Peter, I'm a bit baffled by your concern over the "smoking" problem in this film, because I'd take a different perspective. 1. Is Stern's comment--"I've smoked half of it..."--really a nod to today's health consciousness? It needn't be taken that way. No matter what we've come to know, and how we've become sensitized to the issue through scientific research and education, as well as changing social attitudes, people who don't smoke have always been bothered by smokers--whether or not it's been to a degree of physical illness. Stern could be taken as a man with some physical tolerance to smoke, with the attitudinal tolerance that would jibe with the times, and yet comfortable enough with his boss now to mention the latter's excessive habit jokingly. 2. As for the concern over the discrepancy: the insignificant "problem" of secondary smoke inhalation on a personal level, juxtaposed against the almost humanly ungraspable obscenity of what's issuing from those incinerator smokestacks. One may worry over whether audiences, now or in posterity, are equipped to make the distinction and not to equate them. But for those who can "get" it, the juxtaposition may prompt us to face both an awful fact and a saving grace, both compounded into a truth, like it or not: In the midst of the most awful circumstances created by human agency, we're heir to distractions and discomforts of no more than passing significance. You can be sure that the Jews in the camps living under conditions worse than Stern and Schindler's workers, were conversant with the irks of human-behavior- as-usual, even inside an atmosphere of misery and terror. It's what keeps us going, sometimes, despite the odds. And on the perverse obverse of that coin--not the blackly humorous but the pure-terrible side--our habit or human tendency to focus on those irks-as-usual in everyday life is often what divorces, distracts and desensitizes us sufficiently from the consequences and significance of our larger actions, so that they can become unthinkingly monstrous. No matter what the circumstances and how able the spirit the flesh can be a defensive weakness for the miserable oppressed, and a crippling disease for those who create their misery. This is not anything in the way of an explanation for something of the Holocaust's magnitude, but it may be taken as a contributing part of the experience. ...For those, again, who might misinterpret--what's the answer? One thing we might do is pull our punches, dilute the communication. But we might also have an obligation to forge ahead, communicate with those who can understand, ...and begin to see to it that those who can't begin to get equipped with the tools for comprehension themselves--one aspect of that being not to ob- tain *all* our information on historical events from some feature film, no matter how well-intentioned and commendable it may be. Before I slip off my soapbox, let me leave for the weekend, Jeff