“Umm! Zwetschgenkuchen — ha, ha! Zwetschgenkuchen for the Zigeuner.”
She was yanked from where she stood, then shoved through the door. They were allowed to take nothing. But the fat-fingered man followed them down the stairs with a fistful of tart in one hand and a nightstick in the other. Lilo inhaled sharply when she saw the blood oozing from her father’s brow. Why had she not heard the whack of that stick? Yet she was oddly aware of the most infinitesimally small details — a scuff mark on the stairwell hall she had not seen before, a jewel bearing caught in the cuff of her father’s shirt. Everything came to her with a startling, surreal clarity. It was as if she were meant to register every detail, even the smallest ones, as from that moment on, her life would change irrevocably and forever. Fat Finger was still laughing about his joke. “Ha, ha! Zwetschgenkuchen for the Zigeuner.”
“Together — miteinander.” That had become their prayer, their chant, their hymn. “As long as we are together, everything will be all right.” Lilo’s father said this at least thirty times a day. And they were together, with about five hundred other Gypsies, Sinta and Roma alike, in a barbed-wire enclosure at the Rossauer Lände police station and jail in Vienna.
“A quarter mile, no more, from the Café Budapest,” her father also said even more often, perhaps fifty times a day. “If only I could get a message to Herr Gruniger.”
“A pastry chef is no use in this situation,” her mother had answered the first time her husband said this. But Lilo’s father wouldn’t give up. She noticed him now, studying a pigeon that had landed on the top of the barbed wire. She could almost read his mind. As a boy, her father had raised carrier pigeons. In their old apartment, the landlord had allowed her father to keep some on the roof. She had helped him tend to the pigeons, cleaning their cages. She had even learned how to attach the tiny canisters with the messages to their legs. Was he thinking of that now — of sending a message? she wondered. She felt a glimmer of excitement. Her father was resourceful, so full of ideas. He could fix things — watches, clocks — get them running again. She watched his face. He was thinking, thinking hard.
He sees that pigeon as a savior, a potential angel of deliverance. He must be wondering, Lilo thought, if there is any way he could capture it, train it, and make it fly to the Café Budapest. Could there be the slightest possibility? Her father turned away from the pigeon. Don’t! Don’t turn away! His face reddened with frustration, he kicked a small rock with his foot. That single gesture sent a shudder through her heart. Her father was such a patient, meticulous man. One had to be to do his kind of exacting work. It was as if at last he could no longer hold in the despair.
As it grew dark, floodlights came on.
“Oh, my God, look over there!” her mother said.
“Where?” Lilo asked.
“To the right, beyond the fence, up high.”
Lilo gasped. How had they missed it? It was a huge billboard, and on it, floating eerily in the night, was the luminous face of Leni Riefenstahl. It was an ad for The Holy Mountain, the movie they had talked about seeing.
“Good God, there she is!” Lilo’s father said, walking up to them.
The face was beautiful, almost unearthly, her mouth glossy and just partway open to reveal perfect teeth. Her eyes were dark and smoky and closely set, which gave her a somewhat beady look, almost feral. Yet there was a lovely delicacy to her face. Her high prominent cheekbones, the generous mouth, it all added up to a stunningly gorgeous movie star. There was something almost transcendent about that face, as if it belonged on Olympus with the gods. Her roles certainly reinforced this notion of a divinity. Her face loomed now in the night as bright as any moon. It was profoundly weird and discomfiting.
“I can’t look at her!” Bluma Friwald said. Her voice was shaking. Fernand put his arm around her shoulders. They turned and walked to a shadowy corner of the enclosure. Lilo followed them. But there was no escaping. Other prisoners had begun to point at the huge billboard. “Ah! Leni . . . Leni Riefenstahl . . . I saw her in that movie . . . Holy Mountain, and then the other . . .”
Every day, more Gypsies were brought in, and every day, the conditions at the police station worsened. They all tried to stay as far away from the corner with the latrines as possible. The air was so foul, it was difficult to breathe. The rumors as to what might be in store for them multiplied.
