Schindler's List, 25 years on: a mother's legacy of joy in the face of horror (2024)

I don't remember when I was first told about the Holocaust, or that my mother, Mira, was a survivor. There was always the fact that I never knew any of my grandparents – they, together with two aunts and an uncle had been killed by Nazis. There was my mother's tattoo on her arm: dirty blue, smudged-looking. She neither hated it nor hid it. She just lived with it.

It wasn't until I moved to Los Angeles in my 20s and stumbled upon a support group for the first generation of children born to Holocaust survivors that I realised how unusual my mother was. There, everyone exchanged notes. Did my mother hoard food? No. Did she refuse to talk about her wartime experiences, or talk about them incessantly? No, she recounted details, when asked, in a matter-of-fact way. Was she depressed, anxious, fearful? No. After the war, my mother had moved to France, then Australia. She was social, energetic and unnaturally optimistic. She had a particularly joyful way of viewing the world that was hard to make sense of, given her experiences.

In Melbourne, going to a Jewish school, it wasn't uncommon to be affected by the Holocaust. I remember one teacher asking students if they had lost family members during the Second World War, and many of my classmates' hands shot up. The Holocaust was part of our lives and part of our school curriculum, too. Perhaps other bookish girls in Melbourne huddled up with the collected works of Jane Austen, but I was swept up in works that had Jewish themes. Herman Wouk's Marjorie Morningstar delighted me in my teens, because the protagonist was both Jewish and glamorous. There was also Chaim Potok, the plays of Neil Simon and – the one I read over and over – Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth, which all dealt, to varying degrees, with the issue of Jewish assimilation in a non-Jewish world.

Years later, I fangirled Elie Wiesel, and was delighted when my letter to the author – who had vividly recounted his own shocking Holocaust experiences in the book Night – was answered with a one-pager of his own, adding that I should send his regards to my mother.

I was 27 and living in New York when Steven Spielberg's movie Schindler's List was released in 1993 (the film was released in Australia in February 1994). I had already been writing about movies for nearly a decade, and Spielberg was someone I idolised. Not only had he been phenomenally successful with films such as Jaws and E.T., but he was stalwartly Jewish, and my parents had even met his mother at the kosher restaurant she owned in Los Angeles, The Milky Way.

Spielberg was Hollywood's wunderkind; he'd made Jaws when he was in his 20s, and went on to direct Raiders of the Lost Ark and its Indiana Jones sequel. By 1993, everyone knew he could direct a blockbuster, but there was far less assurance that he had the ability to create a serious, important film.

I went to see Schindler's List alone in a Manhattan theatre, expecting the worst, hoping for the best. It had two stumbling blocks: it was shot in black and white, and its running time was over three hours. But it also had an Australian connection, since it was based on the book by Thomas Keneally, Schindler's Ark. Both told the true story of Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and member of the Nazi party who ultimately risked his own life to save more than a thousand Jewish ones.

In that movie theatre, I sobbed. I couldn't believe what I had just seen, but I didn't need the subsequent rave reviews to confirm that it was a masterpiece. For the first time, I saw two of the camps my mother had been in being named: not only the better-known Auschwitz, but Plaszow, too, where Schindler's List was set. It was where my grandmother was killed and then buried in a pit.

So many of the film's scenes duplicated ones that my mother had witnessed: the SS storming Jewish houses and taking what they wanted, men's sidelocks being shorn and – horrifically – men, women and children being slaughtered, for various reasons or none at all. They had been disobedient, or sick, or young, or just there. They were old, they were young, they were in-between. They were mothers, they were sons, they were Jewish.

My mother's older sister, a newlywed, was one of the first taken to a camp with her husband, at a time when they were still able to send censored letters home. "It is very nice here," my aunt had written, knowing that her letters were being read by the authorities, "but do everything you can not to join us." That was the moment my grandfather put his family into hiding.

Watching the film, I wasn't aware that it would have a trickle-down effect in my family. The huge success of Schindler's List not only gave Spielberg his first Oscar for best director, but it also allowed him to set up the Shoah Foundation, which set out to interview as many survivors as possible.

My mother was one of them. Her testimony lasted several hours, recounting experiences that are difficult to fathom. Her father was shot in front of her, when the family's hiding place was discovered, right before she and her brother and mother were taken to the camp. He had tried to jump out of a window, and was gunned down by a Nazi waiting beneath. As he lay bleeding on the footpath, neither my mother nor his wife were allowed to go to his side. He lay there, until he died, and his body wasn't removed until neighbours buried him the following day.

She paused before saying, 'I learned about the goodness of people'.

Three days later, Mira's mother was killed in Plaszow. Over the course of nearly a year, Mira would go to four camps and endure a death march, where starving prisoners were forced to walk for days on end – or be unceremoniously executed – in bleak conditions. Even after she was finally liberated by Russian soldiers, she bore witness to further atrocities. On her first night of "freedom", she instinctively barricaded the door of the room she and other girls were sleeping in with heavy furniture. When soldiers pounded on the door she whispered to the others to be quiet, until they heard the men declare, "Let's take the other room". The mother and daughter in that room weren't as fortunate. For hours, Mira listened to their pleas, terrible screams and moans – "Rateve mikh, save me, mama"; "Oh my darling, what can I do?" – until there was silence. Both had been raped, over and over.

And yet, when my mother was asked by the Shoah Foundation's interviewer if she had anything she wanted to add – any lesson learned during these blackest of times – she paused before saying, "I learned about the goodness of people". And that was true, too.

Before she died of cancer two years ago, she recounted many of those memories for me. There was one man, a Belgian Army major and ex-prisoner of war himself, who had helped her in the early days of liberation, when she took refuge with others in an abandoned house, but where her fellow survivors saw how close she was to death, and ignored her.

The major took her to a doctor, and then brought liver to her daily during her convalescence. My mother asked him, "Why are you so good to me?" He replied that he had a daughter her age, and he hoped that there would be someone kind in the world whenever she was in need.

For me, these stories mirrored what Spielberg achieved with Schindler's List. The movie is brutal. There's no Spielbergian twist on the horrors, no holding back. But there was hope within the real-life character of Oskar Schindler. In learning about his humanity during the most inhumane of times, it's also hard not to learn about the goodness of people. Just like my mother said.