Suddenly Harald cried out “Ruhe am das Bühnenbild!” — Quiet on the set! They all fell silent. “Action!”
The ugly stand-in had vanished, and Pedro strode through the archway. His broad sombrero was tipped back so a few of his golden curls were visible. He had a rather bland smile on his face. Lilo immediately sensed that Franz Eichberger was not the world’s greatest actor. No Gary Cooper, she thought. Lilo and her mother had seen Cooper in Morocco. How they loved that movie! And it was while she was looking at Pedro walk through the gate for the fifth take, not a foot from where her mother stood with a jug on her head, that the truth of her mother’s words struck her. Film slaves! We are truly slaves!
The crew and the actors had taken a break for lunch. They sat at a long table under the shade of a linden tree. The table was spread with all sorts of delectable foods, foods Lilo hadn’t seen for weeks, like oranges and a platter of sliced tomatoes. There was also the smell of a fresh noodle pudding. She watched as a woman in a white apron trimmed with a ruffle delivered a tiered platter of delicate little cakes just like the kind they displayed in the window of the Fritzlmeyer Conditori shop on Maria-Theresein Strasse. And from the shadows of their enclosure, Lilo watched as Tante Leni peeled her orange very slowly and then fed a section of it to Franz, letting her fingers linger on the edge of his lips.
Their own food was delivered as well — in buckets. They were given the same tin bowls as the day before, and it was the same soup as well. Undoubtedly, it was superior to the food they had received at Rossauer Lände, Buchenwald, or Maxglan. Still, it had more potato peel than actual potato. But as Bluma always said, the peel had all the vitamins. There was a little bit of ham in it, and they were given a decent hunk of not-too-stale bread.
Lilo still had the chocolate in her pocket. She had offered it to her mother, but Bluma had refused, saying it was too rich to eat after all these weeks. She knew it would make her sick to her stomach. Lilo had been very tempted to eat it and was not worried about becoming ill, yet every time, she stopped just short of unwrapping the gold foil that enclosed the luscious treat. The chocolate brought the image of the snake charmer and the snake to mind. That very white palm that had extended toward her with the chocolate, waiting for her to take it, reminded her of the diamond-shaped head of a cobra about to rear.
She smelled the chocolate when the other kids unwrapped theirs. Some had a cherry in the middle, some a praline or chestnut filling. She knew that she might never find out what filled her chocolate. It seemed to her that it was all part of the predator’s game. The baited trap. It was Lilo’s subtle stand against this insidious enemy. She was convinced that there was a profound evil lurking beneath the flawlessly beautiful surface.
Leni was walking toward them with a big smile. Some of the younger kids jumped to their feet. “Guten Tag, Tante Leni.” She stopped at the fence and smiled broadly. Her teeth were very white and slightly pointed. She reached her hand into the robe pocket and came out with a fistful of chocolates.
“Hooray!” the children shouted, and crowded toward the chicken-wire fence.
“Now, darlings,” she said as her eyes were scanning the enclosure. Lilo knew instantly she was searching for Unku. “I want to tell you about the scene we shall be shooting this afternoon. You of course know that we often do things a bit out of order in a movie. So you have already seen me performing the dance — you watched through the tavern window. But now we are doing the scene that would occur just before the dance scene. The scene of me preparing for my first performance in the tavern, tying my dancing shoes, fixing my earrings. You children have been following me through the streets and gather outside where I am getting ready. You are peeking in at me through the opening of my caravan. Won’t it be fun? All right?”
“Always peeking through windows, admiring her,” Rosa whispered to Lilo.
“All right,” they all cried. Tante Leni’s eyes flashed, and she slid them toward Lilo as if seeking her out especially.
“Yes!” Lilo cried, and dragged her mouth into a broad smile. Was it a game they were playing? Had Tante Leni marked her in the notebook as the girl reluctant to take the chocolate? Suddenly the chocolate seemed like dead weight in her pocket.
