“Zigeuner!” The word swelled in the dimness of the tailor’s room.
He began yelling, “Versteckt! Versteckt! You’re one of the hidden ones. They’re picking them up all over Salzburg. Jews in the attics, and now I guess under the cover of daylight — Gypsies, in our beloved theater! Like vermin!” He locked his arm around her neck, dragged her to the alarm box, and pulled the lever.
She looked down at her shoes and blinked. Perfect shoes. Perfect for running, she thought minutes later as the Gestapo surrounded her. But it was completely over. Ganz vorbei. The two words reverberated in her head, sang through her bloodstream. And oddly she felt no fear. Ganz vorbei. Fear was useless. All the fear she had ever known simply leaked out of her. She was hollow, empty. She felt nothing.
Ganz vorbei.
She had stabbed Sepp, but it was a superficial wound. He had simply overpowered her and pulled the alarm for the security guard. Within minutes, the Gestapo had arrived. She didn’t care. She didn’t care about anything except that Marta not be caught. But she knew that was ridiculous. Sepp would surely tell the Gestapo that Marta had been hiding her and that would be the end for Marta. Sepp and the guard were dragging her across the floor. She was as limp as the marionettes that twirled slowly above her, their strings taut on the hangers, their heads lolling to one side waiting for “life.” Her life was over.
She was taken directly to a city prison in the local police building, not a camp. She expected to be sent to a camp, but now it had been nearly two weeks since her arrest and nothing had happened. Every time a new prisoner was brought to the women’s cell block, she expected to see Marta, but so far they had only brought in prostitutes, drunks, and the occasional thief. The drunks were let out when they were sober. The prostitutes languished a bit longer. Finally, when a guard came around at the beginning of her third week, she got up her nerve to talk to him.
“Why am I here? Why haven’t I been sent someplace? A Gypsy camp?” At least if she were sent to a Gypsy camp, her chances of meeting up with Django were greater. The guard merely shrugged and walked off. She heard a snort from behind her. It was the red-headed prostitute who was in for the second time in the two weeks Lilo had been in jail.
“I know why you are here still.” She spoke in a low, smoke-scarred voice.
“I suppose I must pay you something to find out. But I have nothing. Nothing at all,” Lilo said. She had become acquainted with the prison economy — no one got anything without paying in some way. Cigarettes were a major part of the currency, as was sex.
“No matter, sweetie. It’s really not worth anything.” She smiled. “It’s . . . it’s rather humorous, as a matter of fact.”
“Humorous?”
“Yes.” A huge grin broke across her face. “You are still here because they cannot find your papers.”
“Papers? I never had any papers.”
“Oh, someplace there are papers but they haven’t been found. And they can’t exterminate you if they don’t have your papers. It’s the German way. They have an unnatural obsession with order.” She now burst out in loud guffaws. She laughed harder and was soon doubled over on the cot.
An unnatural obsession with order. The words rang in Lilo’s mind like the muffled toll of distant bells. She found them oddly hopeful, though not for herself. But for the first time, she began to think that just possibly Germany might lose this war. The Germans had many unnatural obsessions, but could something like this actually be detrimental to their ability to strategize? Between July 1942 and January 1943, the German army had failed miserably in its attempts to take Stalingrad, and Hitler had blamed it on the weather. It became the turning point of the war for the Germans. Had they been looking for papers instead of long underwear?
There was one small window in the cell that looked out on an exercise yard. Snow was beginning to fall. It was mid-October. She had been in prison for six weeks. This was still a bit early for snow. But apparently in Russia, winter was coming early.
It was nearly two months later that a guard came to fetch her. She was driven to a train station several miles outside Salzburg. It was really not a proper station at all but just a stop. A bitter cold wind was blowing. There were other prisoners, she was not sure from where, who were standing on what appeared to be a makeshift platform. Shortly a train pulled in from the east. The doors of the freight cars were opened, and the guards shouted orders for them to enter. The cars were packed. Packed, it seemed, with Russians and Poles. There was a mélange of languages. Most of the prisoners were women and children. A mother held a child of about three or four on her lap. She nodded toward Lilo, indicating that there might be space next to her. Lilo squashed in. She turned to her to thank her. “Danke,” she whispered. The woman smiled ever so slightly.
“Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Lilo asked. Do you speak German?
“Ein wenig,” the woman replied, and pinched her thumb and forefinger together, indicating “just a bit.”
“Where are we going?” Lilo asked.
“Hölle,” the woman replied.
Hell.
“Marta is free. Not Marta’s fault.” Her eyes felt stuck, but she could feel a light so bright that even with them shut, she was aware of the pink lining of her lids — a garish pink, speckled with dancing dots.
“Marta? Who’s Marta? This one is blabbing about Marta.”
Shut up, Lilo commanded herself. She can’t give away Marta. Marta was all she had thought about since her arrest. Would they arrest Marta?
“Where am I?” she whispered hoarsely.
“Recovery,” someone whispered. It was a gentler voice. “I’ll take care of this one.”
