The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir

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Macmillan, Sep 18, 2002 - Biography & Autobiography - 292 pages
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.
 

Selected pages

Contents

Section 1
1
Section 2
9
Section 3
17
Section 4
30
Section 5
73
Section 6
91
Section 7
103
Section 8
133
Section 12
201
Section 13
218
Section 14
231
Section 15
247
Section 16
255
Section 17
268
Section 18
269
Section 19
282

Section 9
151
Section 10
168
Section 11
184
Section 20
289
Copyright

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About the author (2002)

Roma Ligocka lives in Berlin.

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