“I think for this scene we need only girls,” Leni continued. “No boys and preferably the shorter girls. Maybe one medium-tall girl. Like you.” She pointed directly at Lilo. She paused and looked toward Unku, who was taller. “That one in the back. Why don’t we dress her in the long black skirt and black scarf? She can be standing by the well with some of the other village crones. Oh, and where is that mother with the baby, Harald?”
“In the holding cage, I believe.” Harald had just come up.
“Well, get her. I think it would be adorable if she could hold the baby up to the window to give the infant a peek at me as well.”
“I think the mother is nursing the baby.”
“Well, she could take it off her tit for a moment, for God’s sake. I think it would be charming if she held it up to the window. Don’t you, Harald?” The dark beady eyes bore into him. He shrugged.
“Of course, Leni — charming, adorable,” he muttered.
Two minutes later, Harald was back with the mother and baby. Leni came up to them. The baby was fussing a bit. “May I peek?” she said in a soft voice.
“Of course,” the mother replied.
“Oh, he’s adorable.”
“It’s a girl, madam.”
“Oh, sorry.” Leni tossed her head coquettishly. “She’s adorable. She’ll grow up to be a real beauty, I am sure.”
The scene in the square was shot quickly, but then it was decided that the tavern scene that they had worked on a few days before had some lighting problems and had to be reshot. The street urchins were back outside the tavern, peeking in at the Martha dance. Nothing seemed to be going right in the scene, and tempers were fraying.
“Look at that!” Rosa whispered between takes.
“What?” Lilo said.
“Tante Leni — shaking her finger at little Otto.” He was trying his best not to burst into sobs. The child was not more than ten feet away from the window where Lilo, Rosa, and Blanca were standing.
“He’s tired, Leni.” Harald Reinl strode over. “Give the kid a break.”
“Give him a break? This isn’t my money. It’s the Reich’s.”
“He’s carried that tray perfectly for what, twenty-five takes now?”
Then Lilo and Rosa stared at each other as the child fell down on his knees. “I want my mother, Tante Leni.”
“Being tired is not the problem, apparently,” Leni said.
Leni stooped down, the ruffles of her skirt nearly swamping the child. They could see her extending her hand and stroking Otto’s curly black hair — a wig, which covered his closely shaved head. But now he tore off the wig and shouted “No!” directly at Tante Leni, who held out chocolates to him. “You promised me before. No! No! No! I want my mother. I don’t want chocolates.”
Leni turned and snapped her fingers. The lady who was in charge of dressing Leni came forward and handed her the small notebook. “You already wrote her name down in the notebook. Frieda Kunz!” Otto cried.
“You are right. I am not writing down her name. How do we find your mama if I don’t know your name, Liebling.” There was something in the way she said “mama” that made Lilo’s stomach curdle.
As if in a trance, the child replied, “My name is Otto Anton Kunz.”
From the basket of red ruffles that surrounded him, he tipped up his face to Tante Leni and took a deep breath. “Please, I want my mother. Her name is Frieda Kunz. She is a tall lady. She has a dimple when she smiles. She speaks Sinti and Roma and Italian, and she sings beautifully. Please find her, Tante Leni.”
“Of course, Liebling. Now, you run along. Are you sure you don’t want a chocolate?”
Take it! Take it, Lilo prayed.
“No, thank you. All I want is Mama.”
“Where is
he?” Rosa whispered as they got off the bus at the farm.
“I thought he came on the first bus,” Blanca said.
“Django was on the first bus.” Lilo looked around for Django and spotted him by a newly erected fence.
The head guard greeted them.
“Welcome back. The farmer Herr Cramm has been kind enough to enlarge the fenced area significantly so that you may take a moderate amount of exercise outside the barn.” He looked at Lilo and the others as if he expected to be thanked. Then he briskly nodded and walked away. Lilo, Rosa, and Blanca raced over to Django.
“Was Otto on your bus?” Lilo asked.
“Little Otto? No, why?”
“Oh, God — she took him!” Lilo gasped.
“More likely sent him away,” Rosa added.
“Maybe she really did send him to meet his mother,” Lilo said.
The color drained from Django’s face. “His mother? Otto’s mother is at Dachau.”
“B-b-but that’s not like those horrible camps that we hear are being built in the east,” Lilo stammered.
