“You are surprised to see me here!” He smiled. It was more of a dark gash than a facial expression. “What would you say if I told you I had a brief theatrical career? Ha! You find that funny?” Everyone knew that he did not expect an answer.
“All right, let us begin. The rules here are no different from Maxglan. There are just more. Rule number one: you are prisoners here as you were in Maxglan. When you are on the movie set, do not go near the cast and crew. Do not talk to them. There will be armed guards on the set at all times. Do not talk to the guards. If you try to escape, they will shoot you.”
He continued listing the rules that they had all heard in every internment camp they had been in. He concluded by reassuring them that all infractions would be dealt with swiftly and punishments would be administered either individually or in certain cases collectively, just as at Maxglan. In other words, they could all suffer for the errors of one.
“And,” he added, “if for any reason Fräulein Riefenstahl becomes dissatisfied with your work, you shall be immediately sent back to Maxglan or possibly Ravensbruck or points east.” Again the gash in the face appeared.
Two young farm boys arrived; each carried two pails of milk. The prisoners were then instructed to step forward and receive their food rations.
“Here, take this, Mama.” Lilo held out the metal cup of milk.
“No, no. Keep it. It’s not much, anyway. Look, they watered it.”
The milk had indeed been watered. But it was the best-tasting thing they had put in their mouths in months. They were also given bread and a slab of ham. Lilo sat down next to the pretty girl, Unku.
She couldn’t help but reflect on how different it was to start up a conversation with a prisoner than to talk with a schoolmate. It was nothing like the first day of school, when one might ask a lot of questions about someone’s hobbies or favorite sports hero or where they lived or if they had brothers, sisters. Lilo’s world had shrunk so much that these questions and the information one might get would be mostly useless. Asking about family was off limits because nine out of ten times that person had lost not just one but several family members. The topics of conversation were severely limited. Lilo looked at Unku and wondered if she had been sterilized. But she dared not ask. She was surprised when Unku uttered the blunt words. “So they got your mother but not you, eh?”
“You mean . . . ?”
Unku nodded silently and inscribed a circle with her finger around her belly.
“How could you tell?”
“I saw the scars and the blood when they hosed us down.”
The thing that Lilo hated most was that she was no longer shocked. That she and Unku could talk about this seemed simultaneously unbelievable yet not shocking. A question popped into Lilo’s head.
“What were you doing a year ago, this time?”
“Let’s see, a year ago.” Unku scratched her head. She had the most beautiful hair Lilo had ever seen. Even though her hair had been cut short, it was very thick, so thick, with glinting red highlights. Her eyes weren’t black but amber. Now as she spoke, her eyes became lively with the memory of what she had been doing a year before. “Of course I remember! We were on the new winter triangle route Ostra-Brno-Zlin. It was maybe months before they passed the decree that Gypsies could no longer travel and we had to settle. We’re not like you Sinti.” This she didn’t have to explain to Lilo. “So my grandmother is a fortune-teller, sort of.”
Lilo’s eyes widened. Her mother had said fortune-telling was complete nonsense. “She does the pen dukkerin?” Lilo asked. “Is she good?”
“Ha!” Unku laughed harshly. “We thought she was until we were caught. My grandmother was sure she could use her powers to figure out the best place to go in the triangle.”
“She uses a crystal ball?”
“Only for the gadje.” Gadje was the word for anyone who was not a Gypsy. It also meant dupe. Lilo knew that her mother would have been furious with her for consorting with a girl who spoke so disrespectfully, let alone a Roma girl whose grandma was a fortune-teller. But she found Unku interesting. “So what did she use instead of a crystal ball?”
“A mirrored bowl filled with water.” Then Unku’s eyes flashed. “Problem is, she was a lousy fortune-teller but she thought she was good.”
Lilo laughed. “What, she cheated you? Pulled the hakk’ni panki?”
“No, instead of leading us away from the SS, she led us right to them. When we came into Brno, the SS were waiting for us. Next thing we know, we’re in Lety.” She sighed. “So that’s what I was doing a year ago. Traveling to Lety. What were you doing?”
