Award-winner now on DVD
by Amanda Gruidl
reporter

   Schindler’s List, the holocaust epic directed by Steven Spielberg and winner of seven Academy Awards, including best picture and best director, is now on DVD.
   The film is a true story starring Liam Neeson as Oskar Schindler and Ben Kingsley as Schindler’s Jewish accountant, Itzhak Stern.
   The story delves into the career of enigmatic businessman Oskar Schindler, a member of the Nazi Party, who sought personal fortune through the exploitation of the Nazi Party in Poland by making enamel pots and pans and employing Jews to work for him.
   Schindler’s employees came from a ghetto in Warsaw and eventually were moved to Plaszow, a forced labor camp lorded over by Amon Goethe (Ralph Fiennes), who takes pleasure in torturing and killing Jews.
   When the fate of the Jews becomes clear to Schindler, he and Stern make a list of Jews who will go to work for him at an ammunitions factory in Brinnlitz, Czechoslovakia.
   In the seven months that the factory is in operation, Schindler saves 1,100 Jews from certain death at camps like Auschwitz.
   The DVD contains two features: the first an 11-minute short about the Shoah Foundation, created by Spielberg to preserve the stories of witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust.
   The foundation uses these eyewitness stories to overcome prejudice, intolerance and bigotry and the suffering they cause.
   The second feature is a heartwarming segment (near 80 minutes), featuring interwoven stories from survivors telling their tales of how Schindler helped to save their lives and what happened to them after the war.
   One of the women in the documentary is Helen Hirsch, the cook/maid to Amon Goethe, who tells of the cruelty that she personally endured while serving in Goethe’s household.
   Another woman tells of how she survived a mass murder by a group of Nazis in the camp at Plaszow.
   One of the main topics of the survivors is how they survived the raid on the Warsaw Ghetto before being sent to Plaszow.
   The DVD is disappointing only in that those are the only special features.
   A movie such as this and with many loyal fans deserves to give its audience a behind-the-scenes feature or a director’s commentary.