The only thing they knew was that Rossauer Lände was a holding area for Gypsies facing deportation — a Zigeunerlager, a camp for Gypsies. For how long, they didn’t know, and to where they might be deported was equally mysterious. There was talk of Lackenbach, an internment camp especially for Gypsies that was just nearing completion in eastern Austria. Another camp, Auschwitz, under construction in Poland, was also mentioned.
Lilo spotted Zorinda across the enclosure. She was talking with two other girls. As Lilo approached, Zorinda turned and gave her a big smile.
“Don’t worry about the book,” she said with a laugh. “But pretty good, isn’t it? How far did you get?”
“Chapter eighteen. Huck’s left the Grangerfords and is just meeting up with Jim again. They’re getting back on the raft, back on the river.”
Zorinda sighed. “We should be so lucky, eh?” She looked around. “Anyhow, let me introduce you. This is Michele, and this is Lola.” She turned to the two girls and gestured at Lilo. “And this is Lilian, from my school.”
“Just call me Lilo.”
“So I was just saying that they’re doing surgeries,” Lola said to her.
“Surgeries?” Lilo asked. “What hospital are you talking about?”
“Ravensbruck,” Michele answered. “Not a hospital.”
Lilo thought that she might have heard of Ravensbruck. It was a camp. An all-women’s camp. It would have been terrible if she and her mother had been sent there without her father. But in the next minute, she found out why there was an even worse reason. Michele exchanged a long look with Zorinda.
“She might as well hear it,” Zorinda said.
“They . . . they do these operations on women so they can’t ever have babies,” Michele said.
“And not just grown women,” Lola added. “They’re doing it to small girls — girls as young as four or five.”
Lilo felt all the blood suddenly drain from her face. It was as if the future had been erased, any hope for a future obliterated. Being in this barbed-wire cage was nothing compared with the utter darkness of the black wall of sterility, of a childless world, of a family that simply ended forever and ever. The Friwalds would be extinct.
“No! It can’t possibly be true.”
“It is true,” Zorinda said, and clutched Lilo’s hand.
“Why? Why would they do such a thing?”
“Because they don’t want people like us to have babies. We aren’t good enough to bring a new generation into the world. They think we are worse than criminals. That is why they didn’t put us in cells. They didn’t want us to contaminate the thieves, the murderers, the rapists who are inside those cells.”
“How do we know if we are going to be sent to Ravensbruck or Lackenbach — or Buchenwald, for that matter?” Lilo asked.
“We don’t,” Lola said. “But we’ll find out soon enough.”
That night, shortly after midnight, glaring searchlights suddenly swept the enclosure. A series of harsh bleating noises came over the loudspeaker, and then the shrieking voice of the prison commandant: “Achtung! Appell!”
It was time for roll call. Lilo and her parents had been at Rossauer Lände for only five days, but they’d been introduced to roll call, Appell, on the first day. The prisoners were all to line up in rows of ten. Each prisoner was required to be in the same position each day, ready to be counted. Then some were called out for various tasks — cleaning latrines, digging new latrines, washing the tin plates and cups they had been issued, or ladling out the inedible stews. But never had there been a roll call at this hour of the night.
Lilo stood betw
een her parents. They grasped hands. Then they heard motors in the parking lot behind the enclosure. Dark-gray buses had pulled in. Emblazoned on the sides was the symbol of the Third Reich, now married to that of the Nazi Party: an eagle, its talons grasping an oak-leaf wreath encircling a swastika.
“Looks like we’re taking a trip,” someone whispered.
“Together — God let us be together,” her father murmured, and grasped Lilo’s hand so hard it brought tears to her eyes.
They filed out into the parking lot. The lot was not big enough for all of the buses. Lilo could see a dozen more lining the street. A long table was set up at the front of the lot. Police and SS officers sat behind it along with two men in civilian clothing and two women in nurses’ uniforms. Lilo tried to figure out how it was decided which people were loaded onto which bus. The nurses would point to certain women and girls, who would be taken from the lines and escorted to a nearby bus. That must be the Ravensbruck bus, Lilo thought. Anything but Ravensbruck! Please, God!