“Until those camps are completed in Poland. It’s a major holding camp until then. Like Buchenwald.”
“But how do you know, Django?” Rose asked. “You can’t be sure.”
“I was in Marzahn with Frieda Kunz. She was sent to Dachau. Otto was put on the bus with me to Buchenwald. I looked after him. All the Gypsies from Marzahn who were shipped to Dachau are heading east now.”
“But how do you know for sure?” Lilo pressed. Django’s eyes shifted nervously.
“The guard Gunther.” He nodded toward the head guard, who had just informed them of the farmer’s largesse in building the fence. “I heard him talking the other night. Auschwitz is almost completed. Gypsies and Jews are being sent by the thousands to finish the construction — in short, to dig their own graves, in the Birches.”
“The birches?” Lilo was stunned. They should be glad they aren’t being sent to the birches. The head guard’s words came back to her from the first chilly night nearly a month before. “What are the birches, Django?”
“That is the name of the biggest camp of all: Auschwitz-Birkenau.”
It had nothing to do with trees at all. All the trees had been cut down to make way for the humans that would be cut down.
“I can’t believe Otto is going there,” Blanca said softly. “He’s so little. All he wanted was his mother.”
“We can’t be sure,” Lilo said, but realized that her own words sounded empty to her.
No one was in the latrines when she walked in. Tears slipped down her cheeks. “He only wanted his mother. Just his mother,” she whispered, then thought how Otto was right. They were living in a waking nightmare. Lilo slipped her hand into her pocket and touched the three chocolates, none of which she had unwrapped. There was the one from the first day of shooting. Then the one Tante Leni had given them when she had explained the scenes, and then the “bonus” one she gave each “urchin” for being such “wonderful, marvelous little actresses” as they mooned over her when she was dressing for her performance. She took them from her pocket and threw them down the hole of the latrine.
“Tell it again,” Django asked.
He, Lilo, Rosa, Unku, and Blanca were up in the hayloft, talking softly.
“I was coming back from the latrines by way of the water barrels,” Lilo whispered. “The guards had gathered there to have a smoke and talk. There is a perfect place to hide to hear them. The bad guard —”
“That’s Gunther,” Django interrupted. Lilo sensed that he was just slightly jealous of the information she had discovered. Django liked to think of himself as the only one who could ferret out such vital intelligence, as he called it. Lilo had once referred to him as a “gatherer,” which he deeply resented. “I don’t gather. It sounds like I’m picking flowers in a garden. I run information. I am a runner.”
Lilo continued: “Not ten minutes ago, I came across some astounding intelligence and I shall repeat it exactly as I heard it. The shooting will shut down here by the middle of the month and then the entire production will be moved to Babelsberg.”
“Babelsberg?” Rosa, Unku, and Blanca said.
“Yeah, I have no idea where that is,” Lilo replied
“Ha!” Django said. “I know exactly where it is.” He looked quite pleased with himself. He could now resume his position as chief know-it-all.
“Where?” Blanca asked.
“Berlin.”
“Berlin!” the three girls gasped. Berlin was the most important city, the most sophisticated city, in all of Europe.
“But is Babelsberg a city, too?” Lilo asked. As soon as the words were out, she regretted them. The question made her sound ridiculously ignorant.
“No,” Django replied. “Babelsberg is simply the most important film studio in all of Europe. It is actually located just outside Berlin, in Potsdam. It makes sense, of course.” Django was now speaking in his most authoritative voice. “You see, they have state-of-the art sound studios and can re-create scenes, especially the interior ones, all inside, protected from the weather.” He paused dramatically. “Now, here’s the problem.” He held up a finger to command absolute attention. “We are not the only Gypsies available in Berlin. As you know, I am a veteran of the Marzahn camp, which is almost next door. They have a thousand Gypsies on tap there.”
The girls groaned softly. “Wait!” Lilo said, her eyes brightening. “Look, we’ve only had a few weeks of shooting, but if they want to use us”— she held her hands out to indicate Rosa and Blanca —“for the street urchins, they can’t just put in anybody. It will look funny in the film. I bet you anything that’s where they sent Otto already — to Babelsberg.”
