Schindler listája
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#107
Oliwia Dabrowska
May 28, 1989 in Kraków, Malopolskie, Poland
The girl in the red coat
Schindler sees a little girl wearing a red coat. The red coat is one of the few instances of color in the black-and-white scenes of the film.
Although the film is primarily shot in black-and-white, red is used to distinguish a little girl in a coat. Later in the film, the girl is seen among the dead, recognizable only by the red coat she is still wearing. Although it was unintentional, this character is coincidentally very similar to Roma Ligocka, who was known in the Kraków Ghetto for her red coat. Ligocka, unlike her fictional counterpart, survived the Holocaust. After the film was released, she wrote and published her own story, The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir (2002, in translation).[16] The scene, however, was constructed on the memories of Zelig Burkhut, survivor of Plaszow (and other work camps). When interviewed by Spielberg before the film was made, Burkhut told of a young girl wearing a pink coat, no older than four, who was shot by a Nazi officer right before his eyes. When being interviewed by The Courier-Mail, he said "it is something that stays with you forever."
According to Andy Patrizio of IGN, the girl in the red coat is used to indicate that Schindler has changed: "Spielberg put a twist on her [Ligocka's] story, turning her into one more pile on the cart of corpses to be incinerated. The look on Schindler's face is unmistakable. Minutes earlier, he saw the ash and soot of burning corpses piling up on his car as just an annoyance."[17] Andre Caron wondered whether it was done "to symbolize innocence, hope or the red blood of the Jewish people being sacrificed in the horror of the Holocaust?"[18] Spielberg himself has explained that he only followed the novel, and his interpretation was that
"America and Russia and England all knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and yet we did nothing about it. We didn't assign any of our forces to stopping the march toward death, the inexorable march toward death. It was a large bloodstain, primary red color on everyone's radar, but no one did anything about it. And that's why I wanted to bring the color red in."[19]
This partial climax in the film may have been influenced by the final scene of Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, an entire black-and-white film which shows a few moments of color at the end to put an exclamation point on Rublev's spiritual change. This is a far more likely influence on Spielberg than the suggested Lars von Trier's film, Europa, was in relation to this approach.[neutrality is disputed]
Although she has no speaking part, the little girl is noted on the Internet Movie Database as the "Red Genia". Her portrayer, Oliwia Dabrowska, was born in Krakow on 28 May 1989 and later appeared in only one other movie.