Roma Ligocka / Roma Liebling (F / Poland, 1938), Holocaust survivor

Roma Ligocka / Roma Liebling (F / Poland, 1938), Holocaust survivor.

• KEYWORDS : <Krakow Ghetto> <Hidden Children> <False Papers>
• MEMOIRS : "The Girl in the Red Coat" (2000)

Book : The Girl in the Red Coat (2000)

• Das Mädchen im roten Mantel (München: Droemer, 2000). English edition: The Girl in the Red Coat (New York : St. Martin's Press, 2002). Also translated into Polish (2001).

"Memoirs of a Jew (née Liebling) born in 1938 in Kraków. Pp. 7-187 deal with the Holocaust period. Describes life in the ghetto. In March 1943, Roma and her mother left the ghetto and lived in hiding with false papers under the name Ligocka. Her father was deported to Plaszów, and from there to Auschwitz. He escaped from Auschwitz during the evacuation in January 1945 and returned to Kraków. In 1946 he was arrested and maltreated in prison, suffered a stroke, and died after several weeks. Roma and her mother remained in Kraków. Roma later became an actress, married several times and had a son, but had difficulty coping with her past. In 1994, after seeing Spielberg's film "Schindler's List" and identifying herself as the little girl in the red coat, she wrote her story of survival ... 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.--Publisher description.