“Why would I do that? Are you going to make music jokes?”
“I don’t know. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do? Sinti think they’re smarter than Roma, Roma think they’re better than Sinti.”
“Very childish, I think,” Lilo replied primly.
“No teasing, then?”
“Why would you want to tease?” Lilo asked, genuinely puzzled. But she began to notice that humor and grim sarcasm were Django’s strategies for surviving. Buchenwald was just another stop for him over the past four years. He knew the game. He had learned the ways. One did not simply get food. One organized it, for indeed it was a major endeavor — figuring out the right guard to approach, one willing to break the rules. One had to be a genius at reading human nature, be able to detect the subtlest glimmer in a guard’s eye that might suggest a trace of empathy, a hint of a moral conscience. And for this trip, Django had organized a hunk of cheese that he shared with Lilo and her mother.
“Maxglan,” he sighed. “Now, let me think, what do I know about Maxglan? This will be my fourth camp.”
“What was your first camp, Django?” Bluma asked.
“Ah, Marzahn, just outside Berlin — during the Olympics, would you believe it?” He said this with such delight, as if he had had a front-row seat to every event. “You know, Hitler had to clean up the city, put a good face on things for all the visiting dignitaries and foreigners who came to see the games. So they rounded us all up to keep us out of sight.”
“Your family?” Bluma asked.
His face turned dark. He stared straight ahead. He was no longer a spectator in the front row of the games. “Yes. My baby sister died in Marzahn. Then my father and brother and I were sent to Lackenbach — the rats were plumper there. My mother was sent to Dachau and . . .” He shrugged, and his voice trailed off. “But Maxglan, let me think a moment.” He was quickly his old self again. “Lots of Roma there. I’ve heard through the prison grapevine. So I might feel at home. Don’t worry: I’ll introduce you.” He paused as if to think. Then, scratching his head, he mused, “Local industry. Well, of course there are the Salzburg marionettes. And Mozart — oh, they love Mozart around there. Whole square dedicated to him.” Django talked on for some time. Lilo was just drifting off to sleep when she heard him say finally, “But I can’t imagine why they would be dragging us all the way to Maxglan.”
The trip was hard on Bluma. Her dress was soaked with blood by the time they arrived the next day, and they only rested a few hours before there was another roll call.
“Get her up. She must be standing! Otherwise . . .” Django was hissing orders like a commandant. But Lilo knew he was right. If you didn’t stand, if you didn’t move, you were as good as dead. This stop, Maxglan, was a reprieve of sorts. They had gone east, but they had not crossed the border into Poland, where the most notorious of the extermination camps were rumored to be. Maxglan was, according to Django, halfway between a work camp and a holding area like Rossauer Lände. But it was not in Poland, and that was the crucial fact.
Lilo was beginning to realize that the phrase “Otherwise you’ll end up in Poland!” was a story within itself. It did not need a preface, and the epilogue was death.
Lilo and her mother had briefly held out hope that Fernand Friwald might be at Maxglan, but they soon learned they were the first transport into Maxglan in the last two months.
It was chilly, and the evening swirled with rags of mist. Lilo glanced up at the watchtowers, where guards stood with rifles pointing down at them. She hitched her mother up by the elbow, then surreptitiously snaked her arm around her back so that it looked as if she had been crowded just a bit by her mother and the woman on the other side of her. “You can lean back on me, Mama. Not too much, or they might see I’m helping you.”
She felt the slight weight sink against her arm. She could feel every bone in her mother’s back.
“I don’t believe it!” There was a hushed awe in Django’s voice.
Then her mother’s voice, just a soft exhalation of wonder. “His girlfriend!” She spoke as if in a trance.
Lilo turned her head in the direction they were looking and caught sight of a tall lady, dressed in fine wool slacks, carrying a briefcase.
“No!” Lilo whispered. “Her!”
