Roma Ligocka

Roma Ligocka was a young Jewish girl in Poland during the reign of Nazi Germany. She lived in the Kraków Ghetto after the Nazi German invasion, close to where later the Kraków-Płaszów concentration camp was established. In Spielberg's dramatic biographical film on Oskar Schindler — Schindler's List — the little red girl is seen as the Kraków Ghetto is liquidated, with it's inhabitants forced into Kraków-Płaszów camp. In the film she breaks off from a group of Jews herded toward the camp and hides under a bed in the ghetto buildings, which were later searched with anyone found shot. She is later seen as one of the 10,000 corpses being dug up by the Jewish slave labour force from the mass graves of those killed in the liquidation of the ghetto to be exhumed before the camp would have been dismantled and the remaining Jews sent to Auschwitz. Roma Ligocka actually survived the Holocaust and wrote a memoir later of her experiences both during and after the war (ISBN-10: 0312287941; ISBN-13: 978-0312287948).

Inhabitants of the ghetto remembered Roma as the young girl that always wore a strawberry-red coat. Spielberg features her in colour in the otherwise desaturated black & white film, perhaps to symbolize the shed blood, innocence and/or hope of the Jewish people throughout the Holocaust.

The sign in the painting was at the entrance to the ghetto. In full the top part read “JUDENVIERTEL”, translating to Jewish Quarter/Ghetto, and underneath, “DZIELNICA ZYDOWSKA”, of which I don't know the translation.

What I see on the rest of deviantART and elsewhere generally puts my painting skills to shame, but I couldn't think of a better medium that I felt comfortable with. GIMP 2.3 devel, Wacom Intuos 3 A5-wide, 2 hours.