Our first time watching SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993) blind movie reaction! 

It's still unbelievable that Ralph Fiennes didn't win an Oscar for his portrayal of Amon Goeth. He was nominated but didn't win.

Removing any sugar coating? Uhhhh.......not quite. The people, places & events portrayed here were MUCH worse. It was intentionally toned down in order to make it actually watchable. Amon Goeth, for example, was even more monstrous than portrayed here.

The teeth weren’t taken after they died. They teeth were ripped from the live PEOPLE boarding those trains!!

Yes, a Pole is from Poland.

Guys, c'mon, in the beginning of the movie they told you the movie takes place in Nazi occupied Poland. Yes the Nazis were German, but they invaded Poland.

They actually had to tone down Amon Goeth character as he was truly much more monstrous than dipicted in this. He even disgusted other nazis . Ralph Fiennes who played Goeth played him so well it caused panic attacks in some of the Schindler Jews on set so Ralph Fiennes took time to comfort them in between takes. His performance and mannerisms are so much like him when you watch footage of Goeth and Fiennes iike a mirror image of him its very freaky how well he played him. I dont know if anyone told you that this movie was made by speilberg as his final exan to graduate from film school after a 30 year hiatus ( as off making blockbuster movies) . His professor gave him an A minus for this masterpiece..

Don’t forget: this IS real History and Goeth was actually so much worse that you couldn’t play it like that. Spielberg said: no one would have believed that and thought he would dramatize it for the film

He beat her due to his attraction to her. He hated himself for his attraction and took it out on her.

I really wanted to watch this reaction but you guys need to pick up some history books…

I’m gonna suffer through this whole thing, because I can’t believe how ignorant these two are.

Ugh. Honestly, the ignorance on the part of the woman made me cringe and throw things. But I guess that is actually who needs to be reached.

When Schindler was arguing about his factory being a "haven" it wasn't about reputation. To harbor a Jew was punished by death and often your family's lives as well.

If there are no tears in your eyes at the Schindler leaving scene then you are not a human being... This scene breaks everyone...

55:58 Stern's body language in just this one scene: the startle from the gunshot, his arms going limp as he saw the senseless killing offscreen, and then solemnly moving forward and keeping his eyes ahead as the body comes into frame. That's how you tell a story with no words

Seriously, what is she writing down throughout the movie? Notes? She’s missing so much of the details of the movie by not watching the screen!

A MOVIE THAT SHOULD NOT EVER BE FORGOTTON, IN THIS LIFETIME, OR ANY FUTURE LIFETIME!

The word Ghetto was used long before a term for impoverished parts of a city in the U.S.

I had a very intimate relationship with my grandma. Then when I was about 12 years old, in Germany, I started to be educated on it. And at some point you start asking questions. (How can a person you love so much, is so dear to you was ok with something like that? Mental dissonance) So I asked my grandmother: How could this happen? How could you/ we the people let this happen? And she answered: it didn't happen overnight. It took years. We were busy with our lives. We heard rumours. Neighbors disappeared. Maybe it was also the way, we were brought up. You din't contradict superiors. Maybe I just didn't have the strength/courage. Because, when you live in a dictatorial country you subconsciously know, what will happen to you as well, when you step out of line. They tell you. They show it to you by arresting a neighbor. This will also happen to you. Which at some point perked the question to me: "What would you have done?" I used to be quite quick to answer it, but as I get older, with having kids, responsibilities, still learning about those 12 years of horror, I'm honest to say, I don’t know. I try not to judge too fast or do it careful. Watching this movie, I always feel deeply ashamed. I mean how can you not be ashamed? History here is being taught quite differently. The focus on historical events (more than 2000 years) has a more down to earth/ realistic sense. Heroic pictures are not part of it.

You guys should watch The Pianist (2002) directed by Roman Polanski. He was a Jewish boy when the Nazis invaded Poland, so he had first-hand experience of what it was like to live through this horror. So he incorporated what he did to survive into the film. It won several awards including a couple Oscars.

