-HOPE 2022-
4ft x 4ft acrylic on canvas

www.msnbc.com/ali-velshi/watch/life-imitates-art-girl-in-the-red-coat-from-schindler-s-list-helping-refugees-at-polish-ukrainian-border-137861189983

If you would like to help please donate here

zrzutka.pl/en/evetp6

The language on the page translates to:

Can you imagine what it is like when someone forcibly forces you to leave your home and all your belongings? To leave the immediate family - husband, brother, father, son? Can you imagine escaping a bombed-out house, avoiding the bodies of your unlucky neighbors on the street?

The inhabitants of Ukraine do not have to imagine it, because for them it is a terrifying everyday life. They leave their country not because they want to, but because the escape from war zones is often their only chance to survive.

I, Oliwia Dąbrowska, cannot agree to such great injustice. When I played The Girl in the Red Plane, I was only 3 years old and I didn't understand what war was. But now, as an adult, I know how cruel war is, how many innocent people suffer, die for someone else's decisions. I do not agree to it. This is why I decided to devote all my time to helping refugees. But I'm not alone in this. Together with the gsr_ua group and in cooperation with the Society of Friends of Bielsko-Biała and Podbeskidzie, we are active both in Poland, on the border and in Ukraine, bringing help to everyone who needs it. In a moment, 50 days of war will have passed, and at the same time 50 days of our continuous activities. We have one goal - to provide war victims with at least a substitute for a sense of security and normality.

But most of all, our activities are aimed at providing the refugees with HOPE that they will still be able to live a normal life, that they will find a safe place with us, where they will regain peace of mind and believe that their future does not necessarily have to be dark.

We would like to thank each of you who will join us and support our activities by donating money to our fundraiser. Every penny counts!

zrzutka.pl/evetp6

‘HOPE’ (GOLD)
-2022
-Artist WHiTEFiSH
-30inch x 34.5inch with frame
-House paint, spraypaint, and acrylic on wood
-Signed on reverse with COA



All profits go to @oliwia.dabrowska_ who is assisting the refugees on the ground in Poland. There have been an overwhelming amount of refugee women and children that have been fleeing to safety from Ukraine into Poland. Oliwia and her team are on the ground making those refugees feel welcome.

Her group of volunteers are responding to the immediate attention of the most vulnerable. She is doing everything within her capabilities to assist these innocent lives in this epic human crisis.

Every dollar counts so please visit link in the bio above to donate for the Ukrainian refugees

Thank You, from Oliwia for the material and financial donations. They are going directly to the desperate needs of Ukrainian refugees!

There are 10 days left to donate here "Hope For Ukraine"

*** zrzutka.pl/en/evetp6 ***

http://instagram.com/p/CdLyTEHI8h6

Please donate if you can

zrzutka.pl/evetp6

http://instagram.com/p/CeGY4hRl4X2

No matter your race, color, creed, gender, or age all refugees are welcome. The discriminate marginalization of the world most vulnerable population is incalculable. With millions of refugees children now dispersed across the globe, please do what you can where you can do it. We must come together and unite in solidarity to lead by example and demonstrate HOPE and empathy.

HOPE is something that can be given and received, but most importantly it can be created and recycled. Together we have the chance to change the youth of our existence.

PEACE
WHiTEFiSH

Twenty-nine years later, she’s taking inspiration from her role as “the girl in the red coat” from “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film about the Holocaust, aiming once again to show that war devastates even the innocent — this time, through raising money and volunteering to help Ukrainian refugees.

“I thought that, because of this symbol, I could speak to more people, I could involve more people — people who don’t know me as me, but they know I played this little girl in the red coat,” she told The Washington Post from her home in Krakow, Poland.

The movie about Nazi businessman Oskar Schindler, who secretly saved some 1,200 Jews by employing them in his factory, was shot almost entirely in black-and-white. One exception: As Schindler watches atop a hill while Nazis liquidate the Krakow Ghetto, a girl in red stands out amid the monochrome grayscale, seemingly unnoticed and unbothered as she ambles through the horrific violence erupting all around her.

Dabrowska never expected war to break out, so Russia’s Feb. 24 invasion of Ukraine stunned her into inaction for three or four days. When she emerged from the fog, fear followed, she said, until a conversation with a friend in the United States steeled her and gave her courage.

“I decided to change my fear into action, into helping people,” she told The Post.

