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Schindler's List little red-coat girl has grown up and is helping Ukrainian refugees in Poland 'I'm scared, but that only motivates me more to help the refugees,' Oliwia Dabrowska says Photo by Universal Pictures
Article content On occasion in the film Schindler’s List, a little girl is seen walking nonchalantly among the carnage left by the Nazis in Poland. Her red coat is for all intents and purposes the only colour in the otherwise black-and-white film. The girl’s presence is memorable not only for the shock of colour but for her composed demeanour amid a crowd of anxious people. With its incongruity, the bright red proclaimed there could be hope in a time when it was hard to feel any.
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tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Schindler's List little red-coat girl has grown up and is helping Ukrainian refugees in Poland Back to video That young actress was Oliwia Dabrowska. Today, she is a 32-year-old copywriter, still living in Poland, where the 1993 film was made. But in recent weeks she has also been a humanitarian, as so many Poles have been, helping find homes for Ukrainian refugees and attempting to raise funds for them. In the Instagram post below, she describes her feelings for the young Ukrainians’ suffering. “Those kids … my God, I can barely hold back my tears.” The sadness she experiences surfaces in much of the post, including this statement (paraphrased): “You can’t imagine the nightmare in the eyes of those people.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Oliwia Dąbrowska (@oliwia.dabrowska_)
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Article content Dabrowska’s family also participates. They meet the newcomers at reception centres and drive them far and wide to safety within Poland or to its borders away from Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. “I will do everything I can, I will never forget these people, those faces, those eyes, I will never forget what I’ve seen,” she writes. “You can’t prepare for that, you can only imagine there will be suffering people, children, old people, the sick.” More On This Topic Canadian infantry veteran enters ‘living hell’ in Ukraine to capture village from Russians Undocumented migrants from Russia come ashore in Key West and head for the bar She’s never far from the portrayal of that lone little girl. While she has only vague memories of filming — she was just three at the time — she does remember being tired because she had to get up at 3 a.m. to be on set.
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Article content As a university student, she told the The Times, “I was ashamed of being in the movie and angry with my mother and father when they told anyone about the part.” Being in the film led to much unwanted attention from well-meaning adults and school friends. “People said: ‘It must be so important to you, you must know so much about the Holocaust.’ I was frustrated by it all.” Dabrowska said she was “horrified” when she first watched the film at age 11, though she had promised director Steven Spielberg not to do so until she was 18. It wasn’t until much later that she realized she “had been part of something I could be proud of. Spielberg was right: I had to grow up to watch the film.” (Schindler’s List won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director for Spielberg, and three Golden Globes, and is still as haunting and transfixing as it was three decades ago.)
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Article content The industrialist Oskar Schindler, a staunch Nazi, had taken note — at least it is shown thus in the film — of a little girl walking alone through a crowd of frightened people and when he later saw the child’s dead body he was moved to save as many Jews as he could, hiding many of them in plain sight in his factories. The real Schindler has been credited with keeping some 1,200 Polish Jews alive, though there is little evidence he ever saw such a girl. Nonetheless, these days Dabrowska takes strength from that child, knowing people again need help escaping the horrors of war. Contrary to what one might expect, there’s no screaming or crying at the border, she says — just silence. “They scream inside and this is what I can’t forget. And if I need to do this as the girl in the red coat, let it be.”
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