Child survivors of the Holocaust. Many are now sharing their life stories and memories of that brutal page in the last century’s history. This is one woman’s story that may at first seem an unusual book to recommend for holiday reading.
Rarely in our busy lives do we have the time to reflect quietly and at length on the tragedies of human existence. Indeed we most often fill our lives with busyness to escape such confronting evidence of human sin and cruelty towards the innocent. But it can’t hurt to spend a brief while of one’s leisure and holiday time to consider the depths of evil often displayed in this story. It provides an impetus and example for us to understand and preach the reality of human sin and viciousness.
Roma Ligocka, cousin of Polish film director Roman Polanski, was the only daughter of a Polish Jewish family that survived the horrors of the Krakow ghetto where thousands were butchered by Nazi troops.
She was one of the ‘hidden children’ who spent years peering out a window of the flat where she and her mother were sheltered, watching and wondering at other children playing.
When the war ended she grew up in Communist Poland and studied art and set design at the Academy of the Arts in Krakow. She married twice, had one son, and lived a nomadic and bohemian life in Europe as a renowned artist and theatrical designer. Her childhood memories were carefully hidden away, even from herself.
When, at her son’s urging, she attended the Polish premiere of Steven Speilberg’s Schindler’s List , the story of the Krakow ghetto, she saw the haunting image he uses of the girl in the red coat. Roma Ligocka recalled her own small red coat, and her painful memories of the childhood trauma welled up and confronted her.
Afterwards she wrote this story of ‘the little girl crying deep inside her’ that help us all to understand the horror of one of the great holocausts of human history and how it impacted on individuals.
In an age where many reactionary voices are rewriting history to claim that the narrative of the Jewish Holocaust under the Nazis is a fraud, this story, told with the simplicity and innocence of a child, will rivet the reader’s attention and will put to flight any belief that it did not happen.