“Me? Oh, well, I was in school. It was recitation time. Actually no, recitation tests were usually in the late morning. It’s afternoon now. Maybe mathematics. My favorite subject was history, especially ancient history — like Greece.”
“Ah, you’re not a caravan girl. I’ve never been to school. But I can read and write a little bit. And I can count. You know, add, subtract, multiply, all that.”
“What did you like to do?”
“Dance!”
“I knew you were going to say that.”
Unku poked Lilo with her elbow. “Ah, come on. How did you know that? You a fortune-teller like my grandmother?”
“I guessed when you were prancing around pretending to be a movie star after they gave us these clean clothes. You’re very graceful. You know how to move.”
“Did you have a boyfriend?” Unku suddenly asked.
“No.”
“Never?”
“Well, there were boys I liked, but I wouldn’t say that . . . well, you know, it never added up to anything.”
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen.”
“By the time I was fifteen, I had had at least seven.” Unku laughed. “Close your mouth, Lilo.” In fact, Lilo’s mouth had dropped open in dismay. She was terribly embarrassed by her reaction and felt she must have looked completely wide-eyed, wide mouthed, and stupid.
“Well, how old are you now?” Lilo finally gathered her wits enough to ask.
“Sixteen. And don’t ask how many boyfriends. I’ve lost count.” Lilo noticed that Unku did not say this in a bragging way, and she immediately decided that she liked this Roma girl, this beautiful non-Sinti girl. She was an honest, straightforward girl. Maybe a bit rougher than the girlfriends she was accustomed to, but rough didn’t mean nasty. She knew Sinti girls who could be mean as junkyard dogs.
That night, they were locked up in the barn. Blankets had been distributed to spread on the hay. Lilo and her mother together made an “apartment” out of nine rectangular bales of hay. It seemed almost cozy. Lilo had picked a place close to the barn’s east wall because there was a crack in the boards where she could look out and see the mountains and the sky.
“Mama,” she whispered as they cuddled, “you see? It’s going to be better here. Really. Look — we’re cleaner. They gave us more to eat. You’ll see, Mama. And you’re bleeding less now since the shower. I can tell — you seem stronger.”
“It’s not quite Hollywood, though,” her mother said softly. It was a joke. Her second joke in one day! Lilo took heart and held her closer, but not too tightly. She was as fragile as a bird. Those bones. God, those bones. She thought she could feel every one of them. Her chest was a frail cage for the beating of her heart.
Lilo looked out the crack in the barn boards. There was a half-moon, and beneath it, a star was rising. A sudden shadow sliced across the moon’s light. The crack turned dark. A guard had just passed. She glimpsed his jackboots — blacker than a moonless night. But then a sharp needle of brightness. The star actually reflected for a split second in the sheen of the boots. Then it was gone.
This was better . . . better than Rossauer Lände, better than Buchenwald, better than Maxglan. For dinner, Lilo had had watered milk, a piece of good bread, a hunk of ham, and now this! Through a crack in a barn board, like dessert — a piece of the night, a bit of moon, a dab of starlight.
>
She was not sure what woke her up, close to dawn. Perhaps it was the emptiness in the space beside her. She panicked. Her mother was nowhere in sight. The barn door was unlocked, and she saw figures in the gray of dawn making their way toward the milking barn. She got up and wandered to the small barbed-wire enclosure outside the barn.
Lilo came across a “scene.” Just as Leni Riefenstahl had done at Maxglan, Lilo raised her hand to her eye and made an O to look through. Framed in her finger viewfinder, she saw her mother crouched by a corner of the fence. She was handing a kitten through to a small child, presumably the farmer’s daughter. The child must have been six or seven years old and wore a Tyrolean dirndl. A milking pail was set on the ground by her feet. She had crouched down to receive the kitten and was obviously pleased that Lilo’s mother had found it. She looked up adoringly at Bluma and then leaned forward to try to kiss her through the barbed wire. But that was difficult. So she tucked the kitty into the pocket of her dirndl apron, then reached instead for Bluma’s hand and pressed her mouth to it. She held it for several seconds.