It's not actually a documentary; it's a fictionalized account of real events based on the stories of real people. It's set in Poland, not Germany. Thomas Keneally wrote the book, which was called "Schindler's Ark," based on stories heard from survivors, but he wrote it as a novel. The screenplay is closer to reality, but Spielberg actually had to tone down the atrocities of Amon Goeth and the Nazis, because he was afraid the movie would become completely unwatchable. Some of the real survivors worked as consultants on set; when the real Mila Pfefferberg saw Ralph Fiennes dressed as Goeth, she started shaking violently. Spielberg took no salary and no cut from the profits from this movie. Not an excuse, but a partial explanation for some of what the Nazis did, and why the German people put up with it - nearly 80% of the German population and 100% of the German military were addicted to crystal meth - it was put in soldiers' mess kits. Hitler himself was so addicted to drugs (several different ones) that he couldn't get out of bed in the morning unless and until his personal physician shot cocaine directly into his veins. They weren't all psychopaths or sociopaths, but they WERE all drug-addled and judgment impaired, as well as poisoned/brain-washed by ideology/propaganda. Euros didn't exist in 1943. A thaler was a Polish coin. Germany used Reichsmarks. When Schindler was talking with the black market guys in the church, he wasn't looking for product to barter. He was legitimately trying to buy a quality shirt. He wanted to look affluent, and while he had some cash, he didn't actually have a lot of money, which is why he needed the Jewish investors' money. They say, "Fair would be a percentage in the company," but they literally could not own companies. Their cash was worthless in their hands, because they could not legally use it. They might as well give it to Schindler, who could. Then he gave them the product made by the company he used their money to buy to pay them back, and they can use the products as something to barter with for things they actually need (at least for awhile; once the work camp was opened, they couldn't any more). When the Jews were entering the ghetto, they weren't walking without a destination - they had assigned living spaces that they had to move to, after being pushed out of their homes. Auschwitz was operating by that point in time, if you didn't get a Blauschien, you were sent to the death camp. Their definition of an "essential worker" is literally the opposite of the way the term was used in the US during the COVID pandemic. There, it was used to denote people who could work and therefore were not sent off to be killed. Here, it was used to denote people who were working in jobs that were so essential that they had to risk their health to keep the country going. Please do not confuse the two! The ghetto was an intermediary stop-gap while they built the Krakow work camp, the Krakow work camp was a stop-gap to get work out of the Jews until room could be made to move them to Auschwitz; even at Auschwitz, people worked until they couldn't - often literally until they dropped. Schindler tells Stern that he's a German, but he's actually from Czechoslovakia; the excuse Hitler gave for invading Czechoslovakia was that many "ethnic Germans" (like Schindler) lived there, but there's no such thing as an "ethnic German" = German isn't an ethnicity, just a nationality. Similarly, Jewish isn't a racial characteristic; Judaism is a religion. Cognac is pronounced "cone-yack". Goeth is pronounced "Gert." At the start, Schindler was just focused on being successful. Stern was the one trying to save people. Only later did Schindler come around to the view that what the Nazis were doing was wrong, regardless of whether or not it impacted him and his business. He is *very* self-entitled, as demonstrated in his conversation with his wife when she came to visit him. He fully intended to be a war profiteer. When the woman comes and asks Schindler to save her parents, he confronts Stern about the danger, but by then he already knows it's a horrible situation. She might be pretending to be German, or Polish, or just not Jewish, it's not clear. The train that Stern was in, you said they were being treated like animals, but it's actually worse. People were so packed into the cars they couldn't sit; if their legs gave out, they couldn't fall. The cars are literally called "cattle cars" but if the railroad was actually moving cattle, they'd only put 6 animals per car at most. The little girl in the red coat is in red because Schindler is focused on her and so are we - her coat turns grey after she hides because he can no longer see her, so it's back to black and white. Her jacket is red again at the end so you know that he sees her in the cart and recognizes her. I think you really overthought that one! LOL Goeth didn't so much realize that Schindler was manipulating him, as that he couldn't pardon himself. Unable to pardon himself, he decided not to pardon anyone else, either. He was very conflicted about Helen, yes. He wanted to, but couldn't, love her. He was a true psychopath. In the real Auschwitz, the women's hair would have been completely shaved to a bald scalp. In addition to being terrified of disease-carrying lice being able to infest the camp and get on the guards by association, the Nazis used the hair to make yarn for socks for their navy. They also would have been tattooed with their number on their forearm, it wouldn't have just been on their star pinned to their clothes. One thing they didn't show was that in Auschwitz by the time the Schindler women were sent there they were so far behind on burning corpses that the camp guards were stacking them around buildings as insulation against the cold. The camp started out with one crematorium oven for burning bodies to ash, but they added several gas chambers, and people were dying from illness and starvation as well, so they had to add six more ovens, but those were blown up in the last few months of the war, and may have already been blown up before the women arrived at the camp in reality. At any rate, right up until the end of the war, there were bodies almost everywhere, and there would have certainly been corpses stacked up around the buildings the women saw/were in. Corpses were also skinned and the fat was rendered into soap. The skin was used to make lamp shades; for a while during the war, it was considered extremely fashionable in Berlin to have a lamp with such a shade, better if you got one that had the tattooed number from the forearm. The rest is what got burned. You can see an historic picture of stacked bodies behind the oven in the Birkenau camp here: collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1070095 - it was the same in Auschwitz. Schindler and his wife were Catholic. That was a Catholic church that he found her in, not a synagogue. He didn't build a synagogue for the Jewish workers, he just allowed the rabbi to use his office on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings for services. Schindler saved more Jews from the death camps than literally anyone else. The movie says he saved 1100 people, but it was actually just over 1200. The number of descendants of the Schindler Jews now is somewhere above 8,500. (Sir Nicholas Winston is next, with 669 Jewish children that he was able to save by getting them out of Germany and German-occupied countries.) The movie notes that there were fewer than 4,000 Jewish people in Poland at the time of filming; it has now increased to somewhere between 10,000-20,000. Many people in Poland were raised as Christians because their grandparents or parents survived the war by passing as Christians or getting married to Christians (converting on their own wasn't enough) and didn't know or didn't account for themselves as Jewish or being descended from Jewish families, until the last few years. As more people find out, the Jewish community in Poland is welcoming them into their lives. Don't be ashamed of the tears. If you don't tear up at some point watching this movie, you're not human. You talked about the Japanese survivors of the nuclear bombs, but didn't mention the American citizens of Japanese descent who were put into internment camps here in the US during WWII. We were fighting against Germany and Italy at the same time, but didn't put German-Americans or Italian-Americans in camps. It was a clearly racist move.