Nobody met her eyes. Finally Django spoke: “You do have a point. They’ll need street urchins in Babelsberg. They haven’t finished with all the town scenes yet, according to the script. They have to match the shots. I think it’s called continuity. Same props, same extras. Did they do a lot of close-ups of you when you were peeking in the caravan, watching her get dressed?”
“Yes,” the girls all answered. They were getting up to leave. Rosa yawned. “You know,” she said, still yawning, “I had to keep reaching out, at least ten, twelve times, to touch the castanets she was going to dance with. They shot it from every which way.”
When the other girls had left the hayloft, Lilo noticed that Django had suddenly grown quite still. “Django, are you becoming invisible?” she tried to joke.
“That’s just the problem,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
He slid his eyes toward Lilo. “Your mother is, too, Lilo, and me.”
“What — too what?” she asked. A dark feeling was rising inside her.
“We — me and your mother — have been too invisible. We’ve been here, what? Almost three weeks. No close-up shots. Only long shots. We’re replaceable. I mean, all they shot were my hands on that accordion. They could be anybody’s hands.”
“No! No!” She wanted to say, “No one could have hands like yours.” She loved his hands. She looked down and reached out, touching his right hand lightly.
“You mean replaceable with Marzahn Gypsies?”
Django nodded but said nothing.
Lilo returned to what she and her mother called their hay bale apartment. They had stacked nine bales of hay to make a small three-walled enclosure for their sleeping pallet. The fourth side of their sleeping area was the barn wall. The moonlight slid like a silver blade through the crack of the boards, casting its light on her mother’s tired face. Lilo looked at it, not daring to stroke the cheek for fear of waking her. It was a wonderful face despite its gauntness. She was so thin that the outline of her teeth and gums made a slight impression on the space above her upper lip. Just the day before, she had lost one of her front teeth. It had simply dropped out. It was as if with not enough real food to chew, their teeth became loose — loose from disuse perhaps or most likely
malnutrition. But at least her mother’s bleeding had stopped.
Lilo simply had to figure out a way to get her mother to Babelsberg.
My mother is not replaceable. Nor is Django! Miteinander! She suddenly realized. The thought shocked her. There was indeed no one quite like Django. It was not just that he was so smart and that they all needed him to figure things out. It was that Django, despite all his annoying ways, had crept beneath Lilo’s skin, inched his way into perhaps her heart, and now haunted the edges of her soul like a soft mist.
Lilo lay close to the barn board and pressed the side of her face against the crack. It was her new viewfinder through which she could scan the world for a place for herself, her mother, and Django. But all she could see now was the moon riding high and full in the crisp night air. I must think about a close-up shot — no more long shots — for Django and Mama, she told herself, then silently repeated, No more long shots. In her mind, she began framing their faces.
The moon was so perfectly round. Suspended in the night, it seemed to quiver slightly. But as Lilo watched the glinting orb through the crack in the wall, it did not slip away to another night in another world, but darkened and shrank. Then into her dreamless sleep, an eye floated up. “Call me Tante Leni.” The voice giggled, and Lilo rolled over. Outside, the guards were roasting chestnuts in a grate. The mouthwatering scent drifted into the barn. She spied a shadow by the fence. At first she thought it was a small animal — a lamb perhaps, escaped from a lambing pen. But no! It was the little girl, crouching down where she had first met Lilo’s mother. She looked around furtively, then ran off. What was she doing up this late, outside all by herself? Was she looking for Bluma?
Quietly Lilo got up. The barn door was no longer locked at night since they had enlarged the enclosure and built new latrines farther from the barn for the prisoners to have access to. It was only the fence prickled with barbed wire that was locked. There were rumors that they might electrify it, but so far they had not. Lilo slipped around to where the little girl had been standing. She saw that the dirt was loose around the fence stake. When she put her hand down, she felt heat. Scratching away the dirt, she nearly cried out when her fingers touched the chestnuts, still hot from the fire. She dropped them into the folds of her skirt and ran back to the barn.