Roma Ligocka's first sentence was: "I want to die with my mother." Death was nothing special for the three-year-old, nor for any other of the Jews forced by the Nazis to live in the Kracow Ghetto. She felt nothing when her aunt was shot dead before her eyes and saw nothing remarkable in the bodies lying on the street half-buried in the snow.
She was too young to know that life in the ghetto was not normal life. Fifty years later she would realise just how remarkable her experience was. Roma Ligocka was born into a Jewish family in Kracow in 1938 and was 10 months old when the Germans marched into Poland. When she was two, the Nazis rounded up her family and the rest of Kracow's Jews and locked them up in the ghetto. Ligocka is one of the "hidden children" of the ghetto who, unlike most other children, survived when the ghetto was emptied and its inhabitants shipped to the death camps.
It was as a survivor of the ghetto that the mayor of Kracow invited her, seven years ago, to attend the world premiere of Steven Spielberg's film Schindler's List, the story of how businessman Oskar Schindler saved hundreds of Jews from the concentration camps. The three-hour film was shot in black and white, except for one brief moment of colour when Schindler is transfixed by a small, tired-looking girl of no more than four years old in a red coat.
Ligocka froze when she saw the girl. She remembered the red coat that her grandmother had made her and which she wore during her life in the ghetto. "Dear God, that's me," she thought, unable to speak.
Ligocka met Spielberg two years ago in Berlin when he was awarded the German Order of Merit, the Bundeskreuz; Ligocka was invited to attend the ceremony to represent the survivors of the Kracow Ghetto.
After the ceremony, she walked up to the director and announced: "I am the girl in the red coat." She gave the surprised Spielberg a yellowing photo of her taken in 1946 together with her cousin, the film director Roman Polanski. Spielberg was astounded, she says.
"I didn't know the girl actually existed - why didn't I find you?" he asked her. Spielberg's film is based on the book Schindler's Ark, which author Thomas Keneally based to a large extent on interviews he conducted with survivors of the Kracow ghetto. "It may be that someone told him about me, or perhaps I was not the only girl in the ghetto with a red coat," says Ligocka.
Later in the film, Schindler sees the red coat a second time, on the ground, its owner presumably dead. Ligocka, however, survived. She has never forgotten her coat, nor how safe she felt when she wore it. She says the coat may have saved her life on more than one occasion.
"My mother told me I didn't look so pale when I had it on and that it made my dark hair and eyes less noticeable," she remembers. Ligocka and her mother were smuggled out of the ghetto and at first lived in hiding with a Kracow family. Had they been discovered, it would have meant death for them and the family. She was very nearly caught by German soldiers more than once and used every trick she could think of to convince them she wasn't a Jew.
"I remember once falling on my knees in front of a German soldier and starting to pray, `Hail Mary, full of grace . . .' " she says. Living through the war in Kracow with her mother was a daily game of cat and mouse, played in perpetual fear, not knowing what would happen next. Somehow she and her mother weren't discovered and deported; most of their relatives died in Auschwitz.
Ligocka's father survived the camp and found his wife and child again, only to be arrested by the new communist regime in Poland a year later and placed in another prison camp, where he died.
A day after the Schindler's List premiere, Ligocka decided to write her story. She says she felt like an archaeologist going into her own mind and finding the painful memories still there. As well as being anxious to tell her story, Ligocka is ready to defend her book against attacks from people such as Norman Finkelstein. In his recent book, The Holocaust Industry, Finkelstein condemns what he sees as the exploitation for profit of the Holocaust by the Jewish community.
Ligocka, today a painter in Munich, defends herself simply. "I just wanted to tell my story," she says. "I am a painter, not a professional Holocaust victim."
The Girl in the Red Coat (Das Madchen im Roten Mantel) by Roma Ligocka is published by Droemer Verlag and will be available soon in an English translation
