In some instances, former Schindler Jews readily identify their own experience with a scene in Schindler’s List. When the interviewer asks Marianne Rosner to recount her arrival in Auschwitz, she explains:

Rosner’s initial confusing of the gas chamber with the shower in her narrative recalls the film’s suspenseful juxtaposition of these two sites and the respective fates that awaited prisoners in each location. Her account of “looking for myself” in the film extends this conflation of remembering her own experience at Auschwitz with what she saw enacted on screen. As she acknowledges the distinction between the two (“we went through exactly the same thing”) she nonetheless seeks her “self,” transformed into a dramatic character, in Schindler’s List. The survivor’s subjectivity, a much-vaunted attribute of these interviews, seems to be in limbo, searching for realization in a virtual simulation of the “self.” Similarly, the distinction between the actuality of being a prisoner at Auschwitz and its reenactment is obscured; they are “exactly the same thing.” 

The various ways that survivors imbricate Schindler’s List in their accounts of wartime events they had experienced intimate that they did not simply watch the film differently from other viewers, but that they, in effect, saw a different film, into which they integrated their remembrances during the act of watching. A particularly striking example appears in the interview with Benek Geizhals, as he discusses the scene in Schindler’s List where Schindler is seen on horseback, watching the Cracow ghetto liquidation.

Geizhals can “see” a red building while watching the film, but the rest of us cannot, as it was shot in black and white.

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