The receptions of Schindler's List and the public conversations it has triggered, touch upon issues including: the representation of history by cinema and popular culture; the role of national identity in the shaping and selective reception of popular memory; and others. This book debates the representation and reception of Schindler's List.

Debates the representation and popular reception of Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List

The devastation of Hungarian Jewry was among the worst atrocities of World War II, encompassing the murder of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children in the final months of the war. Facing defeat, Hitler and his allies brought the Holocaust to Hungary with unprecedented speed and barbarity. The Hungarian Jewish population was rounded up and deported to concentration camps in just 54 days. 437,402 Jews. 148 trains. Destination: Auschwitz. The German plan for annihilation of the Jews-called the 'Final Solution'-set the goal that not a single survivor would be left to bear witness to the events. Fifty years later, Steven Spielberg established Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation to record the testimony of as many survivors as possible. From the ashes of the Holocaust these voices now emerge to share their stories and to represent the nearly six million Jews who did not survive. Survivors and liberators share what they experienced in gripping, firsthand testimony. Archival photographs document history, and powerful color images chronicle the survivors' emotional return to the places of their pasts:from homes unseen for fifty years to the ghettos and concentration camps of their imprisonment. Top scholars have been brought together to share their insights into one of humanity's darkest chapters. These elements are poignantly synthesized in The Last Days as a warning for all mankind.

Five survivors of the Holocaust in Hungary describe their lives before the war; the swift and barbarous execution of Hitler's policies from March 1944; and their experiences in hiding and in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau. The book also follows their return to the camps 50 years later.

This illustrated, large-format book, Testimony: The Legacy of Schindler’s List and the USC Shoah Foundation—A 20th Anniversary Commemoration combines, for the first time, the behind-the-scenes story of the making of Schindler’s List with the history of the remarkable organization inspired by that landmark film. Steven Spielberg’s encounters with Holocaust survivors who visited the set and personally told him their stories set him on a quest to collect and preserve survivor testimony for generations to come. In 1994, he established the Shoah Foundation, and in the following four years nearly 52,000 eyewitness interviews were video recorded in 56 countries and 32 languages. This commemorative book relates how the foundation accomplished this feat through a worldwide network of dedicated people, pioneering interview methods, and state-of-the art technologies. A special 140-page section tells the riveting story of the film in photos, script excerpts, and the words of the cast and crew, including Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, and Spielberg. Drawing from the Universal Pictures archives and exclusive interviews, here are details on Spielberg’s struggle to bring Oskar Schindler’s story from novel to script to screen, the casting, cinematography, and especially what happened during the difficult shoot in Poland in 1993—on locations where actual events of the Holocaust occurred. Partnered with the University of Southern California since 2006, the USC Shoah Foundation has broadened its mission and now collects and preserves testimonies from other genocides, including those in Armenia, Cambodia, and Rwanda, while expanding its educational outreach, especially to young people. Its Visual History Archive—digitized, fully searchable, and hyperlinked to the minute—has become the largest digital collection of its kind in the world. As Spielberg writes in his introduction, “I believe the work of the USC Shoah Foundation is the most important legacy of Schindler’s List.”

Fantasies of Witnessing explores how and why those deeply interested in the Holocaust, yet with no direct, familial connection to it, endeavor to experience it vicariously through sites or texts designed to make it "real" for nonwitnesses. Gary Weissman argues that far from overwhelming nonwitnesses with its magnitude of horror, the Holocaust threatens to feel distant and unreal. A prevailing rhetoric of "secondary" memory and trauma, he contends, and efforts to portray the Holocaust as an immediate and personal experience, are responses to an encroaching sense of unreality: "In America, we are haunted not by the traumatic impact of the Holocaust, but by its absence. When we take an interest in the Holocaust, we are not overcoming a fearful aversion to its horror, but endeavoring to actually feel the horror of what otherwise eludes us."Weissman focuses on specific attempts to locate the Holocaust: in the person of Elie Wiesel, the most renowned survivor, and his classic memoir Night; in videotaped survivor stories and Lawrence L. Langer's celebrated book Holocaust Testimonies; and in the films Shoah and Schindler's List. These representations, he explains, constitute a movement away from the view popularized by Wiesel, that those who did not live through the Holocaust will never be able to grasp its horror, and toward re-creating the Holocaust as an "experience" nonwitnesses may put themselves through. "It is only by acknowledging the desire that gives shape to such representations, and by exploring their place in the ongoing contest over who really 'knows' the Holocaust and feels its horror, that we can arrive at a more candid assessment of our current and future relationships to the Holocaust," he says.

In remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the Nazi concentration camps, this award-winning, bestselling work of Holocaust fiction, inspiration for the classic film and “masterful account of the growth of the human soul” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), returns with an all-new introduction by the author. An “extraordinary” (New York Review of Books) novel based on the true story of how German war profiteer and factory director Oskar Schindler came to save more Jews from the gas chambers than any other single person during World War II. In this milestone of Holocaust literature, Thomas Keneally, author of The Book of Science and Antiquities and The Daughter of Mars, uses the actual testimony of the Schindlerjuden—Schindler’s Jews—to brilliantly portray the courage and cunning of a good man in the midst of unspeakable evil. “Astounding…in this case the truth is far more powerful than anything the imagination could invent” (Newsweek).