When she first saw Schindler's List--to whose premiere in Germany she was invited--Roma Ligocka suddenly realized she was witnessing a part of her own life. She felt instinctively that the little girl in the red coat--the only spot of color in the film--was her. When she had lived in the Krakow ghetto during the Second World War she had worn a strawberry-red coat given to her by her grandmother. Unlike the girl in Spielbeg's film, however, Roma survived the war. Startled by this eerie conjunction of art and reality, Ligocka determind to write the story of her own life, to find out what had become of the little girl, and to measure who she now was. From a harrowing childhood under the Nazis, described with a simplicity and innocence that lends it even greater power, through the trials of living in Communist Poland, to a career in the theater and film (an artistic struggle paralleling that of her cousin, Roman Polanski), Ligocka traces her struggle for self-defiition and happiness. The Girl in the Red Coat is a courageous and moving story of survival and triumph.

The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir

Biographies & Memoirs

Ligocka, Roma

Community & Culture

St.Martin's Press

Roma Ligocka has lived multiple lives over the last fifty years - artist, theatrical designer, bohemian nomad, political activist, wife, mother - but she was first 'the girl in the red coat' . Famously picked out in red in the black and white footage of Spielberg's 'Schindler's List' it was only when she saw the image of herself on screen that she realised the extent of her failure to come to terms with the anguish of her childhood. This powerful memoir revisits the horror of her early years and reveals how far its effects have reached throughout her life. Leading an apparently successful life, she has nonetheless often been at the mercy of depressions. Now, after 50 years, she is able to write about honestly examining the scars of a traumatic childhood and getting past sorrow while still acknowledging the truth of the past.

Girl in the Red Coat

History

World

Sceptre

As a child in German-occupied Poland, Roma Ligocka was known for the bright strawberry-red coat she wore against a tide of gathering darkness. Fifty years later, Roma, an artist living in Germany, attended a screening of Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, and instantly knew that “the girl in the red coat”—the only splash of color in the film—was her. Thus began a harrowing journey into the past, as Roma Ligocka sought to reclaim her life and put together the pieces of a shattered childhood. The result is this remarkable memoir, a fifty-year chronicle of survival and its aftermath. With brutal honesty, Ligocka recollects a childhood at the heart of evil: the flashing black boots, the sudden executions, her mother weeping, her father vanished…then her own harrowing escape and the strange twists of fate that allowed her to live on into the haunted years after the war. Powerful, lyrical, and unique among Holocaust memoirs, The Girl in the Red Coat eloquently explores the power of evil to twist our lives long after we have survived it. It is a story for anyone who has ever known the darkness of an unbearable past—and searched for the courage to move forward into the light.

Von Finckenstein, Iris

Delta

Das Mädchen im roten Mantel (German Edition)

Literature & Fiction

Genre Fiction

Droemer

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