Eye Wit (6 page)

Magie Seher Lulu never forecast what was happening in Germany.
She didn’t need to.
Everyone knew what would happen, most of all the Gypsies in Germany.

In May 1940, Reich Minister Heinrich Himmler ordered that all Gy
psies residing in Hamburg be deported to the Lublin District of the Generalgouvernment—the “Greater German Reich,” that part of Poland not formally annexed to Germany. The Hamburg Gypsies’ destination would be the concentration camp at Majdanek, near the city of Lublin. At Majdanek, those not able to work under slave labor conditions, and those who put up any resistance to the guards, were shot in the back of their heads and fell directly into graves they had just dug.

Luludji’s father refused to dig and was shot. Luludji chose life and went to work in the camp’s warehouse, sorting the clothes and belon
gings of murdered victims.

At the camp in the summer of 1942, Luludji married a co-worker, Hadji (“He who visited a holy place”) Krietzman, despite the ban on Gypsy weddings that was harshly enforced––if the Gypsy celebrants were caught. Both Luludji and Hadji were 16 years of age, and their marriage ceremony was conducted quietly, quickly and secretly by a Romani cle
rgyman from the barracks while the camp guards were dining at the mess hall, the usual celebratory music and dancing at a Romani wedding replaced by happy hugs and kisses all around.

Despite the horrors she had already experienced, Luludji was dete
rmined that her family survive. She became pregnant immediately. On April 23, 1942, her daughter, Luminitsa (Light of Dawn) Krietzman was born in the barracks at Majdanek with Gypsy midwives attending.

A gracious God and the flowering of life had produced the “Light of Dawn,” Luminitsa Kriet
zman. My mother.

Exactly a month later, Reichsführer Himmler ordered
that
all Gypsies in
all
Generalgouvernment concentration camps
be transferred
to one camp: the Special Gypsy Family Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the first step of the “Final Solution for the Gypsy Menace.”

When she
was transferred to
Birkenau, Luludji Krietzman, still lactating, was without child—deliberately. She
knew
the sign over the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau,
A
rbeit Macht Frei
(work shall make you f
ree) was a cruel hoax. Indeed, as many in her group had deduced upon seeing
that
sign
up
on their arrival,
Arbeit Macht Fre
i durch den Schornstein
(work brings freedom through the chimney)
would be more
accurate
.

Luludji knew she and her husband Hadji would not survive Birkenau, and she was certain baby Luminitsa would have been doomed as well. So she had left baby Luminitsa in the care of another Romani family at M
ajdanek, the Domanoffs.
She knew that
Andre and Mishka Domanoff, who were supposed to leave for Auschwitz-Birkenau the day
after Luludji and Hadji left
,
had hoped
to escape before then. In her heart of hearts, as confirmed by her treasured crystal ball, Luludji expected that no Gypsy who reached Birkenau would leave alive.

At Birkenau, after meeting Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” she was certain.

11

At the morgue, Dante Nicosian was waiting for Dan in his office just outside the white-tiled examination room that was visible through the window behind Dante’s desk—the only window in Dante’s office. Facing his desk was a much prettier scene: a hand-painted mural of Dante’s ancestral village, Nicosia, in the armed-truce island state known as Cyprus.

The ME held the bag up, examining the arrow. He walked to his computer and tapped the keys rapidly, looking back and forth from the bagged arrow to the words and pictures on the screen. Finally, he gave a nod of satisfaction. “Ha! Just as I thought. It’s exactly the same. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Come on back.”

Dante Nicosian held the door to the examination room open, then led the way. “Number seventeen is back here.” He strode off towards the last of three examination tables holding corpses, and Dan followed, once again struck by the absolute sterility of the room. Everything was as white as Dante’s teeth. Only the corpses showed any color, and even they were only off-white, except for one stitched-up African-American, whose hues mixed black, brown and blue.

Number 17 looked like a ghost.

The ominous haunting strains of Mozart’s 25
^th
Symphony barely covered the sounds of the high-volume ventilating fans Nicosian had insisted upon when the examination room had been remodeled a couple of years earlier. A big help, those fans, but the smell of formaldehyde, mixed with something else that Dan always identified as the odor of death itself, couldn’t be eliminated entirely.

“As my report indicates, Marco Fellini was killed by an arrow identical to the one that wounded the balloonist, the same length, same shaft material—some perfectly straight wood of some kind––same color, same fletching, same razor-sharp blades. There’s no question they came from the same place. Here’s the denouement: the two arrows are so much alike, I’m saying they probably came from the same quiver. Interestingly, both are hunting arrows, not target arrows.”

The ME smiled at Dan. “Now aren’t those what a detective would call significant facts?”