Lilo liked looking at the world through her finger viewfinder. It cut out the unnecessary. It brought everything into a sharp focus despite the fact that she knew there was no magnifying lens. She felt that all her senses were heightened. The child seemed so open with Bluma. Once again the child pressed her face close to the fence and reached out with her free hand to touch her mother’s cheek — a Gypsy cheek! Suddenly two guards appeared. It was the head guard, however, who bent down and shook his finger at Bluma. Lilo heard the word verboten, forbidden.
“But she saved my kitty,” the little girl was saying.
“Nein! Nein! The kitty could catch a disease from these filthy Gypsies. You should be in the milking barn with your sister, helping milk the cows.” The little girl looked confused. Lilo saw the younger guard glance at Bluma almost sympathetically. But again the word verboten cut through the dawn.
This “scene” was real, not a movie, and Lilo had learned much from it: she had learned first that the little girl was not simply innocent, but that she had a deep well of goodness in her. To her, Bluma was not a Gypsy, not a prisoner crawling with vermin, but a caring human being. She had tried to reward Lilo’s mother’s kindness with kindness.
Just as Django gained advantages by observing people for their likes, dislikes, strengths, and weaknesses, Lilo realized she could gain knowledge of her own. She knew that not all the guards were the same. The head guard was nothing like the young one who had accompanied him. That fellow had appeared genuinely distressed when the head guard had warned the little girl to stay away from the filthy Gypsies. He had looked with real sympathy at her mother. Lilo followed the two guards at a distance until they stopped on the far side of the fence to talk. There was a water barrel there. She crouched behind it and easily heard what they were saying.
The younger one was talking. “What happens when the weather turns? Won’t they get cold in the barn?”
“Ach! They’re tough, these Gypsies, Johan.”
“Cold is cold, especially here in the Tyrol.”
Lilo’s notions about the younger guard were confirmed as she listened. And she learned his name! She was getting good at this.
“Hey, they should be happy they ain’t going to the Birches. Plenty of them going to the Birches.”
Birches? Lilo had no idea what they were talking about. There were certainly no birch trees around this farm. What did he mean? No time to wonder. She caught a glimpse of her mother heading back to the barn. She didn’t want her to worry if she found Lilo gone. She headed back, pleased with what she had learned. It was a new curriculum and more important to her survival than learning logarithms or the history of ancient Greece.
That morning, Lilo and fifteen of the inmates were driven a short distance to the film set. She worried about leaving her mother behind. For almost four weeks, they had rarely been out of each other’s sight for longer than a few minutes. Indeed the longest time was at Buchenwald, when her mother had undergone the sterilization procedure.
“It looks so real!” Unku said as a village came into view. “Small but real.”
But too perfect, Lilo thought. The thatch on the roofs was so evenly trimmed, there was not a straw out of place. The shutters hung on the windows with fresh coats of paint that shined as if enameled. The stones of the well were all precisely cut. When Lilo saw a man come up to the well and easily pick up one stone and replace it with another, she realized they were not real stones at all but most likely made from papier-mâché or whatever movie people used to simulate real rocks.
The sense of unreality settled in quickly as they disembarked from the bus and soon realized that the storefronts were just that — fronts with no backs. People walked through plywood doors that opened onto nothing. The facades of the building were pieces of painted plywood propped up to render a replica of a town square. The donkeys tied to a hitching post were real. A flock of geese was herded to a coop, not by a farmer’s wife but by a man in rolled-up sleeves and street pants.
“Keine Scheisse!” A man with a bullhorn was shouting. “Get the sweepers!”
Two young men with broad brooms materialized out of nowhere, or so it seemed to Lilo, and began sweeping up the animal droppings. Apparently the square must look perfectly clean for the opening shots. She saw a crane with a camera on it being rolled forward. On top rode a cameraman, one side of his face pressed to a long lens. He gave a jaunty thumbs-up to the bullhorn man.
“So this is Roccabruna!” Django said as they stepped off the bus.
“Is that what they call it?” Lilo asked.
“According to the script.”
