Schindler’s List
Schindler’s list’s girl in the red coat is steven spielberg at his most powerful: as German industrialist Oskar schindler (Liam Neeson) and his mistress Ingrid (Béatrice Macola) survey the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto from a hill on horseback, a girl (Oliwia Dabrowska) in a bright red coat walks blithely through the carnage, ignored by the Nazi soldiers and seemingly oblivious to the violence around her. It’s the film’s master image, a grace-note of colour in a black-and-white film, a moment of light in a world of darkness.
spielberg’s decision to make Schindler’s list in black-and-white became a battle. Universal chairman Tom Pollock implored the filmmaker to shoot his three-hour dive into Holocaust history on colour negative stock so a colour version could be made for the then lucrative home video market. Yet spielberg refused. “I don’t know the Holocaust in colour,” he explained on the film’s 25th anniversary. “Anyone who has seen any documentaries, they are all shot in black-andwhite.” Yet he knew a splash of colour amidst the monochrome could work wonders.
Rather than created in spielberg’s fevered imagination, the girl in the red coat was ripped from Thomas Keneally’s source novel. The actual girl was Gittel Chill — known as Red Genia due to her love of her coloured coat — who was left with her Uncle Idek, the Krakow Ghetto doctor, while her parents fled to the countryside (they were later killed). safer in the Ghetto, Genia gained a reputation for evading the Nazis until she was discovered and exterminated on 13 March 1943 — the day schindler spotted her.
To play Red Genia, spielberg chose Oliwia Dabrowska, a then three-yearold Krakow resident whose mother responded to an advert looking for a “a small girl with blonde hair”. Taken to the audition by her grandfather,
Dabrowksa remembered talking to spielberg “about my home, about dogs, and about e.t.” The scene was shot on szeroka street in Krakow in spring 1993, with the film’s technical advisor, Franciszek Palowski, observing that Oliwia “rebelled and cried, ‘I want my mama,’ but she quietened down in the arms of steven.” The next day Palowski reported spielberg had a double standing by just in case.
The girl in the red coat is often cited as the turning point for schindler’s change of heart, a pricking of his conscience, but for spielberg, the moment stands for something else. “she was wearing the brightest colour and she wasn’t being seen,” he recalled last year. “To me that meant Roosevelt, Eisenhower and probably stalin and Churchill knew about the Holocaust and did nothing to stop it. For me it was a glaring red flag that anybody — if they had been watching — could have seen.” some things are, it seems, just black-and-white.