Schindler's List.

This entry is gonna be a long one.

Today is history. Today will be remembered. years from now the young will ask with wonder about this day. Today is history and you are apart of it. Six hundred years ago when elsewhere they were footing the blame for the Black Death, Casimir the Great - so called - told the Jews they could come to Krakow. They came. They trundled their belonging into the city. They settled. They took hold. They prospered in business, science, education, the arts. With nothing they came and with nothing they flourished. Fir six centuries there has been Jewish Krakow. By this evening those six centuries will be a rumor. They never happened. Today is history.

- Amon Goeth

*****
Similar to The Pianist, the movie used The Holocaust as its background, and made Oskar Schindler as the main focus of the story. Schindler was a German businessman whom at the end of the movie, saved 1100 Jews from being massacred by the Nazis by employing them working at his factory.

The interesting part of this movie is, it is centralized on humanity and it's stressed deeper than what the The Pianist have shown to us. This trait is being portrayed eminently by Oskar Schindler himself. Despite being one of the Germany pack, he audaciously ventured into a formidable task - saving as much of the Jews' lives as he could by bribing millions of money that he owned to the SS officials.

This has intrigued me somehow because we are often been showered with images of how selfish one could be during war time as if nothing else matter except for taking care of our own lives. Selflessness becomes an extinct word. But at one point in the story, Schindler was able to cast that side away from himself even though at first he was just a war profiteer,the hoity-toity money spinning type who used the Jews as his money making human machines and couldn't care less about what happened to them.

This selfish Schindler was shown when one of his workers who was an old, incompetent person wanted to meet Schindler in person and thanked him for his good deed by hiring him but he paid only little interest. He even went rage against Itzhak Stern, his accountant when he noticed that that old man only had only one arm.

The turning point that transformed selfish Schindler into selfless Schindler was when Amon Goeth commanded for the final liquidation of the gettho, butchering hundreds of Jews and he watched this happened uphills. I guess this is the part when he finally realized the right thing he got to do - or perhaps maybe when the Jews were being cremated by the officials. Those who died during the liquidation had been unburied, garnered, and incinerated.

It's really refreshing and mesmerizing to see something as unusual as this. The so many questions I asked myself when I've finished watching it and how I relate these questions back to my country, the government, the leaders and the people.

The fear of being engulfed in similar situation. Fear alone wouldn't be able to stop it from happening. But if it does happen to us all, what are we going to do?

Should we just abandon humanity? Would we? Could we? Let alone being civilized, I doubt we're still going to hold onto it. Would the Chinese help the Malays? Would Malays help the Indians? Or would someone mock the unison of this multi-race and cut the connection off? What if, one of a race is obliged to help someone only of the same race? We can't just simply brush off the speculation that racism might be escalating during this period of time making the term 'racial discrimination' widely used among us. And perhaps thing such as racial segmentation is relived - precedent for such occurrence could be seen when the Brits came and they used 'divide-and-conquer' method to rule our country for decades of deep malaise. As for a fact, the instability between the races in our country nowadays might herald that this speculation has a fair chance to take place even sooner, far before a war between nations erupts and possibly lead us to a civil war instead.

I do not favor any of that. I prefer to see all of them as another human being who accidently happened to be in the same shoes as I do, experiencing the same tragedy of life, and needing the same thing for survival. I prefer not to discriminate them based on their gender, age, skin color, religion, race, whatnots. Take Schindler as the best example - he'd shown us even though he stood alone as being the only Nazi who wanted to help the Jews, the only Nazi who was against bloodbath of the Jews, but he made it through and saved 1100 Jews. The quote: Whoever saves a life, saves the world entire, is proven to be true.

But again, he had the power to make it happened. He had the position and the money to do that. During war time, the elitists are subjected towards morass of corruption. They self-indulged with the importance of themselves first before everyone else's, becoming the war profiteer instead, not the savior. They can be the knights in shining armors for the people, provided only that selfishness is put aside. Remember that once you've decided to be a leader, you serve the people.

Anyhow, seeing Schindler invested his own money to save those Jews made me think, would Najib be able to do the same thing like he did? He makes massive fortune as our Prime Minister, he has the power, the connection, the money, all the essence parts to help the people. Would he do it?

We should be able to do it - helping others in need with all might, insyaAllah.