Did her parents know about Ravensbruck? Lilo wasn’t sure. She had not dared to tell them what the girls had told her. It was just too awful to imagine. She was afraid to look at her mother. Afraid that she might betray something that she knew and her mother did not. She wanted to protect her mother from the horrible thing that Zorinda and Lola and Michele had told her. There was a peculiar irony, Lilo realized. For although she might never be a mother, she felt this inexorable urge to mother her own mother, to protect Bluma.
They were drawing closer to the table. The starched nurses’ caps seemed to take on a life of their own as the women bobbed their heads up and down, checking items off a list and then nodding for the next person to step up. Like strange white wingless birds, they nested in the darkness atop oddly disembodied heads, silently clucking. Should she shrink down between her parents or stand up tall. No, stand up tall! This was not a time to look invisible. They had to appear as a unit, inseparable, forged like the strongest metals, like iron.
It happened very quickly. One of the wingless birds dipped toward them. “Nächste. Komm mal her, bis zum Schreibtisch”— come up to the desk. Then another nod toward a bus as their names were checked off and the three of them were told to board bus number thirty. They were together! She felt her father ease his grip. Tears were streaming from all of their eyes. Just as they were boarding, she turned to look at the bus next to theirs, number twenty-nine. She gasped. Zorinda and Lola were both in a long line of women and girls. A nurse was hurrying them along. Zorinda caught sight of her. She shrugged, as if to say, “What a world we live in,” then turned and stepped onto the bus. But all Lilo could think of was the Mark Twain book still sitting by her book bag. Some Mississippi! Then she grabbed her mother’s hand and felt her father’s hand drop onto her shoulder.
We’re together! We’re together. Miteinander! The word clanged in her head. That was all that mattered. Miteinander.
As the bus rounded the corner, they came directly under the billboard of Leni Riefenstahl.
“Would you look at that!” her mother said softly. Lilo did not want to look up, but she could not resist. It was as if the eyes were reeling her in, following her. The beautiful face rose in the night. The piercing dark eyes, the serene brow, the elegantly molded cheekbones. A luminous presence in the night — an angel? A goddess? But it was only Hitler’s favorite movie star.
She heard the chimes of the clock tower in the nearby square.
“It’s off,” her father said, glancing at his watch, which he had somehow managed to keep. “Too fast.”
Lilo suddenly thought of the gingerbread man. She pictured him running through the streets.
The baker made a boy one day,
Who leaped from the oven, ready to play.
He and his wife were ready to eat
The gingerbread man who had run down the street.
Except it was a gingerbread girl. Two gingerbread girls, Zorinda and Lola. “Run, run as fast as you can!” she whispered. The window fogged with her breath.
“So what’s this one?” The female overseer, the Aufseherin, scowled at the list on the clipboard. “Is she an O or a G? I’m not sure how to mark her.”
Another woman bustled up and took the clipboard. “Just match her name to the number on her uniform,” she barked.
“Ach! Here she is. That’s an O. I know someone makes the G’s sometimes look like O’s. Sloppy. I’ll talk to the intake secretary.”
“All right, extend your left arm and don’t wiggle. It’s ink. I want it perfect.” Ink for what? Perfect for what? Lilo wondered as the woman inscribed an O on her forearm. She had just been marked, marked like an item on the discount counter at the department store in Vienna. She had become an article, a commodity — branded! But for what?
“Now that is a nicely formed O,” she said, still holding Lilo’s arm. “I learned how to make my letters in school. Always got an A+ in penmanship.” And look where it got you! Lilo thought. “What do you think?” the woman looked up brightly at Lilo as if expecting a compliment.
“I’ve seen better but not on human flesh,” she muttered.
There was a gasp behind her. The Aufseherin’s face turned to stone. Then a slow smile crawled across it, making her lips look like fat worms. “All right, then”— the words oozed out slowly —“let me try again. Maybe I’ll put more letters on you just to practice my penmanship.”
