Oskar Schindler's breakdown when he feels he could have done more... "this car... ten people... this pin... two people." Staggering in its power...

And then, of course, seeing the footage of the survivors and their families placing the symbolic stone on his grave in Israel.

I saw this film at a pre-release screening with local families of Holocaust survivors. As I've told others, it was one of the most deeply and profoundly moving nights of my life. As a kid raised Jewish, you get pummeled with Holocaust tales and memorials all your life...

... but it was only Spielberg's film that became a turning point for me. When I realized that we HAVE TO keep this wretched event in our collective human history as much in the forefront as possible. Not only as a constant memorial to those who passed but a constant warning and reminder to future generations.

The scene with the girl in the red coat isn't just good filmmaking, it's good history. There was a little girl who was well-known around the Ghetto because of her red coat. She was actually called "Red Gennia" - I probably just misspelled her name because it's been such a long time since I read Thomas Kenally's incredible book. Schindler was riding his horse on the hill the day of liquidation and saw her down below in her red coat, just as shown in the film. I remember being impressed by Spielberg's artistic mastery when I first saw this film, and then being impressed in a different way - by Spielberg's commitment to historical accuracy - when I read the book a few weeks later.

@Annika W: Thanks for that information. Part of the challenge for filmmakers adapting real-life stories into a movie is knowing what to omit and what to include in the final product. Obviously the decision to include the little girl in red was a smart one.

I only recently saw Schindler’s List for the first time.

Right before the film was released, I spent an entire day in the National Holocaust Museum and was so deeply effected that I knew I couldn’t watch the movie. Only a few years before, I’d visited a refugee camp in Honduras and held an infant who was about the same age as my own daughter as she died of starvation. The cruelty of a system run by people who where in the frame of mind to help refugees was unbelievable to me; when I compared that to the stories I’d heard growing up, I could not begin to fathom what a system with extermination in mind would be like (my aunt’s family is Latvian and her father was a political leader who didn’t support either the Nazis or the Soviets. They were briefly in a camp before being allowed to emigrate.). Visiting the museum confirmed the worst that I thought, especially when I read of the extermination of the mentally disabled (of which I’d never heard) and realized that my brother would have been among them.

As it was, I had a hard time not crying through much of the film. One scene that stuck with me was when the children were nearly taken at the train depot in Auschwitz. Even with my children grown, I have what seems like an irrational fear of losing them (until I remember that little girl).

Oskar Schindler did what was right and paid for it with his own poverty for the rest of his life. Those he saved helped save him. So for me, as a non Jew, the most moving part of the film was the post script:

OSKAR SCHINDLER FAILED AT SEVERAL BUSINESSES, AND MARRIAGE. AFTER THE WAR IN 1958, HE WAS DECLARED A RIGHTEOUS PERSON BY THE COUNCIL OF THE YAD VASHEM IN JERUSALEM, AND INVITED TO PLANT A TREE IN THE AVENUE OF THE RIGHTEOUS. IT GROWS THERE STILL.

THERE ARE FEWER THAN FIVE THOUSAND JEWS LEFT ALIVE IN POLAND TODAY. THERE ARE MORE THAN SIX THOUSAND DESCENDANTS OF THE SCHINDLER JEWS.

@Jeff: I agree, we have to do what we can to keep the memory alive, but I fear that with fewer and fewer survivors the true depth of the atrocities will fade. Most of the records concerning the liberation of the camps are still sealed because they were simply too horrible to release. Unfortunately, genocide usually affects groups that don’t have the ability to tell their story the way the Jews were able to.

Wikipedia (Genocides in History) reports 25 instances of genocide since the end of WWII.

The scene with the Rabbi... when he's taken outside the factory to be killed and the gun jams repeatedly...