Schindler’s List, Addiction, and the True Cost of Recovery
- alex50414
- Sep 13
- 3 min read
What if we made a list to save lives from addiction and mental illness like Schindler did in WWII? A bold call to reimagine treatment, stigma, and worth.
Oskar Schindler wasn’t always a hero.
He started the war as an opportunist. A Nazi Party member. A man who saw occupied Poland as a business opportunity. He wined and dined SS officers. He bought a factory that used Jewish slave labor. He made money.
But over time, Schindler changed.
It wasn’t ideology that moved him. It was the people. The workers. The children. The families.
He watched them disappear into ghettos and gas chambers.
And one day, he realized something: his money could stop it.
He could bribe. He could negotiate. He could maneuver to keep people on his factory list—and off the trains to Auschwitz.
By the end of the war, Schindler had saved 1,200 people.
Every ring, every coin, every favor was converted into a life.
And when it was over, he looked at his gold pin and wept:
“I could have saved one more.”
The 21st-Century Version of Schindler’s List
Today, we’re not facing Nazi genocide.
But we are facing a public health crisis that’s claiming hundreds of thousands of lives every year.
The weapon isn’t the gas chamber.
It’s untreated trauma.
Health insurance red tape.
Fentanyl. Meth. Alcohol. Isolation. Despair.
We see addiction as a choice, not a condition.
And who’s making the list?
Parents, desperate for help.
Unhoused people on the streets, in ERs, in jails.
Treatment centers that triage by ability to pay, not alienable rights.
People who get care, but not the right kind.
The thirty-day rehab model? Outdated.
The cost is too high. The results too low.
Schindler Had It Easy
There’s a moment in Schindler’s List, quiet, almost bureaucratic when Oskar learns the price of a life:
50 Reichsmarks per week.
If he paid, they lived.
If he didn’t, they died.
That kind of certainty made saving lives seem solvable. Measurable. The kind of thing a wealthy man could do with a checkbook and courage.
But what if saving a life doesn’t come with a price tag?
What if the cost is vague, variable, and compounding, with unknown promise of return?
What if the people who need help… don’t want help?
Schindler had it easy.
Because helping someone with severe addiction or mental illness isn’t a one-time act.
It’s a revolving door. It’s relapse and return.
There’s no pill. No perfect program. No cure.
We don’t save people once.
We help them stay alive over and over again.
Building a New List
Reimagining treatment means challenging antiquated models:
30 days inside a building
Cut off from the world
No phone, no job, no autonomy, no dignity
That’s not treatment.
That’s postponement.
Treatment Reimagined
Let’s start over with connection, not control.
Where relapse isn’t failure, but learning.
Where we ask not “Why the addiction?” but “Why the pain?” (thanks, Gabor Maté)
Where preservation of life comes before abstinence
Where we stop treating symptoms and start empowering transformation.
Where we extol mental fitness the way we do physical fitness.
Where we celebrate the truth that:
“The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.” (thanks, Apple)
A Different Ending
Oskar Schindler didn’t start out as a hero.
He was a war profiteer.
A man of contradictions.
But he made a choice:
To spend his money not on hedonic pleasures
but on preservation of life.
He gave up his fortune for a list.
To care about the undesirable.
To buy hope.
To invest with no guaranteed return.
We tell that story like it’s extraordinary.
And it is.
But maybe… it shouldn’t be.
Because today, we know what Schindler never could:
That addiction and mental illness do not define a life’s worth.
That recovery is not only possible, it’s transformative.
That the return on investing in someone’s life is exponential.
Just ask the Presidents.
The billionaires.
The Nobel laureates.
The artists, the scientists, the mothers and fathers.
All who once struggled.
All who were saved because someone believed in them before they could believe in themselves.
So here’s the call to action:
Let us build systems that invest in people the way Schindler did:
Not because it’s profitable,
But because it’s right.
Let us stop judging people by their lowest moment.
And start designing care that helps them reach their highest potential.
Let us create communities, not clinics:
Where healing is not only possible, but expected.
Because the question isn’t whether a life is worth saving.
It’s whether we are brave enough, like Schindler, to prove it.
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