“Aufseherin Liebgott,” the matron who was standing behind her said, “there are still thirty more prisoners to be done.”
The Aufseherin shrugged and waved Lilo on.
Lilo stared down at the O. Her rage surged.
As she rose from the chair and another girl was led in, Lilo looked at the matron who had gasped, but the woman avoided her eyes. She was pretty, very pretty. Slender and blond, neither young nor old, but there seemed to be a weariness about her that defied the obvious markers of age. No wrinkles, no gray hair. She shook her head slightly when Lilo passed by.
“Be careful,” she whispered. “Es gibt keinen Gott hier.” But Lilo did not need to be told that there was no God in Buchenwald.
On her way back to the barracks, Lilo saw guards and some other prisoners moving cots into a building. A man in shiny boots with a ferocious dog at his side was shouting orders through a bullhorn.
“Come on, move! We’ve got to get forty beds in there. Stack them up. It’s not a luxury hotel. We’ll dig latrines tomorrow.”
A woman next to her whispered, “We’re the first women prisoners here, they say.”
“Where are the men kept?” Lilo asked.
“Not sure,” the woman replied. “But here. They are here.” Then Papa is here someplace, Lilo thought.
“Did you see your father?” Bluma asked as soon as Lilo came back to the barracks. “No, Mama. They closed the curtain between the men’s part and the women’s.”
“It was open when they did me.” Bluma sighed, her shoulders slumped down.
“Well, he’s here, Mama. Someplace in this camp. Maybe we can find him somehow.”
“Let me see the mark on your arm.”
“Why? It’s ugly.”
“I want to compare the letters. Maybe there’s a letter on his arm — a code. Perhaps they give families matching letters so they know who belongs together.”
“Mama, there are far more people in this camp than there are letters in the alphabet. All I know is that the numbers on our shirts match up with our names on the matron’s clipboard. But the letters on our arms make no sense to me.”
But Bluma was just staring at the O. She sighed. “There seems to be no rhyme nor reason.”
Lilo blinked. It seemed the most absurd remark ever. “Rhyme nor reason! Mama, are you crazy? They are herding us around like cattle. Branding us with letters. You think there is a logic buried in this somewhere? You think it’s our fault and if we had done something different, we could have saved ourselves?”
Bluma’s eyes began to well with tears. Her mo
uth trembled as she looked at her daughter in dismay. Suddenly Lilo wanted to take back every word she had uttered, even if what she had said was true. She had never in her life spoken to her mother that way.
“Oh, Mama, I am sorry.” She grabbed her mother and hugged her. Clung to her.
Her mother buried her head on Lilo’s shoulder, and said in a low, guttural voice, “All that matters, Lilo, is that we keep track of him. We have to find out his letter or maybe the number on his uniform somehow. We are just letters now, Lilo. Letters that seem to have nothing to do with our names. No names here,” she said softly, then added, “The ink erases us, but we can’t erase the ink. How . . . how peculiar.”
“I know, Mama. I know.”
“Think of something. Think of anything. We must send him a message somehow. Tell him we are all right for now. And find out”— Bluma’s voice faltered —“if he is, too.”
Lilo began to bite her thumbnail. The pretty matron who had warned her to be careful — what was it she had said? Es gibt keinen Gott hier. Could she go to her? Could she be trusted? But what choice did she have?
But the good matron seemed to have disappeared for the rest of the day. It wasn’t until that evening that Lilo caught sight of her as she walked by the barracks in Block 5 on her way to what passed for their evening meal, the same stew as at Rossauer Lände except perhaps slightly more edible, since it had been watered down to nothing. She waited in the shadows at the corner of the barracks and then stepped out.
“Oh!” Good Matron gasped.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” A queer little smile fled across the woman’s face. Frighten. I frighten her? Lilo thought. How utterly stupid. No wonder she’s smiling. “I — I —” Lilo began to stammer. “I need to ask you something. A kind of favor.” She saw the woman’s shoulders sag when she said favor.
“Yes. Go on,” the matron said softly.