One of the main problems with Shindler's list is that it pretends that the Holocaust does not effect the way history is presented. As anyone who has spent time with surviers or researched their testemony can tell you the holocaust is a remarkably difficult event to tell because it undermines the posibility of its being witnessed. This is true not only because the Nazis tried to destroy all survivors and all evidence of the event but because the intensity of the trauma ruptures the psychological structures that support narration. Namely the experience of the camps caused such a severe crisis of valuation that no point from which to narrate exists which is not already structured by shame and repression. Most of the elements that led to this crisis are omited by Speilberg; the film has no kapos(at least not the kind that were required to beat the other prisoners), none of the inamtes steal one anothers bread, we never learn of the squads of prisoners whose job it was to transfer the bodies from the gas chamberse to the ovens. It is these details of the camp experience that gave it its true horror and made it impossible to tell as a classical narrative. Impossible to tell, because the Nazis turned the prisoners against each other so that almost everyone who survived reports an intense feeling of guilt that won't allow them to speak. The truth of the Holocaust is not to be found only in the content of the testimony of the survivers but in the crisis of form that their testimonies play out when they are considered as speach acts rather than simple narratives. That's why a film like Shoah is an attempt to deal with the Holocaust where as Shindler's list is an attempt to blind ourselves to the Holocaust in the very act of looking at it, so that we can leave the Mall and go out to dinner while feeling that wqe've donbe our bit of politics for the weekend. lgs.