The Girl in the Red Coat
A Memoir
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4.6 • 14 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 determined 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As a young child, in the Krakow ghetto, Ligocka was known to everyone by the strawberry-red coat she always wore an image that Steven Spielberg would use in Schindler's List, without knowing anything about Ligocka herself. Determined to tell her own story, Ligocka gives a harrowing, impressionistic account of her early memories of the ghetto: the men in shiny black boots with snarling dogs, the endless waiting in lines, people shot indiscriminately and her grandmother's seizure by SS officers while Ligocka hides under a table. Ligocka and her mother sneak out of the ghetto and are taken in by a Polish family; her father, taken to Auschwitz, escapes several years later. In a poignant episode, the little girl doesn't recognize this haggard specter who wants to embrace her. The memoir also describes Ligocka's youth in Communist Krakow: her career as an actress in theater and films, her struggle as an adult to confront her frightful memories and the weathering of new crises, from the passing of her parents to political turmoil in Poland. Though Ligocka's rendering of her early childhood voice isn't quite seamless (it sometimes sounds forced and too knowing), this doesn't take away from the power of her narrative, and readers may be particularly interested in her experiences as one of a tiny handful of Jewish survivors in Communist Poland. 30 b&w photos. (Sept. 16)
