The Girl in the Red Coat: A Memoir
Roma Ligocka
The book opens with an elderly Jewish woman sitting in the elegant dining room of a posh hotel on the French Riviera. Suddenly and quite seamlessly it transitions to the dark Ghetto of Kraków, Poland during World War II and I was hooked!
Roma Ligocka was born to Jewish parents in Poland in November 1938, less than a year before the beginning of World War II. Told through the eyes of a child, the story of her early years living in the Jewish Ghetto of Kraków is a harrowing account of uniformed men in shiny black boots with snarling dogs, people being shot indiscriminately, her mother’s tears, and from her hiding place under a table, seeing her own grandmother seized by SS officers. After her father is arrested and taken to Auschwitz, Roma and her mother, with their hair dyed blonde and carrying falsified documents, escape the Ghetto and are taken in by a non-Jewish family who pass them off as visiting cousins. Sometime later, when her father escapes the concentration camp and is reunited with his family, she fails to recognize the haggard spectre that he has become.
Roma is just short of her seventh birthday when the war comes to an end, but her life continues to be marked by severe hardship. Within two years her father dies and the communists take control of Poland.
As her adult life unfolds, we see the results of the trauma that she endured as a child. Although she studied art and costume design at the prestigious Academy of the Arts and became a successful costume and set designer, she continued to confront her frightful memories and her adult life is characterized by anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse and the inability to maintain lasting relationships.
Finally, at the age of 55, on March 2, 1994, Roma reluctantly attended the première of Steven Spielberg’s epic movie “Schindler’s List” in Kraków. The Academy Award-winning movie was shot entirely in black and white except for the image of a little girl in a red coat. Seeing something of herself in that little girl, Roma, who had had a bright red coat of her own as a wee child, finally felt inspired and strong enough to tell the story of her own experiences.
Interestingly, although I suspected it early on, until late in the book, Ligocka doesn’t reveal the fact that her cousin, Roman, with whom she had a close relationship, was none other than the famous director, producer, writer and actor, Roman Polanski.
If I didn’t know that this novel was was a well-researched, but fictionalized retelling of a true story I would have thought it a bit far-fetched. A father giving his 16-year-old daughter control of three family plantations in South Carolina while he leaves the country to secure his political position on the Caribbean island of Antigua would be remarkable at any time, but this was 1738! At a time when the role of women was purely domestic, intelligent and headstrong Eliza Lucas was determined to find a cash crop to pull the plantations out of debt, pay for their upkeep, and support her family.
This book is really three stories in one, each distinct, but all connected. Deborah Birch is a seasoned hospice nurse assigned to care for an embittered and lonely history professor whose career ended in academic scandal. As his life slowly ebbs away, the professor, an expert in the Pacific Theater of World War II, begrudgingly puts his trust in Deborah and begins to share with her an unpublished book that he wrote. As she reads to him from his story about a Japanese fighter pilot who dropped bombs on the coastline of Oregon, he challenges her to decide if it is true or not.
I’ve been avoiding books set during World War II lately. Over the past year or so I’d read so many of that popular genre that I was growing weary of them, but The Book Thief was different from most.
Being diagnosed with a life-changing illness can be completely overwhelming. In Hope for the Best, Plan for the Rest, Drs. Sammy Winemaker and Hsien Seow offer a valuable guide to help patients and families deal with their new reality. Combining their decades of palliative care research and experience caring for seriously ill patients and harnessing the advice of thousands of patients, they offer 7 keys for navigating a life-changing diagnosis. With real-life stories, tips, and exercises, these compassionate experts empower patients with practical tools to help them successfully navigate the health care system with knowledge and confidence.
At the outset, Gina Holmes’ Crossing Oceans reminded me of a sappy Christmas movie. You know the ones… after several years away, beautiful young woman returns to her quaint mid American hometown where she encounters sweet, kindhearted, and inexplicably single man from her past who sweeps her off her feet and solves all her problems.
Until the end, when the two finally come together, this is really two completely different storylines connected only by a specific location.
Geertruida (Truus) Wijsmuller, a childless member of the Dutch resistance, risks her life smuggling Jewish children out of Nazi Germany to the nations that will take them. It is a mission that becomes even more dangerous after Hitler’s annexation of Austria when, across Europe, countries begin to close their borders to the growing number of refugees desperate to escape. After Britain passes a measure to take in at-risk child refugees from the German Reich, Tante Truus, as she is known by the children, dares to approach Adolf Eichmann, the man who would later help devise the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question” and is granted permission to escort a trainload of 600 children (not 599 or 601, but exactly 600) out of the country. In a race against time, 600 children between the ages of 4 and 17 are registered, photographed, checked by medical doctors and put on board the train to begin a perilous journey to an uncertain future abroad. Thus begins the famous Kindertransport system that went on to transport thousands of children out of various parts of Europe during the Nazi occupation of the region in the late 1930s, immediately prior to the official start of World War II.
After reading Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, a 713 page novel about life in India in the 1970s and 80s, and then Timothy Keller’s The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism, I was looking for something light to read! Something frivolous and entertaining.
Following Augustine 