Steven Spielberg Reflects on Working Toward Peace

I was shocked many years ago to read a statistic showing an alarming number of Americans who had only the barest knowledge of the Holocaust, and a startling number who had no knowledge at all. This was bad enough for the adult population. For younger people, it had the potential to begin a plague of ignorance.

That fact, more than anything else, compelled me to make Schindler's List in 1993-even though I knew that what I could put on film, the most powerful medium, could only show a fraction of the suffering that occurred-suffering I cannot begin to imagine.

If there was one result of making Schindler's List that was particularly gratifying, it was that more than 1,250,000 high school students have seen the film, either on their own or at the free high school showings arranged through the cooperation of Universal Pictures, American theater owners, and the governors and departments of education of more than forty-five states. It is particularly noteworthy that most of these showings have been in places far from the urban, Jewish centers, places where students may have never even met a Jew, such as Wasilla, Alaska; Pocatello, Idaho; and Summersville, West Virginia.

My hope with my last film, Saving Private Ryan, was to honor those who ended the Holocaust. D day was the pivot point of the twentieth century. All that went before was preparation, all that followed was consequence. And then there were the men of D day-the junior officers, NCOs, and enlisted men-who hit the beaches at Omaha and Utah on June 6, 1944. They were born mostly between 1920 and 1925. To them had come the responsibility, the sacrifice, and the honor of saving Western civilization. This isn't Hollywood hyperbole; it is simple fact.

At 0500 hours, June 6, 1944, the outcome of World War II was very much in doubt. If Hitler's armies were able to stop the invasion and then drive the British, Canadian, and American forces back into the sea, he would have been free to move major forces from his western to his eastern front, enough maybe to win a victory-and almost certainly enough to impose a stalemate. The war would have gone on. The Holocaust would have gone on. It really is too terrible to imagine.

It all came down to a bunch of twenty-year-olds-men like Dick Winters, Len Lomell, Dutch Schultz, Bob Slaughter, Melvin Paisley, Barney Oldfield, James Colella, Peter Howenstein, and John Harrison.

John Harrison lost his brother to the war. The Sullivan family lost all five brothers. The Borgstroms lost four. The Slighs, three. The Hobacks, their only two sons. The Niland family also lost two sons. If these men hadn't defied death to ensure our freedom, then this day would never have come.

It is to honor these men and their buddies-the men who put an end to the Holocaust and saved Western civilization-that I made Saving Private Ryan.

My hope in making Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan is that eyes have been opened. My hope is that lives have been changed.

 

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