As the beautiful face emerged from the night gauzy with fog, it was as if she had climbed out of the billboard. Leni Riefenstahl was here at this stinking, run-down camp. There were two different realities colliding in the camp of Maxglan. It was not supposed to be this way, Lilo thought. Leni Riefenstahl belonged on the billboard, hovering in the moonlight of the clock-tower square, or on the movie screen in the Palace Theater, but not here — not here with them, dirty Gypsies, women still bleeding from terrible operations.
Two assistants preceded her and occasionally motioned for her to come take a closer look. Lilo guessed that there were more than 250 prisoners lined up. But she wondered what these three people were doing — the lady in the slacks with her briefcase and the two men not in uniform. She leaned around the woman who stood next to her and called to Django, who was standing next to another Roma boy, just a child really.
“Django, what is it?”
“Casting call.” His dark eyes sparkled. She saw him bend down and whisper something to the small boy. The boy stood up straighter and squared his shoulders.
“What?” She had never heard these words. “What are you talking about?”
“The movies.”
“Like Hollywood?” She saw the beautiful lady raise her hand to her face and close her thumb and forefinger to make an O. “What’s she doing with her fingers?”
“Framing us — like in a camera lens,” Django replied. “So look sharp, Lilo. Here she comes.”
Lilo felt her mother slip down toward the mud. “I can’t do it. I’m losing too much blood.”
“You can, Mama! You can.” Lilo gave her mother a sharp poke. She felt her mother gasp and straighten up. It was just in time. The woman was a few yards away, picking her way through the mud in her beautiful alligator boots. She carried a small notebook and sometimes paused to write something down.
“What do you think she is writing in the notebook, Django?”
“Oh, that you are pretty and perfect for a part.”
“Don’t be silly.”
“Okay, that I am so handsome that I should play the lead.”
“Yeah, you’re a regular Clark Gable!” Lilo said.
The woman was walking more quickly down the line of prisoners. The face in the poster, the face of Leni Riefenstahl, was inches from her own.
“This one, Hugo. This girl.” Then she again held her hand to her eye and closed her thumb and forefinger, and swung the “lens” directly at Lilo. She looked back at the woman through the O formed by her fingers. The eye glimmered darkly. Lilo would never forget that eye. Lilo found that she seemed in some uncanny way to know exactly what to do. She tilted her head saucily and pressed her mother closer, her head resting lightly against her mother’s. Then she smiled so that her dimple flashed.
“Ah! Liebling.” Riefenstahl turned to the man called Hugo. “This one is charming.”
“And my mother, too,” Lilo said softly.
“Yes, clean them up. Mein Gott. I see lice crawling out from her hair.” She continued down the line. “And this one and this.” She pointed at Django and the little boy next to him. Lilo felt a sweep of relief that Django had been chosen. She saw him run his hands through the stubble of hair on the child’s head. The gesture was so unimaginably tender that she nearly gasped aloud.
The next day, twenty-three of the Maxglan prisoners, including a three-month-old infant and its mother, were loaded onto two trucks. As the trucks rolled out of the camp, Bluma Friwald grasped Lilo’s hand and shut her eyes tight.
“Mama, what are you doing?”
“I won’t believe it until we turn.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. Turn right,
we head east. Turn left, west.”
A few seconds later, she felt her mother slide against her. “Mama, it’s . . .” But her voice was drowned out as a roar went up from the two trucks.
“Next stop Hollywood!” Django yelled.
“Hollywood!” cried the little boy who was sitting next to him, and he punched the air with his stick-thin arm. They had turned left.
Not Hollywood, but the village of Krün, nestled at the foot of the Karwendel range of the Bavarian Alps. West, but not as far west as California, Lilo thought.
They were heading to the village that had been built for the set of the movie. The prisoners were told that Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s favorite director, was making a movie called Tiefland. It was to be Leni Riefenstahl’s first time directing a dramatic film rather than a documentary. The story was a romantic one, about a beautiful Spanish girl, based on a Spanish folk opera.
