Stephen Schiff of The New Yorker called it the best historical drama about the Holocaust, a film that "will take its place in cultural history and remain there."[84] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film four stars out of four and described it as Spielberg's best, "brilliantly acted, written, directed, and seen."[85] Ebert named it one of his ten favorite films of 1993.[86] Terrence Rafferty, also with The New Yorker, admired the film's "narrative boldness, visual audacity, and emotional directness." He noted the performances of Neeson, Fiennes, Kingsley, and Davidtz as warranting special praise,[87] and calls the scene in the shower at Auschwitz "the most terrifying sequence ever filmed."[88] In the 2013 edition of his Movie and Video Guide, Leonard Maltin awarded the picture a four-out-of-four-star rating; he described the movie as a "staggering adaptation of Thomas Keneally's best-seller ... with such frenzied pacing that it looks and feels like nothing Hollywood has ever made before ... Spielberg's most intense and personal film to date".[89] James Verniere of the Boston Herald noted the film's restraint and lack of sensationalism, and called it a "major addition to the body of work about the Holocaust."[90] In his review for The New York Review of Books, British critic John Gross said his misgivings that the story would be overly sentimentalized "were altogether misplaced. Spielberg shows a firm moral and emotional grasp of his material. The film is an outstanding achievement."[91] Mintz notes that even the film's harshest critics admire the "visual brilliance" of the fifteen-minute segment depicting the liquidation of the Kraków ghetto. He describes the sequence as "realistic" and "stunning".[92] He points out that the film has done much to increase Holocaust remembrance and awareness as the remaining survivors pass away, severing the last living links with the catastrophe.[93] The film's release in Germany led to widespread discussion about why most Germans did not do more to help.[94]
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At a 1994 Village Voice symposium about the film, historian Annette Insdorf described how her mother, a survivor of three concentration camps, felt gratitude that the Holocaust story was finally being told in a major film that would be widely viewed.[111] Hungarian Jewish author Imre Kertész, a Holocaust survivor, feels it is impossible for life in a Nazi concentration camp to be accurately portrayed by anyone who did not experience it first-hand. While commending Spielberg for bringing the story to a wide audience, he found the film's final scene at the graveyard neglected the terrible after-effects of the experience on the survivors and implied that they came through emotionally unscathed.[112] Rabbi Uri D. Herscher found the film an "appealing" and "uplifting" demonstration of humanitarianism.[113] Norbert Friedman noted that, like many Holocaust survivors, he reacted with a feeling of solidarity towards Spielberg of a sort normally reserved for other survivors.[114] Albert L. Lewis, Spielberg's childhood rabbi and teacher, described the movie as "Steven's gift to his mother, to his people, and in a sense to himself. Now he is a full human being."[113]
STEVEN SPIELBERG: Well, first of all, you know, I sympathize with you. I, too, saw "20,000 Leagues Under The Sea," with James Mason and Kirk Douglas and Peter Lorre. And that sequence with the giant squid attacking the novelist was terrifying, especially because they were cutting the tentacles off with axes. And that was pretty gruesome in those days. And I remember that. But I was older when I saw that movie, but I was only 6 years old when I saw - when my parents took me to "The Greatest Show On Earth," and they thought it was going to be a great picture having to do with circus clowns and three rings of entertainment and, you know, and it was - I actually thought they were saying to me, we're taking you to a circus, because I had never been to a movie before. We had television at home, but I had never been to a motion picture. And I thought what they meant to say was, you're going to actually see giraffes and elephants and lions and tigers.
While this movie might seem to violate the criteria that entries on this list center on the battlefield experience, prisoners of war actually considered their camps to be extensions of the frontlines; they were expected to do all they could to escape, if not to successfully make it home, then to at least harry the enemy, diverting and depleting his resources.
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