Mrs. Schindler wasn't Jewish. She wanted to be addressed by her name as apposed to "Miss" as not to be mistaken for a mistress instead of his wife.

That wasn’t a door chain. It was a mezuzah. It holds a prayer inside.

The term “ghetto” was first used in the 1500’s to designate the areas within Venice, Italy where Jewish families had to live. The word may be from various sources-Hebrew, Yiddish, Latin, Italian, or French.

Probably the only movie ive cried through multiple times. The ring scene at the end always gets me

I’ve seen dozens of Schindler’s List reactions and this girl absolutely obliterated the record for “longest time until first cry.” I don’t know whether to be impressed or concerned.

"The Boy In The Striped Pajamas" is another powerful film about the Holocaust.

I feel like a teeny bit of historical knowledge is important here. It's a tad disturbing how little you know.

Incredibly important film that needs to be seen by all, especialy the generations to come, now more importantly, thank- you guys for sharing this film, it needs to be not forgotten.

Good thing you mentioned that you reacted to this on your LotR reaction. Splendid reaction. You guys are picking up on a massive amount of details, in both LotR and this one. I'm german and this topic has always interested me greatly. I'm quite knowledgeable when it comes to this stuff and you can NOT imagine the hatred I bear for these people, those back then and the ones we have nowadays with a similar mindset. While I don't watch a lot of stuff, I will be here for the few movies that I watch over and over and over again. If humanity hasn't fully failed yet you will go far in life and here on RU-vid. Thanks for sharing this with us!

LIFE is the happy ending to this movie. These people SURVIVED.

Actually, what the person was, removing from the side of the door was a mazuzah , a little container that holds a rolled up, scroll with a verse from the Torah

The "euro" as a currency was launched in 1999. Germany's currency from 1924-1948 was the Reichsmark.

The ignorance of these two is why its important that this is seen.

