Great Character: The Little Girl in Red (“Schindler’s List”)

She doesn’t have one word of dialogue in the movie, yet this is one of the most important characters in the movie Schindler’s List (1993) [screenplay by Steve Zaillian, based on the book by Thomas Keneally]: The Little Girl in Red.

Up to this point in the movie, Oskar Schindler [Liam Neeson] has managed to live something of a double life, a Nazi businessman who can work with German military officials while overlooking the atrocities they are committing. Then one day he and his wife Emilie [Caroline Goodall] go out for a horse ride. From atop a hill, they witness the ‘cleansing’ of the Jewish ghetto in Krakow:

http://static.movieclips.com/embedplayer.swf?shortid=2o8b

The Little Girl in Red is the only color image in the historical part of an otherwise black-and-white film. Why did director Steven Spielberg make this cinematic choice?

I think it’s because the Little Girl in Red puts a distinguishable human face on the insanity of the Nazi treatment of the Jews. Specifically her experience is what reaches out and grabs Schindler by the throat, a moment of searing truth causing him to see through whatever moral accommodations he had made up to this point and transform his world view, starting him on the path that turned him into the hero he became, saving the lives of 1100 Jewish prisoners. In this respect, this tiny character in the briefest of subplots functions as one of the story’s most important Attractor figures.

As per the clip above, the Little Girl in Red crawling under a bed, we are left with the briefest flicker of hope that she might survive. But in our heart of hearts, we know better.

It may be impossible to imagine what it means for 6,000,000 Jews to perish at the hands of Nazi Germany. But the fate of the Little Girl in Red? That small human story drives home the tragedy on a deeply personal level.

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