Juxtaposition In Schindler's List

When asked why he choose to direct Schindler’s List in black and white, acclaimed director Steven Spielberg stated, “The Holocaust was life without light. For me the symbol of life is color. That's why a film about the Holocaust has to be in black-and-white." The Holocaust was truly one of the most horrific events to take place throughout the course of human history. Yet two very different stories depict how this mass genocide took place. Peter Gay’s memoir My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin tells a story of how his Jewish family survived and ultimately escaped Nazi control prior to the commencement of the Holocaust. In juxtaposition, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, portrays a story of hundreds of Jews being round up and placed

While he was a school boy, Gay experienced little to no ridicule at the Goethe Gymnasium. Many Jewish Germans were successful small, or even large, business owners prior to the holocaust. However: On April 1, 1933, the Nazis carried out the first nationwide, planned action against Jews: a boycott targeting Jewish businesses and professionals. The boycott was both a reprisal and an act of revenge against Gruelpropaganda (atrocity stories) that German and foreign Jews, assisted by foreign journalists, were allegedly circulating in the international press to damage Nazi Germany's reputation: This destroyed countless Jewish German’s economic security and places of business. However, Gay’s father’s business prospered throughout this time period. A number of factors are attributed to the Gay’s ability to successfully avoid the callousness and inhumaneness that were derived by the Nazi’s throughout the Holocaust. For starters, the Gays did not look fully Jewish as per “Arian” standards. He claims, “I had blue eyes and a straight nose, brown hair and regular features- in short, like my parents, I did not look Jewish.”(Gay 57) Gay’s father, Mortiz Frohlich, like thousands of other Jewish men, fought valiantly for his country throughout World War One. Over one hundred thousand German Jews enlisted to fight for their nation in the First World War, which was 1/6 of the entire German Jewish population. Even after Hitler was elected Chancellor and began implementing anti-Semitic redirect, veterans that where Jews, or their families, never would have imagined what they would be subjected, nor to what the holocaust would bring. Gay described his father’s nationalism for Germany as, “My father, like most Germans, had greeted the coming war in early 1914 with patriotic