«ANDY THOUGHT ABOUT JEWS A LOT» -BOB COLACELLO

Jewish Journal: Would you have made “Schindler’s List” without your own Jewish background?

Spielberg: I don’t think “Schindler’s List” would have compelled me to the extent that it did, had I not been part of a deeply Jewish Orthodox experience growing up. I was raised Orthodox, then became Conservative and eventually became Reform.

I don’t think “Schindler’s List” would have had the hold that it has had on me had my parents not been such good teachers, and had not my grandparents [immigrants from the Odessa region of Ukraine] risked frightening me to death with horrendous stories of what happened to their friends and relatives in Eastern Europe during the Holocaust.

I grew up with all these scary stories as a little kid. And, indeed, learned to count by reading the numbers tattooed on the arm of a Hungarian survivor, in Cincinnati, in 1948 and ’49, when I was 2 to 3 years old. I think the book [“Schindler’s Ark”] by Thomas Keneally probably would not have come to my attention had I not been opened to it. Had I not been, it would not have somehow magically landed in my lap.

-Jewish Journal