Ralph Fiennes once recalled the incredibly disturbing thing a Polish woman said to him while he was filming Schindler's List.
The film follows Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who went on to save more than a thousand mostly Polish–Jewish refugees from the Holocaust between 1941 and 1945.
It was a stark look into the evils of Nazi Germany in WWII.
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In the 1993 film, Liam Neeson took on the role of Schindler, while Ralph Fiennes played brutal Nazi official Amon Göth.
Göth was a member of Adolf Hitler’s SS, who oversaw the heinous concentration camps which were used to murder millions of Jewish people through torture, gas chambers and manual labor.
While Fiennes extensively researched for his Steven Spielberg's movie, he was caught off guard when filming in Poland.
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Fiennes, who spoke to The Washington Post, went on to share a shocking meeting he had with a Polish woman while filming the movie.
He recalled his thoughts of his character: "You have to be wary of labeling evil in a blanket way, as just evil.
"I think that playing a part like that, you can't judge it; I can't look at the effect or the final result. I think one's job is rather to look at the cause, rather than the symptom, if you like.
"So I really put away, I pushed aside, the sense of 'This man is evil. This man is a sadist.'”
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He added: “I just started off with the premise that this is a man who was once a child in diapers and, somewhere along the line, events and 'some vicious mole of nature' in him took over his life and produced these actions which are horrific.”
Fiennes’ version of the SS member was portrayed a little too well, as when he was filming on the streets, wearing his Nazi uniform, a random woman would shout down to him that she wished the Nazi’s ‘were back here protecting us again'.
Fiennes said that while in Poland, he was reminded that people are still infected with ‘Hitler's obscene set of beliefs.’
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He shared that a Polish woman came up to him, smiling and nodding and talking to him.
However, because the actor didn’t speak her language, he simply smiled back.
That’s when a friend translated: "She said, 'The Germans were charming people, and they didn't kill anyone who didn't deserve it.' "
This was the stark reality of what some people still believed even 50 years after the war.
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For the actor, it was frightening.
The only way he could portray such a man was to start afresh.
He said: "I just sort of elbowed away this prejudice about Amon Göth. I found him vulnerable ... not that he would know about it, but I sensed that there would be some sort of fracture or twist or canker in his psychological makeup or soul or whatever you want to call it that needed to find some palliative.
"There's a void inside him that needed to be filled with some sort of violence. ... The closest he gets to knowing who he is is by brutality. Although I don't for a minute think that Amon Göth is conscious of that himself."
Fiennes's portrayal of Amon Göth won him the best supporting actor award from the National Society of Film Critics and the New York Film Critics Circle.
Topics: World War 2, Germany, Film and TV, Celebrity, History
Britt Jones