Well, I finally got to see the darn film. Good "movie" for all the known reasons. However, I wanted to note one of the big historical inaccuracies contained in it -and I apologize if this has already been brought up. There is a scene where Schindler and Stern are carefully writing the list of the people that are supposed to be transferred from Poland to the new factory location in Czechoslovakia. It's a long night and at the end of it all Schindler notes that he must have smoked more than three packs of sigarettes during those hours. Stern sternly (excuse the pun) replies that he is well aware of it since he must have smoked half of them. I honestly don't think that in 1944 "passive smoking" was an hot issue. Therefore in a film dedicated to a reasessment of a collective historic memory it is, to say the least, odd that Spielberg finds time to create the context to even wink an eye to the populist concerns of the health conscious American viewer of today. At first glance this might be considered an irrelevant inaccuracy in a film that is generally well documented and lovingly detailed. However it is absurd to make believe that while Auschwitz' chimneys were blowing out a much more death filled smoke someone like Stern was preoccupied with the smoke that Schindler blew in his face. Again, "Schindler's List" is a film on memory. And something like this is surely not very good for creating a historic memory for the future generations that will sit down to watch thirty years from now as their memory span will necessarily be even shorter than ours. In this case they might even be led to think that the smoke from someone's sigarette is just as bad as that rising from crematorium chimneys. Obsessions can be very dangerous. ------------- Peter Sarram Northwestern University [log in to unmask] Peace!