From Schindler's List, another scene from my "This scene made me tear up" playlist... As director Steven Spielberg said - the atrocities of the Holocaust were so plain and obvious to everyday Germans and those in the US as seeing a girl in a red coat in a black and white movie. So many disturbing images in this movie...

The Girl in the Red Coat was a symbol of Oscar Schindler's conscience. He first saw the little girl during the "cleansing of the Warsaw ghetto." She is running around in a state of bewilderment as Jews are getting rounded up, beaten and killed. As Schindler witnesses the goings on from a bluff overlooking the city, his mistress begs him to leave. He lingers on to watch the little girl and then she disappears from his sight. In a cut, the girl evades the Nazis and the SS by entering a building and hiding under a bed while gunfire is heard outside.

Later in the movie, Schindler is employing Jewish prisoners in his factory. He initially views his workers as cogs in his machine, something to be used to line his pockets. One day Schindler is walking outside and sees what he thinks at first is snow, but then realizes that it is ash falling from the skies. He ventures out to the place where the Nazi prison guards and warden are trying to hide their crimes by exhuming the dead and cremating them. He then sees in horror that the girl in the red coat is among the exhumed dead to be cremated en masse in the Nazi ovens.

German high command is shutting down the current facility and sending everyone to Auschwitz. Schindler buys many of the workers so that they can work in a munitions factory. While at the factory, the end of the war is announced and Schindler informs the workers that as a war criminal, he will be hunted and they will be freed as of midnight. The workers draft a letter hoping that if Schindler is captured that he will be spared. Schindler then leaves at midnight, lamenting that if he had made more money, he might have saved more. The workers then watch him leave, never seeing him again.

The girl in the red coat represents Oscar Schindler's conscience and his view of his workers as humans. After he sees the dead girl in the red coat, he begins his transformation from mere businessman to savior.