So, who is this Girl in the Red Coat?
Well, it is a real woman - Roma Ligocka. You see, this is a memoir of a girl who has been through the horrors of the Kraków Ghetto and the communist Poland.What happened to her?
Being born only a year before the war started in a wealthy Jewish family, she didn't get the chance to have a happy childhood... actually she had no childhood at all. All their assets being taken away, she and her family where put in this huge walled-off area with other Jews.People dying left and right, continuous flood of diseases, little food, cramped rooms, shiny boots and black coats, non-stop executions - are only some of the things she had to witness during the time in the ghetto.
By the skin of their teeth, some - including her - survive the ghetto and will hide until the Russians will arrive in Krakow. But beyond the change in power, little has - people are still disappearing, activists of any kind are being persecuted, there is still little food and almost nothing to buy, Russian propaganda took the place of the German one, communism took the place of fascism.
Although she continues to live, learn, love, create and so on, the weight of the past will be, sometimes, too much to bear.
I heard about these kind of stories before, what's the catch?
I have been taught history at high-school and read history books; I passed history exams and discussed history with many other people, but there is something so refreshing and reassuring about reading a memoir - something that somebody felt on its own skin - you know that the story told is not the result of some debate or a political opinion about past events.The consequences
If you will read the book you will find out that Roma never had the idea of writing it all down - there was too much pain to be relived, the motivation for the book came to her after she saw Steven Spielberg's "Schindler's List" and decided that everybody that suffered didn't do so in vain and their story must be told. The tragedy of it all is that the memories of that crying little girl never really left her alone - they were following her in day-to-day life and in her dreams as well, putting in even more pressure on her shoulders as she was going through her troubled life.If you live in Chisinau or somewhere nearby, I will pleased to share this book with you, just write to me at - bitlana@gmail.com.