Dabrowska asked her mother, who unlike Dabrowska has a car and a driver’s license, whether she would go with her to volunteer at the Ukrainian border roughly 130 miles from Krakow. She agreed.

There, they spent weeks ferrying about 100 refugees — mostly families — from the border to various Polish cities. The United Nations estimates that more than 2.8 million Ukrainians have so far sought safe haven in Poland. (Over 5 million have fled in total, according to the U.N.)

Their work meant not only driving refugees from the border to the interior of Poland, but also connecting them with Polish citizens willing to take them in, Dabrowska said. Early in the invasion before the government had created a system to handle refugees, Dabrowska checked many of the Facebook groups she follows for people offering housing.

Ukrainians had swarmed the border, resulting in a three- or four-day wait to cross into Poland, Dabrowska said. But, she added, it wasn’t chaotic or even loud. Thousands of people, exhausted and heartbroken, quietly waited their turn to escape their war-torn homeland. One of them stood out: a boy who, so exhausted from traveling and waiting, started vomiting. He barely reacted.

“He was very quiet, and his eyes were so big and lost,” Dabrowska said. “Every child there has big lost eyes.”

She thought of her 3½-year-old self, or rather, the character she played.

“There were and still are a lot of children,” Dabrowska said, “and I saw this little girl in the red coat in every child.”

Helping displaced people has often meant reacting to unforeseeable situations, like when she learned of an insulin shortage, which led her to connect a donor wanting to help diabetic refugees with a fellow volunteer who is a pharmacist. In one case, Dabrowska took in an 18-year-old mother and her son as she sought a more permanent place for them. In another, she traveled to Lviv, in western Ukraine, to pick up a dog that had been left behind earlier in the war. Another volunteer fostered the pet until they could take it to its owner in Berlin.

“I remember every single person, every single story. And all of those stories are very, very tragic and horrible,” Dabrowska told The Post, “and I don’t think I will forget them in my life — ever.”

Over the past couple of weeks, Dabrowska’s role has shifted. While she still occasionally transports Ukrainians, she more often delivers aid packages to the border, handles logistics and raises money for the two organizations she volunteers for. It’s not as compelling as shepherding refugees to safety, but she said it’s important for her to embrace the unique opportunity of being the “girl in the red coat” — a platform only she can use to drum up cash to help those fleeing war with virtually nothing.

Before the invasion, Dabrowska was a self-employed copywriter. She still squeezes in jobs for clients because she doesn’t want to lose them. But that work has taken a back seat to her wartime volunteerism. She’ll keep up with the aid work for the foreseeable future, she said. Even if the war ends tomorrow, millions of Ukrainians will need homes, jobs, and schools for their children.

“There is no more important thing than helping refugees,” Dabrowska said. “This is my biggest purpose now.”

When the war started, “Schindler’s List” didn’t spring to mind, Dabrowska said. Other than the occasional journalist calling on significant anniversaries of the film’s release, it hasn’t affected her daily life much — she’s “just a normal person with a regular life.” In 2013, the 20th anniversary of the film’s release, she told the Guardian she was “horrified” when she watched the film as an 11-year-old and regretted not heeding Spielberg’s advice to wait until she was an adult and could “grow up into the film.”

“I was ashamed of being in the movie and really angry with my mother and father when they told anyone about my part,” she told the newspaper. But when she re-watched it at 18, she had a change of heart: “I had been part of something I could be proud of.”

A couple of weeks into the war, her friend Adam Babb created an artistic adaptation of a still image from the movie — Dabrowska’s 3½-year-old self draped in her famous coat. Except in Babb’s version, it is no longer red but dappled in the blue of the Ukrainian flag. Behind her, Polish Jews look to her as Nazis corral and guard them.

Dabrowska leaned into the connection, writing a caption for her friend’s artwork.

“She was always the symbol of hope. Let her be it again.”

The little girl shows up once more in “Schindler’s List” as the title character talks with the Nazi SS officer charged with exhuming and burning the bodies of those murdered during the ghetto liquidation. As carts filled with bodies roll toward a mass pyre, Schindler spots the girl among the dead. Again, the red of her coat is the only color in an otherwise black-and-white scene.

Dabrowska said she feels a strong connection to that girl, that it wasn’t just a role and that she’s not just a character on a screen. The connection remains, one that allows her to tap into what the girl symbolizes: the power for change, innocence and hope — hope that injustice can inspire even powerful insiders like Schindler to do good. Those are all things she wants to make real for Ukrainian refugees.