Since it was impossible to film in Spain or cast Spanish actors in the middle of a world war, the director and producers needed Spanish-looking people. So why not use Gypsies? There was a ready supply of Spanish-looking people right under their noses, and they wouldn’t have to pay them. They could have their pick of thousands of Roma. These “work-shy,” “racially inferior” people who had been rounded up in the last four years would provide extras for what was to be Leni Riefenstahl’s masterpiece.
Django made his way to the back of the truck and squeezed in next to Lilo and her mother.
“It’s going to be great, Lilo. You’ll see, Frau Friwald. They have to treat us good. ’Cause we have to look good — for the cameras.”
“Oh, yeah,” Bluma said. “When you clean me up, I’m a regular Marlene Dietrich!” She rolled her eyes.
Lilo laughed. It was the first time her mother had made a joke since they had been arrested in Vienna. Django and Lilo continued chattering in German, rather than the dialect of either Gypsy language. Her mother used to frown at Buchenwald when she heard the Roma girls talking in their dialect. But differences tended to disappear when one stood on the brink of extinction.
Lilo leaned against Django and gave him a soft jab with her elbow.
“So, big guy, you going to organize some bread for us?” The truck they were riding in took a sharp curve and lurched, so he was thrown against her. She heard a wail rise up in protest from the baby.
“Organize! Don’t be ridiculous. They’re going to serve us on silver platters. We’re in show business now. You watch, Lilo. We have to look great for the cameras. There’ll be good food, nice clothes. Leni wants us looking fantastic for the silver screen.”
Django was already calling her Leni, not to her face, of course, but to the rest of the “cast.” They were no longer prisoners in his mind but cast members.
Lilo looked at him out of the corner of her eye, shook her head, and laughed.
“What’s so funny?”
“You, Django.”
Funny was not really the right word. Django was curious more than funny. Lilo had known him only a short time — a matter of weeks. His story had come to her piecemeal — the smallest pieces imaginable — crumbs really, from his life before Maxglan, before Buchenwald, before Lackenbach, before Marzahn. But Marzahn was where Django’s story really began.
Django joked about his tour of camps, and like a connoisseur of fine wines, he would expound on the subtle distinctions between a camp of concentration, a collecting-point camp, and a transit camp. But Lilo knew somehow that humor was an elaborate pretense, a masquerade that hid the horrible facts that he seldom talked about. When he did talk, it was only in the sparsest detail, as on the bus trip to Maxglan. As close as he and Lilo had become, she always sensed that there were things that had happened to him in the camps that were unspeakable.
He could name his losses: the death of a baby sister; the separation from his father and older brother; the death of his mother at Dachau, finally confirmed through some kind of concentration camp grapevine. But naming was simple; naming was not telling. She knew there were things he simply could not say. She sensed within him a deep reservoir of anger, of hatred, but with it came an unimaginable cunning and energy. It was almost as if Django did not speak of these things because to speak of them would dilute the potency of this reservoir, on which his survival depended. More than once when she had asked a question, one that cut perhaps too close to the bone, those nearly navy-blue eyes had become almost opaque and he’d snapped, “You don’t need to know that,” or simply, “Never mind.”
“Look!” Django nudged her. They had turned off the paved road onto a dirt one that ran between two newly mown hayfields. The hay was bundled into neat little conical formations that reminded Lilo of houses that fairy folk or trolls might live in. There was a wonderful fresh smell. Ahead was a gate. A man dressed in lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat stood by to pull a rope that swung open the gate.
“Mama, cows!” Lilo exclaimed.
“And goats!” someone else said.
A silence fell on the twenty-three people as one collective vision danced in their heads. Cheese and milk!
The truck stopped, and the man in the lederhosen, who was obviously the farmer, came to the driver’s side of the truck and began speaking and pointing. “You drive past the first house, and then there are . . .” They all fell silent trying to hear what he was saying.
“He said first house. So there must be a second,” someone whispered.
“The farmhands’ house is probably the second, but hey, it’s probably empty. They’ve all gone to war,” another person said.
