Schindler Comes Home ,

By RICHARD CORLISS

Memory is all we have. And when the memories are dreadful -- when they hold images of the pain we have suffered or, perhaps even worse, inflicted -- they are what we try to escape. The Nazi scheme to exterminate Jews and other undesirables is one such nightmare image; and Schindler's List, Steven Spielberg's drama about the man who saved 1,100 Jews from the Plaszow death camp, is essentially a plea by a preeminent popular artist that to remember is to speed the healing. Last week that moving Holocaust memorial became a mobile one, as the film opened in Germany, Poland and Israel -- the three countries where the atrocities were planned, executed and most poignantly commemorated.

Thanks as much to its persuasive craftsmanship as to its wrenching theme, Schindler's List has already touched U.S. audiences. New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman has arranged screenings as an intended antidote to hate crimes. But no audiences could feel a higher emotional stake in the subject than those last week at premieres in Frankfurt and other German cities, in Tel Aviv and Krakow. Viewers wept. Afterward many could not eat or sleep or talk. Some had been afraid to see it. Others said it should be seen by everyone. Spielberg, less a promoter for his film than a proselytizer for a spiritual unification of Germans and Jews, agreed. "I feel it is time in Germany for this generation to teach its children," he said. "Education is the way to stop another Holocaust from happening."

With President Richard von Weizsacker in attendance, the film premiered in Frankfurt, the city where Schindler died in poverty in 1974. Then it moved to local theaters across the country. In Cologne's Cinedom, half a dozen young women collapsed sobbing in the arms of friends or parents. "I have never seen an audience behave like this," said Wolfgang Rohrig, a 26-year-old student. "It was as if they were in church. It was as if something sacred had happened."

What happened was the belated restoration of Oskar Schindler. In Israel, where he is buried, Schindler was a hero. In Poland, where he connived to save lives, he was a footnote in a history book. In Germany, where he was once sued for punching a man who called him a "Jew kisser," he was an embarrassment to all those who knew something and did nothing. And because amnesia is the most convenient placebo for collective guilt, Schindler was essentially a nonperson. In the '70s Artur Brauner, a German Jew, tried to make a movie about Schindler but could not raise the money. Now, with the release of Spielberg's film and several documentaries on the subject, Schindler has become a strange kind of celebrity, gnawing from beyond the grave at Germany's restless conscience.

If Germans were confronting their countrymen's bestiality in detail more vivid than some could stand, many Israelis were reluctant to relive it. "People here live the Holocaust," says Tel Aviv resident Noga Reshef, 29. "They teach it in school, they hold ceremonies, and every year there is Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Day. We can't escape the Holocaust; it sits on our shoulders." Others had more personal reasons for wanting to avoid the experience. "I'm afraid of these movies," said Pinchas Pistol, a Plaszow survivor who witnessed too much of the Nazis' random sadism. "Every time I see one, the memories come back, and I can't sleep or work." Yet he went, as did scores of other Holocaust survivors, as well as Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and President Ezer Weizman.

The official and popular response to Schindler's List was a mixture of benumbed awe and gratitude. But, as in the U.S., some critics charged that the film, by focusing on the few survivors of Nazi genocide rather than on the millions of dead, turned a continent's horror story into a fairy tale. In the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, historian Tom Segev dismissed it as "Spielberg's Holocaust Park," called the Auschwitz sequence "pornography" and concluded, "Spielberg needs the Holocaust, but the Holocaust does not need Spielberg." In the German newspaper Die Welt, critic Will Tremper headlined his review "Indiana Jones in the Krakow Ghetto." He excoriated Spielberg's vision as "pure Hollywood . . . the fantasies of a young boy from California who had never taken an interest in the Holocaust or the Jews before." Both critics were reflecting the view of Claude Lanzmann, director of the 1985 death-camp documentary Shoah. "It is seen from a very slanted angle, almost like an adventure story," Lanzmann wrote in London's Evening Standard. "Even if Spielberg believes that he has respected the historical truth, and I am sure he does, the general impression is distorting."

These antithetical, politically heretical opinions will only fuel interest in the film. In Vienna, 10,000 children quickly volunteered to see the 3-hour 15-minute movie. Yes, on a school day; but playing hooky will educate kids in ! the lesson of man's inhumanity to man -- and of one man's humanity. To Michel Friedman, a child of Schindlerjuden and a leader in Frankfurt's Jewish community, Schindler's importance was not that he was a hero but that he was a human being: "a Mensch," says Friedman, using a good German and Yiddish word. "He is proof that if you wanted to help, even in 1944, even in Auschwitz, you could." And the response to Schindler's List is proof that the most offensive word in any language is forget.

With reporting by James O. Jackson/Bonn and Felice Marantz/Tel Aviv