Was it Good Matron? Could she be back in Buchenwald? There was something familiar in that voice.
“Open your eyes, Lilo. They’re gone.”
She clenched her eyes shut even tighter. She did not want to wake up. “Where am I?” Then she felt a wave of nausea and began to gag. Someone lifted her shoulders, and a flood of vomit filled her mouth. Luckily the person was holding a bowl.
“Are you done?”
Now she opened her eyes. “Zorinda?”
“Yeah. Welcome to Ravensbruck.”
“They . . . they . . . they did it to me.” And another thought crowded her brain. This is where my mother died. I know it. I know it.
Zorinda nodded solemnly. “But they did it to me, too, and look, I’m alive.”
“For what?” Lilo asked, and gave a laugh, which despite her weakness sounded harsh. “You were right, Zorinda.”
“Right about what?”
“You said we should be so lucky.”
Zorinda looked momentarily confused. Then a smile broke across her face. “Oh, the chapter when Huck left the Grangerfords and met up again with Jim and they get back on the raft.”
“Yeah, you remember.”
“I do . . . I do. Now, listen to me. You have to do everything I say. I survived the operation. Now I work as kind of a nurse assistant. Not one girl I’ve worked on has gotten an infection. I’m good at keeping you clean and all that. But better yet, I can organize food.”
Lilo shut her eyes tight, but tears squeezed out at the mention of organizing food. Her thoughts instantly turned to Django. What did she care about food? Django was all she had left to care about. Where was he now? What had they done to him?
“I don’t want to live.”
“You do want to live! You have to live.”
“Why? What for? Everything has been taken from me. They have hollowed me out. I am empty.”
“Don’t argue with me.”
“I’m not arguing.”
“Look, you don’t want to die of an infection. It’s horribly painful.”
“I don’t care.”
“Yes, you do. Let me tell you something.” She crouched down close to her head and cupped her hand over Lilo’s ear.
“They’re losing in the Soviet Union — losing bad. We just have to hang on. American troops landed in Irelan
d last year. They have established bases in England now. Some say they are going to cross the Channel and invade. And by then the Russians will come in from the east. There’s hope. You’re going to eat. You’re going to do everything I tell you. I am risking my life for you to get you this food. To make you strong. Because when they come you’ll be ready.”
“Ready for what?”
“Ready to be free.”
“I have to tell you something, Zorinda.” Lilo’s voice grew weak. She paused to gather strength. “I met a boy, a boy when I was in the first camp, Buchenwald. It’s a long story, but we were together then in Maxglan, and, well, I fell in love. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know if he is still alive. I can’t explain it. I know my mother is dead. Same with my father. It sort of came to me in a dream, but so far . . . well, not with Django.”
“Django — is that his name? Like the musician Django Reinhardt?”
“Yes, but not the musician.”
“I think he’d be a bit old for you.” Zorinda gave a soft chuckle.
“Yes.” Lilo smiled. “But this Django is also a very good musician. A guitarist.” It felt good to talk about him with Zorinda.
“Then you have to live, Lilo. Don’t you see it? If you don’t live, it’s like killing hope, your hope for him to be alive. Would you want him to wish himself dead?”
The idea shocked her. “No, never!” Her eyes were wide with horror. “Never!”
Lilo was in recovery for two days. During those two days, Zorinda brought her food and not scraps. Good food.
“Where do you get this?” Lilo said as she chewed on a hunk of bread with some ham.
“There’s an inmate. Very educated woman, a metal engineer. They release her every day to go work at the Siemens factory. They make something called the V-2 rockets there and munitions, you know. She brings back food for us.”
“Just for us?”
“No, for a few of us. But there are others who work there as well. They are able to get food, too. We have to get you strong really fast. I’m telling the overseer for our barracks that you are ready for work detail tomorrow.”
“What’s the work?”
“Making socks for the soldiers. I work there, too, on the days I am not in the surgery.” Zorinda smiled. Her dark eyes, which tilted slightly, got the most mischievous sparkle. “We make them thin in the toes and the heels so they wear out and give the soldiers sore feet. A little trick.”
“How do you do that? A sock is a sock. You just sew it or knit it.”
“Not here. The socks are made on machines. There’s a way we can set the machines to do our dirty work. No one ever notices. They are only concerned with us making our quota for the day.” An unnatural obsession with order. The words tolled again in her head.
“Lilo . . .” Zorinda lowered her voice even more. “Things are happening. The word is they want to march us north to another camp. They are worried about the Russians. We aren’t that far from Russia here. Not really. If they cross the Oder, the Rhine, East Prussia will fall. That’s why you have to be strong, because they’ll march us north when the Russians come.”
“North? How soon?”
“I’m not sure, but when it does happen, it’s our chance, Lilo . . . our . . . our . . . Mississippi.”
Lilo closed her eyes. She tried to imagine running as she had before. Could her legs ever be that strong again? Could her feet be so fast? So swift? They said it was a march, but if there was a chance to run away, could she do it? Could she and Zorinda do it together? Miteinander? Life became so complicated. Every time you thought it was just you, only you left, another came along. She looked at Zorinda and put her hand on her shoulder.