Lilo thought that if all the hands had indeed gone to war, the farm looked pretty well cared for. A few minutes later, they pulled up to a large barn. A police car and SS jeep were parked in front. Half a dozen officers, either in the uniforms of the local constabulary or the tan-and-black of the SS, suddenly materialized. Two officers slid open the enormous barn door.
“Look up there, Lilo.” Her mother pointed to the opening just beneath the peak of the roof, the hayloft window. Another officer stood with one foot on the edge of the opening, a rifle pointed down at them.
The back gate of the truck was opened. An officer stepped up. They were all surprised to see that it was Commandant Anton Bohmer, the head of the Maxglan camp.
“Why would he come here?” Lilo whispered to Django.
“He wants to be in movies, too.”
“But if he’s here . . .” The words died in Lilo’s throat. It would be just like the camp, not Hollywood.
“Women and girls to the left, men and boys to the right.”
Lilo, her mother, and ten other women and girls were led toward a long, low building with a metal roof.
“It’s a milking barn,” Unku said. Unku had arrived at Maxglan shortly after Lilo. She was very pretty. A few months before, Lilo’s mother would have described her as “too pretty in that Roma way.” But those ways of thinking were gone. She was just “fetching,” as her father might have said.
“How do you know it’s a milking barn?” Lilo asked.
“I worked in one once with my mother near Dusseldorf.”
“They’re going to give us milk!” Lilo exclaimed. Just then a woman strode up to them.
“This way, this way!” She was not in uniform but began herding them along into the barn. “Take off all your clothes. Put them in a pile. They have to be burned. Then step over by the hoses, and after that we’ll give you new clothes.”
The floor in the milking barn was cement, and there were two trenches separated by twenty feet. A curtain had been hung between the two trenches, and Lilo could hear the men and boys on the other side. They were being given identical instructions. “Step into the trench. Stand still. Do not leave the trench until ordered. Soap and shampoo will be issued.”
Five minutes later, they were being hosed down. The water was chilly, but it still felt good.
Lilo saw the mother crouching over her infant girl to protect her from the blast of the hose. The water must have b
een too cold, because she was howling. Poor thing, Lilo thought. Then she noticed the water turning pink around her own feet. She stole a glance at her mother. She was still bleeding. But it was not the blood that shocked her. It was the knobs of her mother’s pelvis jutting through skin that was thin as tissue paper. When her mother turned, she saw that her buttocks no longer had any shape at all. There was no crack, instead just a shallow gully with the skin draped over the bones. She didn’t look quite human but like some sort of stick-figure construction. One might expect to see screws or bolts fastening the pieces together. Her mother shuddered as the fierce stream of the hose hit her squarely in the chest. Lilo quickly slipped her arm around her.
“Easy!” she barked at the woman with the hose and moved to protect her mother from the powerful spray of water.
“Oh, sorry, dearie. Your mum?” Lilo was stunned. No one had ever said sorry to them since before Rossauer Lände. Not even Good Matron. She nodded. “Just a bit of a thing, ain’t she? Could wash her right down the drain.” Please don’t, thought Lilo.
After they had been hosed, dried, and sprayed with a disinfectant that stung, they were issued new clothes. Unku began sashaying around. “My, don’t I look like a movie star in this.” The clothes were the same gray coarse prison shirts and pants worn at Maxglan, only cleaner. All shirts were stamped with a Z on the front and the back. Lilo laughed at Unku’s antics, but her mother scowled.
When they were dressed, they were told to stand in the paved yard outside the milk barns. Four armed guards stood watch and shortly Commandant Bohmer strode into the yard. In his hand he held a whip coiled into a perfect circle. He held it as if it were another appendage, a natural extension of his hand. He slid his fingers almost unconsciously along the leather. It was not precisely a threatening gesture. It was simply a statement, an assertion of power. He cast his eyes lazily over the twenty-three people, then tipped his head and murmured something to his aide.