Interesting and sad(well she did survived but it was still sad in places)read about a girl who grew up in hiding during the WWII.

The blurb is a bit misleading though seeming to imply that the author was the basis for the girl in the movie "Schindlers list" wearing a red coat during the purging of the jewish ghetto. I have always found this scene so moving

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schindler's_List#Girl_in_red

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j1VL-y9JHuI

The author as a child wore a red coat as a child when she was in the ghetto but when watching the movie she recognized the red coat and the little girl it as a symbol of her own childhood. ( )

This really should be a 3 star plus rating, but I really didn't love it. I think I heard too many good things about it before I read it, so I was a little disappointed.

I liked the character, and really liked the fact that you saw her journey through life, as compared to most books of this sort that kind of end right after the war. She comes into her own as an adult, and deals with things as a survivor of the war, which we get to see.

The writing about her being in the war, as a tiny child were very hard to take. Most of these things are hard to imagine and read about, but I think the fact that I was seeing through the eyes of a child made it so much more heartwrenching.

All in all, I'm glad I read the book, and I would be curious to know what happens after the story ends. ( )

J'ai adorer cette histoire, bien que je l'ai lue il y a 2 ans (quand j'avais 9 ans) ;

As a witness and survivor of the Shoah, Roma Ligocka's biography is not my first choice in providing a true picture of having endured that hell. I remember watching Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List and the little girl in the red coat stood out wandering alone and overlooked by the Nazi troops.It was a compelling picture! When I saw the title of this memoir I knew I had to read it. However, her childhood memories appear too perfect, too knowing, too detailed for a child of such a tender age. For me, this level of recall for a child felt contrived and detracted from a testimony that needs to be heard again and again. Roma's life is revealed to us from the Krakow ghetto, through Comunist Poland and eventually to becoming a wife, mother and struggling artist. All in all this 'novel' like memoir is a worth the time to read but it is not the most compelling testimony available. There is a degree of vanity and self centeredness that is out of place in such a harrowing time. A much better memoir would be found in Eli Wiesel's Night or Dawn or in Ann Ornstein's My Mother's Eyes: Holocaust Memories of a Young Girl. ( )

It would really be misleading to call this a Holocaust memoir. Roma Ligocka does write about the Holocaust, but she was a very young child during that time and her vague, fragmentary memories of it take up only a few chapters of the book. The rest of the book is about her growing up and her adulthood as an artist. I didn't find the book all that interesting, and I thought Roma liked to promote herself a lot, talking about how beautiful she was, etc. Interesting detail: Roma's cousin is the famous film director Roman Polanski, and he's one of the major characters in the early part of the book. ( )