Schindler's List

I just watched Schindler's List for the first time and I can't believe I waited so long! It was amazing. So amazing that I had to look up the facts about it and I thought I'd share some of them with you guys. I hope you'll enjoy my short list.
Plus, if any of you got more information - please send me the links!

Movie description from Wiki:
Businessman Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) arrives in Krakow in 1939, ready to make his fortune from World War II, which has just started. After joining the Nazi party primarily for political expediency, he staffs his factory with Jewish workers for similarly pragmatic reasons. When the SS begins exterminating Jews in the Krakow ghetto, Schindler arranges to have his workers protected to keep his factory in operation, but soon realizes that in so doing, he is also saving innocent lives.

8.9/10 on IMDd
96% on Rotten Tomatoes
93% on Metacritic

Universal agreed to let Spielberg direct the film, provided he shoot Jurassic Park first. Spielberg agreed, knowing he wouldn't feel like making a dinosaur movie after finishing Schindler's List.

"Schindler's List" was nominated for 12 Academy Awards. It won seven, including Best Picture, Best Director (Spielberg's first Oscar in that category), Best Adapted Screenplay (to Steven Zaillian), Best Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Original Score. Neeson and Fiennes were nominated for their performances but didn't win.

A number of high-profile leading men were up for the role of Schindler, from Kevin Costner to Mel Gibson to Warren Beatty, but Spielberg didn't want to cast anyone with movie-star baggage, about whom the audience would bring preconceived notions.

Months before he landed the title role, Liam Neeson had auditioned for Schindler but, assuming that he'd never get the part, accepted instead an offer to play opposite wife-to-be Natasha Richardson in a Broadway revival of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie at New York's Criterion Center in 1993. After a performance one evening, Neeson was in his dressing when a knock on the the door announced the arrival of Steven Spielberg, wife Kate Capshaw and her mother. After Spielberg had introduced his wife and mother-in-law, Neeson hugged the older woman in a manner that stuck with Capshaw, who later commented to husband Steven, "That's just what Oskar Schindler would have done." Neeson received a call a week later from Spielberg with the offer of the lead role.

Oskar Schindler and the list

Oskar Schindler was a German industrialist who helped save the lives of hundreds of Jews from Hitler’s onslaught during the Holocaust. The World War II was a time of wide spread terror and destruction especially for the Jews who were subjected to systematic mass murder at the hands of Adolf Hitler who led Nazi Germany. Schindler was a businessman who operated several factories which employed thousands of people including numerous Jews. Although initially as a businessman he was concerned only with the profit-making aspect of his ventures, gradually a conversion took over him and he began spending all his life’s earnings on saving the lives of the Jews employed in his factories. As a young man he was a Nazi spy and used to collect information on railways, military installations, etc. in order to make some money. He also became a member of the Nazi party after his stint as a Nazi spy. He acquired an enamelware factory, which employed thousand Jews. At the time of the Holocaust, he invested his time, money and soul into protecting his employees, and even risked his own life for them. Saving the Jews became his life’s calling and he fully devoted himself to this cause.

Schindler protected his Jews by declaring them as valuable employees of his factory and therefore necessary for the running and operation of his businesses.

During the 1940s, the Jews were in extreme danger of being deported and sent to Nazi concentration camps. Schindler helped protect his Jewish employees by bribing Nazi officials and giving them expensive gifts.

Seven lists in all were made by Oskar Schindler and his associates during the war, while four are known to still exist. Two are at the Yad Vashem in Israel, one is at the US Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC, and one privately owned list was unsuccessfully auctioned off via eBay in 2013.

The movie refers to the first two lists created in 1944, otherwise known as “The Lists of Life.” The five subsequent lists were updates to the first two versions, which included the names of more than 1000 Jews who Schindler saved by recruiting them to work in his factory.

According to a new biography of the German industrialist, there was no Schindler's list, the legendary document containing names of Jewish employees at his Polish factory who were designated as essential workers and thus spared from the concentration camps.