“Have you seen the script?”
“Bits and pieces,” Django said cryptically. “I plan to organize a whole one by tonight.”
Lilo looked at him and shook her head ever so slightly in wonder.
“Very Spanish, isn’t it?” Django said.
“I’ve never been to Spain, so I couldn’t tell you.”
“Well, it’s certainly not German.”
They had been moved temporarily to an area near the tavern, which, unlike the other buildings, was not simply a front but a real space. Inside they could see tables, bunches of fake grapes hanging from hooks, wine casks, and posters of bullfighters in swinging capes. “Look, no beer steins in the tavern, no beer kegs. Ola!”
“Ola? What’s that?”
“Spanish expression. They seem to say it a lot. Ola this, ola that! Just a good general all-purpose word.”
“Ola,” Lilo repeated.
The bullhorn man was striding toward them. Was he going to give them brooms and order them to clean up as well? Lilo wondered. He stopped just short of where they were standing and looked the girls and women up and down.
“You! You! And you! And now for the fellows . . . that one over there and that one — can you hold an accordion?” He snapped his fingers at Django.
“Hold one? I can play!” Django said.
“All right, we dub in the music, but you can pretend! Look professional.”
“That’s me. I am the total professional!” Django brushed his shirt.
“Okay, my professional, over here!” Lilo had learned that this man was Hugo Lehner. He was one of the two men who had been at Maxglan with Fräulein Riefenstahl when she selected the prisoners.
“And the mother with baby. There’s one with a baby. Right?”
The woman whom Lilo had learned was named Mina stepped forward with her swaddled infant in a sling. The baby was mewling. Mina was so thin that Lilo couldn’t help but wonder how she could make enough milk for the child. Lehner walked over and pulled back the covers a bit. “Okay, good enough. Now your job is just to stand in the square near the well. That’s where all the women gather — to gossip, get water, you know.”
Mina nodded.
“The rest of you, wait over there until called. Aufseher!” He raised his hands and snapped his fingers. Two unif
ormed guards with pistols seemed to materialize out of nowhere.
“Escort the prisoners to the cage.”
“Just like Hollywood,” Lilo muttered to Rosa, another girl, who was about two years younger than she was.
In spite of not being a real village, it was nonetheless an amazing one. The real village, so to speak, the village of Krün, was next door. The cage that Lilo and the other extras were put into was near the tavern. It was more of a small corral than an actual cage. There was splitrail fencing with wire, not barbed, however, between the rails.
Lilo soon learned that there was a lot of waiting on a movie set. But for now it was exciting. She wished her mother had been brought to the set, but only fifteen had been required for the day’s shooting. An assistant director came up to the corral and swung open the gate. A woman accompanied him and began picking out half a dozen girls.
“Follow me!” She waved to them. Lilo and the five others fell in line behind her. The woman had a tape measure around her neck and led them to an area at the tavern that had been roped off and draped with a cloth. It was called the costume tent and was filled with racks of clothes. She began pulling blouses and skirts from the racks. “My God, they’re all so skinny. Anna, come over here. We have to start taking these in fast.”
“No fat ones, Bella?” a woman asked.
“Nah. These were the healthiest I could find. You know these are the street urchins. So we can’t use the older females.”
Lilo’s eyes widened as the woman called Anna walked up to them. She was virtually a human porcupine. Her mouth bristled with pins, and each of her wrists was encircled with a bracelet pincushion with at least one hundred pins stuck into it. On her head she wore a headband that was spiked with larger pins, mostly safety pins.
Lilo, Unku, and two other girls, Rosa and Blanca, had been given skirts and blouses that were many times too large for their thin frames. Anna and Bella, with two assistants, began to furiously sew the girls into their costumes. The stitching was not fine and tight but just basting reinforced with pins. “Just be careful how you sit,” one of the assistants said. It seemed to Lilo like a strange remark at first. Except for Good Matron, no one in any camp had told them to be careful about anything that had to do with their personal well-being. But then she realized it was not really their personal well-being that was the concern but the creation of the flawless nature of the unreal world of the film.