When you think of a family movie to watch with your kid, “Schindler’s List” probably doesn’t come to mind. But now that it’s streaming on Netflix, a new addition for 2025, it’s actually top of my list for watching with my tween son. And I think it should be on top of yours, too.
No, I don’t want to scare him or scar him — at least not any more than the film has scared and scarred the rest of us. In fact, I was his same age, 10 years old, when “Schindler’s List” first hit theaters in 1993. My dad, a son of Holocaust survivors, took me to see it. I had known by then that my grandparents had been in concentration camps, but I didn’t think about what had happened before that: how they were taken from their homes, stripped of their possessions, pushed into ghettos, and eventually loaded onto cattle cars, their gentile neighbors in what’s now Belarus looking on apathetically. “Schindler’s List” contextualized their experience more vividly than my dad could.
I want my son to see all this so he understands what his great-grandparents endured simply for being Jewish — and to encourage him to do his part in standing up to hate.
He’s really not too young to learn about this. Holocaust education, in schools that offer it, typically starts in 4th grade. Last year, my son’s class read “Number the Stars” by Lois Lowry of “The Giver” fame. It’s historical fiction about a Danish family passing off their 10-year-old daughter’s Jewish best friend as their own to keep her safe until she could get to neutral Sweden. When the students finished the book, my son’s teacher invited me to speak to the class about my grandparents’ own harrowing stories. So if your child is 9 or older, educators think they’re old enough to learn about the Shoah. Judging by the students’ thoughtful questions, I wholeheartedly agree.
Even though “Number the Stars” is still one of my favorite books of all time, it’s just one small piece of the Holocaust story, and kids are ready and capable of learning and seeing more. In an otherwise black-and-white “Schindler’s List,” you can watch the little girl in the red coat go from walking around in one scene to lying lifeless in a pile of corpses in another. That’s a memorable, effective way to show how hate turns into violence. Plus, it paints a clear picture of just how innocent victims of hatred can be.
True, both these works champion righteous gentiles, with “Schindler’s List” in particular centering a non-Jew. It’s important to expose kids to Holocaust narratives about Jews saving themselves, too. But what I love about “Schindler’s List” is that it shows how necessary it is to step up to help others in the face of injustice, even when it’s risky and uncomfortable, even when your own people would tell you not to. I don’t care who is centered in a book or movie if my children learn that crucial lesson.
Your kid might do fine seeing such an explicit movie in public like I did, but I’m grateful we can watch it at home. You can pause to answer your child’s questions in real time without disturbing theater-goers. You can shut off the film and return to it another time if your child (or you) needs a break. If it winds up being too much, your child can walk away without attracting an audience’s attention.
Ultimately, your child should have a say in whether or not to watch it, but if they’re emotionally mature enough, they deserve the chance to make that choice. I told my son: “There’s a movie on Netflix about a German man who saved many Jews during the Holocaust. But it also shows horrible things happening to Jews during the war. I saw it with Grandpa Bob when I was 10. Do you want to watch it with me?” I got a “sure” in response, which is about as enthusiastic as my tween gets about activities with his mom these days. It won’t be a raging good time, but I bet it’ll become a core memory, as seeing the movie with my now-deceased dad became for me.
