‘Schindler’s List’ is 30. It may be more valuable now for how divisive it remains

On a wintry 1944 night at Auschwitz, several Jewish women, naked and shivering, are forced into a large room and plunged into total darkness. They scream and cling to each other, peering up in dread at the looming shower heads; they’ve been warned about what happens next. But it doesn’t happen. Water, real water, comes pouring out instead. The women are not going to die, at least not now. As they bathe and drink, many of them weep in relief. One can’t help but laugh, as though appreciating their deliverance for the cruel cosmic punchline it is.

It says something about the debate that “Schindler’s List” still inspires that, three decades after its release, its most terrifying sequence is often dismissed as its most fraudulent. Some version of this brush with death really did befall some of the Jewish women who worked for Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist and Nazi Party member whose rescue of more than 1,100 Jews during the Holocaust is memorialized in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film.

Bound for Schindler’s new munitions factory in Brünnlitz, in what is now the Czech Republic, the women were sent to Auschwitz for an inspection stopover that not all of them survived. Even so, the shower episode has been referenced in survivor testimony: “I remember, after they shaved my head, we were put in a dark room and cold water came down,” said Rena Finder, one of the Schindlerjuden, in a 2018 interview with Time.

But for the sharpest critics of “Schindler’s List,” the moral bankruptcy of the shower scene had little to do with its basis in fact and everything to do with Spielberg’s manipulative intent. With unconscionable virtuosity, the filmmaker still best