"The girl was portrayed by Oliwia Dąbrowska, three years old at the time of filming. Spielberg asked Dąbrowska not to watch the film until she was eighteen, but she watched it when she was eleven, and says she was "horrified".[60] Upon seeing the film again as an adult, she was proud of the role she played." - got this from the wiki. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler%27s_List

Schindler was a businessman a bombastic personality. German Jews lived in Germany lived and worked and had businesses with racism mixed in. Then the storm of horror took over. Schindler began to be affected by what he was seeing and he wanted to do something about it.

מי שהציל נפש אחת כאילו הציל עולם ומלואו The man who saved a single soul as if he saved the world entire

"Liquidation of the ghetto meaning they're going to liquidate it"

is this one of my new favorite reacting channels.. I believe so, we appreciate the professionalism and long talks after. love

At this time the currency was (1924 to 1948) Reichmarks after 1948 it became DeutscheMark then in 2002 it became the Euro

That's a hero for you. No matter how much they do, they never feel that they've done enough.

Him letting them celebrate the shabbath was not giving them back their faith (dont think they ever lost it even during those gruesome times) it was humanizing them again as they were not treated even as human beings.

You definitely tried to look beyond the lines & dialogue, but you took it too far & over-complicated it that you missed the point & real meaning of why certain things were being said & done.

if u want to cry again like this, watch "the pianist" its from the same time

I was born in Kraków. Schindler's factory still stands and is now a museum.

His HIGH HORSE ? Schindler?

I remember seeing this in the theatre when it was released. Deeply impactful. I then read the book, which I highly recommend.

All the way from Israel, I send my gratitude to you both for taking the time to watch and learn a little more about our history. 🇮🇱❤️✌️ Danka was my pediatrician as a child , I am 39 years old, after Schindler died. she changed her last name to Schindler. To me she will always be Dr. Schindler.

the real Goeth was even more psycho than shown in the movie. it's worth looking him up. in 1944 for example, he was thrown out by the nazis because he was going to far even by their standards

Thank you for taking the time to watch this amazing yet tradgic telling of real events. I watch this movie twice a year and my children watch it to continue to remind me. I hope you watch it again and maybe say a prayer. Thank you and god bless stay safe J.

Amazing how much you missed and or got wrong You also had some good observations

You asked about the dance in the nightclub scene where first we meet Schindler. The dance is the tango. The musical piece is called Por una cabeza. Interestingly, it's the same piece used in the famous Al Pacino tango scene in "Scent of a Woman" -- a movie which happened to come out the same year as "Schindler's List"

The Grandaughter of Amon Göth is black. Her name is Jennifer teege and she wrote the book 'Amon, my grandfather would have shoot me'

When I lived in New York, our neighbors were survivors. They would speak to my wife and I about the horrors they experienced. They did say that this movie came close to the reality. It is extremely difficult to watch. But it is incumbent upon us to say never again and to always remember. We are tasked with preventing another holocaust. Julie/Jessica

Took you guys so long to realise schindler was a good man and what he was trying to do

Germany didn’t begin using the Euro until 2002. During the 1940’s, the basic amount was the Reichsmark and after the war was named the Deutsche Mark. A taler was a name for an ancient Germanic silver coin.

Gabriela, you are right on point with this movie! You pick up on everything.

Try to imagine walking out of the movie theatre back in 93, everyone slowly walking back to their cars, nobody talking, you knew it hit.

This movie is so powerful , it truly is. But your commentary and raw emotional really got me. Maybe i mentioned before, but this channel deserve so many more subs.

At this stage - I’m not sure there’s any way of making the missus smart enough to take these movies in (in terms of context, history, life, etc) ☹️

im a german, but i hope you dont think we are like this anymore, bc a lot of u guys think this

I appreciate your reactions. There is an older film which was released in 1961. It is also in black and white and it is a fictionalized story based on the book by Abby Mann called "Judgment at Nuremberg". If you can ever locate it, it is worth a watch. It is primarily a court drama about the Nuremberg trials involving Nazi judges during the Third Reich. The big question of the movie was who was responsible for the Holocaust. There is also a back story in the film about an American judge from Maine who is tasked to be the lead judge during the trial who tries to understand how an intelligent cultured people like the Germans could be seduced into such a dark place to allow such things to happen. Great acting all around and great monologues as well. It does show some real and difficult scenes from the camps in one part of the film although you tend to see the aftermath of the violence rather than the immediate acts as in "Schindler's List". For many Americans, it was the first time a large number actually saw footage of what really happened in the camps and the fact that the film was released in 1961, only 12 years after the Nuremberg trials, means it was still fresh in many minds.