In fact, Schindler was in jail at the time, and others compiled the lists, according to David Crowe, a North Carolina history professor affiliated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.

"Schindler had almost nothing to do with the list," Professor Crowe wrote in New York Times. He added that Steven Spielberg was "a very wonderful, tender man _ but Schindler's List was theatre, and not in an historically accurate way."

Amon Goeth

Ralph Fiennes landed the role of Amon Goeth, the Nazi commandant of the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp in Płaszów. This is what Ralph said about his audition:

"Steven Spielberg was in London casting for all the roles in the film, and I was asked to meet him, and I met him informally. I had got through the book by Thomas Keneally called Schindler’s Ark. I had read it and I wasn’t sure who I was being seen for, whether it was Schindler or Amon Goeth. And then a few days later I got a page, which was in fact an amalgam of different lines from the screenplay into a speech, and I went to a..., on my own, I went to a recording studio in London and directed myself with a cameraman helping me in the speech. That was my directorial debut. And I sent off the test and then I remember early in the morning I got a call from LA saying, “You’ve got the part.” Which I was ecstatic about, of course. And that was it."

I couldn't find any information about who else auditioned for the role of Amon Goeth, but I'm glad Spielberg chose Voldemort.

Steven Spielberg decided to shoot in black and white for several reasons. It reminded him of documentary footage of the Holocaust. It had a timeless quality to it. And he felt that the film should be drained of color to reflect the draining of life during the Holocaust.

For Spielberg, the hardest moment was the sequence when the Polish extras, playing concentration camp prisoners, were stripped and humiliated. He said he couldn't actually watch that part of the shoot. Frequently during the filming, he would break down in tears.

To cheer himself up, Spielberg had Robin Williams phone him. He also would watch episodes of Seinfeld every night after work.

The Girl in the Red Coat

In one of the film's few instances of color, Spielberg's camera singled out a little girl in a red coat. She was played by Oliwia Dabrowska, then 3. Spielberg warned her not to watch the completed film until she was 18, but she saw it when she was 11 and was traumatized. But she watched it again at 18. "I realized I had been part of something I could be proud of," she told the London Times in 2013. "Spielberg was right I had to grow up to watch the film."

In real life, there actually was a little girl in Krakow known for her red coat, Roma Ligocka. She survived the Holocaust, and she published a memoir in 2002, The Girl in the Red Coat.

What happened to Schindler after the war?

Schindler was named ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ in 1963 by the State of Israel for his work during the war. This award was bestowed upon non-Jews who actively helped to rescue Jews during the Holocaust.

By the time the World War II ended, Schindler had spent all his earnings on bribing and purchasing supplies for his workers. He was virtually penniless by this time and also in danger of being arrested as a war criminal.
He went to Argentina in 1949 where he tried to establish himself again by running businesses. However, he could never again prosper and returned to Germany where he filed for bankruptcy. He survived during his later years on donations sent by the Jews he had helped rescue.

Upon his death from heart and liver problems in 1974, he was granted his request to be buried in Israel. About five hundred Schindlerjuden attended his funeral and watched as his body was laid to rest in the Catholic cemetery on Mount Zion in Jerusalem. Thanks to Oskar Schindler, more than six thousand Holocaust survivors and their descendants were alive in the 1990s to tell the remarkable story of "Schindler's List" and of the equally amazing man who compiled it.

Sources:
http://www.moviefone.com/2013/12/15/schindlers-list-facts/
http://mentalfloss.com/article/69150/14-fascinating-facts-about-schindlers-list
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0108052/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
http://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/oskar-schindler-4035.php
http://www.encyclopedia.com/topic/Oskar_Schindler.aspx
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/nov/25/germany.film
https://www.ushmm.org/confront-antisemitism/antisemitism-podcast/ralph-fiennes

If anyone is interested in reading some critics about the movie, here's the link:
http://www.thejc.com/arts/arts-features/103882/is-schindler%E2%80%99s-list-fatally-flawed