware factory and, at some point, the hard-drinking, womanizing, black market-dealing German Catholic decided to use his fortune and risk his neck to save every one of his "Schindlerjuden" from certain death in the nearby Auschwitz extermination camp.
His motives remain a mystery.
"I was always trying to discover through the survivors who knew him, who saw him, who were saved by him, why he did this," Spielberg said in an interview. "And most of the survivors said, ‘We don’t know why he did this. We only know that he did.’"
Filmed in black and white, the movie has the feel of a documentary and includes some of the most graphic Holocaust scenes ever shown in a Hollywood picture.
The director first thought about making "Schindler’s List" in 1982, but he did not make the movie until 1993, when it overlapped with the production of "Jurassic Park" by three months.
"I could have been much easier and kinder to myself and my family by simply waiting until January ’94 to start ‘Schindler’s List,’ but I had just seen too many things on television that horrified myself and my wife," Spielberg said.
‘A QUIET MESSAGE WAS PASSED ON TO ME’
"What was happening in Bosnia — it was so familiar and it was so much a part of what I thought could never possibly happen again," he said. "And I just felt that sooner rather than later, a movie like this should come out and at least stir the pot."
When Spielberg was 3 and living in Cincinnati, he learned to read numbers from an Auschwitz survivor by using the concentration camp numbers on the man’s forearm. The survivor enlivened the lesson with a flip of his arm and magically changed a 9 into a 6.
"I had a familiarity as a secondhand witness to the Holocaust from my family, who kept the memories of those years alive. It was something I grew up with," Spielberg said.
The director also experienced anti-Semitism as a teen-ager in an affluent part of northern California.
"I was physically abused. I was beaten up," he said. "At one point it became so bad that I had to stop going to physical education because most of the abuse happened then. And that’s when I was struck many times and knocked down.
"I mean I am not feeling sorry for myself when I say this, it was just an experience I wasn’t prepared for," he said.
When Spielberg proposed making this film, a studio executive suggested that the director make a donation to a Holocaust museum and save the distributor grief.
"I felt that was a message," he said. "That was sort of a very, very quiet message to be passed on to me, which kind of capped my resolve to make the movie immediately."
The birth of Spielberg’s son in 1985 led him to re-examine Judaism and to a road that also led to "Schindler’s List."
"When I began to read books to him, I had to make a choice," he said. "Do I read books about Santa Claus or do I read books about Moses and Abraham and Isaac?
"I made a very strong choice to raise him Jewish with my first wife, Amy Irving, who was half-Jewish," he said.
Spielberg’s second wife, Kate Capshaw, converted to Judaism.
"Her conversion was a beautiful experience for all of us because I studied along with her," the director said. "She studied and I was the beneficiary of everything that she was learning that I had forgotten.
"I re-emerged (to Judaism), I would say, through the birth of my children and through a decision I had to make about how I was going to raise them.
HOLLYWOOD DIDN’T MAKE FILMS ABOUT JEWS
"I think that’s what led me, that and events around the world, very naturally and I think in a very smooth way, to the decision to make ‘Schindler’s List,’" he said.
When Spielberg began to look for movies to inspire him as he prepared to tell Oskar Schindler’s story, he could not find any.
"It occurred to me that the predominant number of studio heads in the golden era of Hollywood were all Jews," Spielberg said.
"But they did not produce movies of the Jewish race, religion or culture or tradition. I also understood that they did struggle between the Jewish culture and race and the American culture and race, and they chose being American with fierce determination. And all I can say is that it’s reflected in their choices of movies they didn’t make," he said.
To prepare himself for "Schindler’s List," the director turned to documentaries that chronicled the Holocaust.
"Documentaries were my only source of inspiration, because Hollywood flees from subjects like this," he said. "They always have and they still do."
Spielberg’s $23 million film will premiere Dec. 15 in 12 American and Canadian cities.
"I hope that people will say, ‘Yes, I’ve heard of the Holocaust but I never knew anything about the Holocaust and now, maybe, I know more than I wanted to, but I feel I need to tell my children,’" he said.
Spielberg also hopes people will feel compelled "to be active in remembering — not just on Jewish holidays and not just on the anniversaries of the Shoah," but constantly, he said.
"I am not saying that to devote your life to the Holocaust is a definition of being Jewish," he said. "I don’t believe that.
"I think every human being owes a moral debt to the past, so that events that are happening as we sit right now, in Bosnia and with the Kurds, and just the heinousness of what could take place in the future, is at least given some serious time and attention."
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