“I am strong.”
But it would not happen for more than a year, and when it did, it was not a march, as Zorinda had thought. It was not anything like the Mississippi. First, it was just another transport train, this time to Landsberg, a subcamp of Dachau. They arrived in January 1945. For the first few weeks they were there, both Zorinda and Lilo were taken each day with a handful of the healthy prisoners to work at a Siemens plant. They were thrilled, as this was where they could get news.
In the textile factory back in Ravensbruck, making socks, they had first heard that the Allies had successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy. During their first week at Siemens, while winding thin-coated wires on spools for electrical motors, they heard that the Russians had liberated Auschwitz. Then just a few days later, the Red Army had crossed the Oder River and was said to be within fifty miles of Berlin. By March, word had come that the Americans had begun crossing the Rhine into Germany. And that was when their work at Siemens stopped. Completely.
“It’s not good,” Zorinda said two days after their work at the factory had halted. “They don’t want us going back to work. They’re losing the war, and they don’t want us to find out about it.”
Lilo knew Zorinda was right. What the commandants of the camps feared most was that their prisoners, despite their horrendous physical condition, would take heart and find the energy and the strength to rise up. “But that is the good news,” Zorinda added after a moment.
“Wait, I thought you said it was not good news.”
“Mississippi — our Mississippi!” Her eyes danced with delight.
“You mean a march like the one we hoped for?”
“Yeah. They’ll want to get us out and not leave a trace behind. Just you wait. Our chance will come again. The Allies are getting closer. The Nazis will march us north.”
At that moment, a barrage of shots cracked the air. They grabbed each other’s hand.
“You’re right,” Lilo said. “They don’t want anyone left behind to tell what’s gone on here when the Allies come.”
For three days, there were selections nearly every morning and often in the evening to weed out the weak and kill them before the remaining prisoners marched north. Lilo and Zorinda teetered on a strange border between fear and hope. Fear that they would be in the next selection but hope that the Allies were advancing.
Late in the evening of the fourth day, there was one more selection, but this time the guards did not even bother to take the bodies to the crematorium. They were left on a pile of fresh corpses from an earlier selection that day. Then there was the roar of engines as eight SS men entered the camp on motorcycles.
Zorinda went to the barracks window. “It’s about to begin — the march.”
Lilo looked at her and then at the immense pile of dead bodies near the selection ground. “We have to get out there.”
“Where?”
“That pile of bodies.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We’re not going,” Lilo said firmly.
“What! Have you gone crazy?”
“Not at all.” Lilo was thinking how those long years ago she had hidden in a pile of pig feces and escaped the sterilization operation. Well, too late for that now, but she still had her life and hiding in the refuse of death might save them.
“Listen to me, Zorinda. On this march, there will be guards all along the way. They’ll shoot anyone who’s not moving fast enough. If we can find any chance to get away and run, we’ll be lucky. But that’s just a chance. If we stay here, hidden beneath that mountain of death, we’ll be safe. Do you understand? Safe without having to move an inch.”
Zorinda shut her eyes for what seemed forever. There was a static bleating over the loudspeaker. “All prisoners assemble to march in Workshop Square.”
“This is our chance. Workshop Square. The lights will be on there. The rest of the camp is dark.”
Hundreds of prisoners began pouring out of the barracks to assemble in the square.
“This way!” Zorinda hissed. She knew the lay of the land much better than Lilo. They slid between the shadows of buildings. They could hear the chaos in the square as the warden’s shrill voice seared the night. Occasionally there was the crack of a pistol. Another prisoner shot dead, deemed too weak to
march. Lights went on in all the barracks as SS men searched for any who had lingered. But ahead, a mere fifty meters from where Lilo and Zorinda crouched in the shadows, loomed the mountain of the dead.
“Now!” Lilo hissed, and they sprinted across the flagstones. She sprang for the pile. There was a soft thud. She shoved bodies aside and then burrowed down. She could hear Zorinda nearby.
“You here?” Zorinda asked.
“Somewhere,” she answered.
“Let’s hold hands.”
Lilo reached out. There was a hand but it was that of a dead woman. Thin and bony and very stiff. Lilo’s fingers swept over the face of another dead person, then a breast, and she felt the cavity where the bullet had torn away half the chest.
“Here! Here!” Zorinda whispered. And finally their fingers touched and intertwined. They heard the sound of the motorcycles and a few jeeps. Cutting through the noise of the vehicles were the commands barked through a bullhorn, punctuated by the occasional gunshot when another prisoner was deemed too weak to walk as they were herded like cattle onto the road.
Then at last, a quiet descended on the camp. They could still hear the occasional boom of the artillery and the sound of planes overhead. But toward dawn, the two girls fell asleep, their fingers intertwined.
When Lilo woke, she heard someone gagging and then the sound of vomit hitting the paving stones.