Reaction has even started yet but I've subbed just cos you two seem real cool and down to earth

Believe it or not Liam Neeson was a relatively unknown actor at the time of this across the Atlantic as he worked mainly in irish tv, movies and films.

Thank you for bearing witness and for your thoughtful reaction. A note on the grave site at the end - it’s Jewish tradition to place a rock on the tombstone to indicate you were there. More permanent and humble than flowers. Another interesting movie about this era is Life is Beautiful. Amazing story about what a parent will do to protect their child.

Thank you for your heartfelt reaction. . I just subscribed to your channel. Thank you for broaching such a serious topic as the Holocaust. It is so important that the younger generations know what happened. It must never happen again. Side note- I too am Portuguese. My family lives in the Azores.

The dance at the beginning is the Tango.

My Father saw this on TV back in the day on PBS TV for the full four hours. He wasn't ready for it. He saw Escape From Sobibor, Holocaust but this was beyond amazing for him.

Hey Gabriella and Caleb, I often put myself back in my mind as a child. When we face cruelity and lack of compassion, someone is often there to protect us. -------- I remember hoping someone would protect me if my parents were not around. And an adult would always step up.------- In many parts of Shindler's List we see the fear of facing the hate of your persecutor, without a shield to protect you. This is unthinkable and frightening to the bone.------- What a cruel world this can be.

The frightening thing is that something like this could easily happen again, and most people would not expect it

about 35:00 - they're liquidating the ghettos, moving them out to concentration camps. A ghetto was a place where Jews were restricted to live. It came to mean a place where people of one cultural group were forced to live. It's not about how much money you had; it was about race and ethnicity.

The little girl in the red coat is Polish and she is in her 30s today. In 2022 she was volunteering at the Poland-Ukraine border to help Ukrainian war refugees.

While this movie always gets to me the one scene of the little boy who hopped in the toilets into the sh*t and is told to get out and then he looks up to the toilet hole in utter fear and shock always gets me the most.

A film that had to be made and had to be seen. This movie is a warning.

"I could have got more" got me good

Thank you for taking the time (and mental energy😅) to watch this important movie. Love from Israel!

Everyone can visit every Concentration Camp that still exist. My wife and me visiting all of them 😔

I have been in 3 Concentration Camps on School Field Trips. Never have places spread such a gloomy, depressive, sad and hopeless mood for me. Believe me, this movie is not sugarcoating at all. In reality, it's toned down. This is tame. They completely dehumanized the Jews and treated them in unbelievable, gruesome and disgusting ways no one ever wants to encounter.

Thank you for doing this film, I believe every grown up should watch this at least once, just to get a small grasp of what the Holocaust was. It always amazes me that he made just enough money to save them. Thank you again!

He's thankful for the food he was given. Prisoners were made to starve.

Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire

Sir Ben Kinsley who played Ishtak Stern played Mahatma Gandhi directed by Richard Attenborough nearly 10 years before this one. Gandhi movie went on to win 8 Oscars including Best Actor (Ben Kingsley), Best Picture and Best Director.

Little girl in red. Spielberg is a cinematic genius.

What he removed from the door frame was a mezzuzah. You will see that on the door frames of most Jewish homes, work places and so on. It is a tiny ark. Inside of it is a very small scroll that contains the 5 books of Moses.

It is a movie that I will never watch again but I will surely remember it forever.

15:23 Thaler is a silver coin that was worth 3 Reichsmarks. The Reichsmark, in turn, is the currency in Germany between 1924 and 1948. Reichsmark is also a so-called gold core currency. The €URO was first introduced in January 2002.

This had 12 oscar nominations. It won 7 for best picture, best director for Steven Spielberg, best adapted screenplay, original music, cinematography, editing, and production design, and it was also up for best actor for Liam Neeson, best supporting actor for Ralph Fiennes, makeup, costume design, and sound mixing.

