My youth is filled with memories of your movies, to some degree you have been a part of my life for a long time, so please, allow me to call you Steven.
Steven, I grew up in Acapulco, and at the tender age of 10 you gave me a scare that produced goosebumps on me each time I went for a swim in the ocean.
Then came an onslaught of easy to watch movies, not a whole lot of content, but easy to watch nevertheless.
One day you surprised many around the world with your movie about Oskar Schindler and the Holocaust. By then I was heavy into Kurosawa, Kubrik, Stone and Scorcese. So, I thought it was a valiant effort on your part, but the movie was not all that.
Now they are announcing your new movie, the one called "Munich". I read something about you wanting to be up for a bunch of Oscars and I really don't know if you are going to be able to pull the trick, but good luck to you.
But let me get to the reason of this open letter to you.
As you may know, there is a large selection of movies that revolve around the Holocaust. They must be hundreds.
If you add those to all the movies made about WWII and the Nazis, we can be talking about thousands of movies that touch some way or the other the nightmare that this particular era was to all of humankind.
Today I ask, in how many of those movies about the Holocaust do you get to see what happened to all the non-Jewish victims of the Nazi murderous machinery?
How many are there that talk about the Roma*?
How many show what happened to the Basques?
I'm sure you know that millions of Roma died in the same concentration camps where the Jewish were massacred.
You may not know that also many Basques met their deaths at those very same camps. Is not your fault, the Basques have been all but removed from the world's historic records.
What I am getting at is that not you nor any of the other movie directors that talked about the Holocaust so far have had the courage to present the other victims of the Holocaust to the world.
Why does this happen?
One world: box office.
The Roma and the Basques do not sell as well as the Jewish, so why bother making a movie about them.
And in doing so you help perpetuate what the Nazis (an many others) worked on, to refuse a place for the Roma, the Basques and many others in this planet.
We all decry what happened to the Jewish community in Europe under the Nazi regime, we really hope that it never ever happens again.
But only a few of us wish for that also for many others: the forgotten victims, the unsung heroes, the voiceless.
Not you nor any of your fellow movie directors ever made a movie about the Basque resistance being fully engaged in the rescue of Jewish individuals (children mainly) throughout World War II. Name a movie that depicts the horrors of Gernika being bombed by the Luftwaffe.
You can't, because there is none.
But suddenly you feel like including something Basque in one of your movies, and this is all you could come up to according to an article by the World Peace Herald called "Walker's World: Terror's challenge to democracies":
The next mission, in Greece, finds the Israeli team, who are claiming to be European terrorists from the Basque ETA, and the German Red Army Faktion, sharing a safe house with a group of PLO bodyguards. Inevitably, but in a scene that strains credulity, the Israeli team leader finds himself discussing the justice of the Palestinian cause with one of the PLO men.
Oh my.
Never a movie about the Basque priest that used to spirit Jewish children away from the Nazis by carrying them on his back from Vichy's France to the Spanish Basque Country. Never a movie about the 14 year old Basque boy tortured by the Gestapo as to obtain information about the boy's father who was in charge of a group taking Jewish people across the border. Never a movie about the Basque smuggler who scaped a Nazi jail even with a broken leg. Never a movie about the hundreds of Basques murdered by Franco's underlings for hiding Jewish families.
Oh, but there you go, making a movie that will perpetuate the wrong (and criminal) perception that equates the Basque people to terrorism.
Steven Spielberg, shame on you.
Shame on you.
* Wrongly called Gypsies
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