07/08/16 Schindler's List Actor: Every Heart Feels
Offering a view of the future, PETA Germany's video "Hope" moved viewers around the world
- The powerful new video, which has been translated into Croatian, confronts our cruel and shameful past
What would the world be like if we took the lessons from our past to heart? In a beautiful and moving clip titled "Hope" by PETA Germany, vegan actor Jochen Nickel (best known for his role in the movie Schindler's List) plays a grandfather walking with his grandson through the ruins of an abandoned factory farm, one of thousands shut down when humans stopped eating animal flesh. Revisiting the dark remnants of the past, he asks humanity's essential questions: "Who are we? What defines us?"
While pressing on through the dreary factory farm, he remembers: "We pretended they couldn't feel. What was it that made us so blind? Our compassion buried beneath selfishness. Who gave us the right?"
Gazing at the hooks that once held slaughtered animals, Nickel vividly remembers the past and cautions that it mustn't be forgotten: "Their screams still echo in my ears, the smell of their fear stuck in my nose. Their blood on our hands, on our plates. No water will wash it away. No eternity will make it fade."
Although he says that he still sees "their pleading eyes," he reveals that the farm is one among many closed when humans "realized that every heart feels" and decided that animals can no longer be products.
At the end of this short but powerful clip, grandfather and grandson leave behind the ruins and walk together into a peaceful, sun-drenched field, where Nickel says to his grandson: "I'm guilt and conscience... and you, you are hope!"
In Croatia, there are more than 160,000 vegans and vegetarians. That number keeps growing, in Croatia and throughout the world, every day. But this video shows a world of the future in which everyone stops eating animal products―the future that could one day be a reality.
Every one of us has the means to become aware of our habits, learn from past mistakes, oppose the killing of more than 60 billion animals every year, and be the hope for all conscious, sentient living beings.
The video "Hope", which Animal Friends Croatia translated and subtitled in Croatian in collaboration with PETA, can be viewed here.