Jeez. No, it’s not his perspective. That’s what Spielberg did on purpose and he’s not on his high horse. He was just horseback riding that day.

While making this movie, Spielberg wouldn't even communicate with the actors playing the Einsatzgruppen. These were actors of the German theater playing these parts. Spielberg would give them direction but he wouldn't make small talk with them as he couldn't get past the Schutzstaffel uniforms. That is until a beautiful thing happened very early in production. A Passover Seder was held at the hotel the cast and crew were staying. Spielberg had all the Jewish actors sitting around at a table, then all the German actors walked in wearing yarmulkes and participated in the rituals of the Passover Seder and Spielberg was moved to tears.

Regardless of what the Teachers Union, College Academia , Social Media Platforms, or anyone else thinks about it.... we should be teaching every student in the world the truth concerning of all that took place before, during, and after the entire WW I and WW II eras and the aftermath involving all of those participants involved. Those whom do not study and learn from the annuals of History are doomed to repeat it. We should endeavor to make the world a better place through the education, protection, and investment of our nations future....our young people. It is, for sure, an investment in the future of our nation.

Is it so hard to pick up a few books and do research ? WWII and then around the same time having to fight Japan. Then there also is a slew of Nazis escaping and finding refuge in South America.

What makes this movie so special is that the entire cast & crew refused to be paid for making it. Spielberg said in a interview that they all saw taking payment as equal to taking ‘blood money’, instead, everyone pooled together what they earned and founded the USC Shoah Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicating into preserving the accounts of both survivors and victims and provide them for educational purposes. Thanks to this film, there was a drastic spike of education programs in the US dedicating into teaching all generations of what the Holocaust was.

Great reaction. This is one of those films that everyone should see. Parents should watch the film with their children as soon as they are old enough to understand and talk to them about it. I cry like a baby every time I see the movie. Even if it's a reaction. It's heart-breaking. Maybe you should watch "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas" too.

him and Schindler... made me cry... HIM...

The train cars are 40 & 8 cars. Comfortably fitting 40 men or 8 horses. In reality they were often filled with 100-150 people. So full that the dead stayed standing until the car was emptied.

Excellent reaction, you're exactly right, this is the type of movie that one has to feel - no words can fully convey adequately feelings into words.. But to answer one question at 1:09:05 it's not a synagogue, its a Catholic church (that's how they used to look back in the day), as Schindler walks up to the pew and just before whispering to his wife, we can hear the priest softly chanting in Latin the "Our Father" (Pater Noster).. They were Catholics, both he and his wife (he did the sign of the cross when he asked to do 3 minutes of silence after announcing the end of the war to the workers and notice the cross on his grave stone).. One more interesting thing to notice, earlier in the film when we saw all the guys talking about business inside a house of worship -- it was at a Catholic church too, this is where Jews would go, sit in the back and conduct business in peace -- notice before going to the church, (right infront of a store) one of them (the actor who plays Leopold Pfefferberg), quietly takes off his arm band with the star of david..and in the next scene when we see him again, he's in the church with the others (who aren't wearing the star of david either) doing business in the back (you can also hear the priest chanting softly in the background in Latin here too). Excellent raw reaction from the both of you to such a heavy and heartbreaking movie..

I don’t think Liam neeson has any rules now for the quality of films he takes on…

A film that does an amazing job showing how this all went down from the start to the ghettos to later is called the Pianist. There’s also great ones that show how it was in Italy but it’s much older. If you’re ever interested in seeing more I’ve done many film studies on this topic (also for a different one there’s Hotel Rwanda)

37:10 Ghetto is an Italian word. early 17th century: perhaps from Italian getto ‘foundry’ (because the first ghetto was established in 1516 on the site of a foundry in Venice), or from Italian borghetto, diminutive of borgo ‘borough’.

What you said in the beginning about people first time seeing what happened may be true for the USA, but here in Europe almost everyone got this taught in school, from the 50's on, with very graphical photos and stuff. There are older movies about this topic that are not less shocking, but most of them were not shown in theatres in the US or were highly sesored. Because at the time there were BS policies in place what movies should be shown. For example had the good guys always to win at the end, no blood or dead bodies shown and stuff like that, which is on a topic like this, nearly impossible.

the "winds of war" are blowing again !!