“Apart from a few missing links such as ‘who and why?’” Dan said.

“Hey,” Dante protested, “tell me you find this interesting––I know I’ll wait till I’m an aging queen and hell has frozen before you find me interesting.”

“I assure you, Dante. You’re the most interesting aging queen I know.”

“I’ll take that as a compliment. God, now I feel
thlimmenos
.” 

“
Thlimmenos
?”

“Ohh…Kay…. Anything else you found that can help me figure out why Marco Fellini and the balloonist are connected? Why’d the balloonist be flying a balloon across lower Manhattan?”

“Outside of the obvious?”

“What do you mean?”

“Maybe because he could. Maybe because he was another Phillippe Petit. You remember. That
oraios
French dude who walked the high wire he strung between the Twin Towers?”

“
Oraios
?”

“Handsome. Charming. Devastatingly gorgeous. God, if he’d only been gay. We could’ve had a beautiful life together. I could have knit his bones back together when he fell….”

“Or opened him up with your famously tidy Y incision, right here on the slab.”

“Thank you,
mystikos praktoras,
for bringing another cherished fantasy down to Earth.”

“
Mystik
os
-whatsis
?”

“Detective,” Dante explained.

“Oh. All part of a day’s work for us
mystikos whatsis,
Doc.”

The ME nodded. “You owe me a drink, Daniel Riley. At least a drink.”

12

Thanks to
the sacrifices of Malina Lublinski
in 1943, I, Hans Reiniger, am alive to tell this tale today as a Gypsy of Bohemian heritage and a bona fide citizen of Switzerland.

By the spring of 1943, Malina Lublinski had been a prostitute for two years, a fair-skinned eigh
teen-year-old beauty with tresses the length and color of late-harvested straw and eyes the cerulean hue of a canyon-flanked fjord. To every camp guard, she was the ideal and—more importantly—available Nordic goddess, a wet dream in the flesh. She looked fourteen.

Unknown to the guards, she also was as Jewish as her parents, Ca
smir and Cyla Rolnik,
both
professors of biology and botany at the Agricultural University of Lublin.

Malina was sixteen and living with her parents on the northern ou
tskirts of Lublin when Casmir and Cyla were questioned at home by Generalgouvernment troops, then escorted out their own front door and executed as dissidents who were proselytizing against the Greater German Reich. Their bodies were left to rot on the doorstep as an object lesson to Jews and other dissidents.

Malina Lublinski escaped capture by sneaking out the back door as the troops approached the house; she escaped discovery by burrowing into a pile of manure alongside her neighbor’s barn.

Malina entered the manure pile a young woman who had been pla
nning a career in veterinary medicine. She exited to find her parent’s bullet-riddled bodies—and herself an orphan with no assets beyond her body and a determination to avenge her parents.

To escape detection as the daughter of dissidents, she would forego her parent’s surname and call herself Malina Lublinski from that date forward—a good
Christian
trade name: “Magdalene from Lublin.”

Malina knew all the guards at Majdanek concentration camp; they were her most devoted cu
stomers. Evening after evening these guards demonstrated their devotion to racial purity by taking turns pillaging her Aryan exquisiteness. Her payment in Reichsmarks was insignificant. Her real recompense was distracting the guards’ attention
from
the fences
and gates
surrounding the barracks. Dozens of Jews and Romani escaped, sometimes entire families.
Malina was impoverished—but
a moral millionaire, many times over.

One such evening was May 25
^th
, 1943, when Malina serviced three gate guards simultaneously, her finest performance, in my book. Only a few Romani escaped during that one-hour love fest, but two of them, the Domanoffs, Andre and Mishka, walked out the unattended gate carrying
a third Gypsy,
baby Luminitsa Krietzman—my mother, then barely a month old.

Once outside the gate, Andre and Mishka and baby Luminitsa headed immediately to the forest, a quarter mile away, where they were embraced by Romani partisans. Over the next weeks and months, partisan guides led them from temporary encampment to encampment, deep in the fo
rest paralleling the road to Kielce, then stealthily proceeded southwestward, eventually passing quite close by the gates of Auschwitz,
then
across the valleys and ranges of the Protectorate of Bohemia-Moravia and Greater Germany, and finally, by small boat, across the Bodensee into Switzerland.

Little Luminitsa, my mother, was almost nine months old when they arrived at Sankt Gallen in northeast Switzerland in the dead of winter, January 1944. The next month they travelled to Winte
rthur, Switzerland. At this point, you’re probably thinking, “Good for them, they made it to
sanctuary in
the n
eutral haven of Switzerland
.” You couldn’t be more wrong. In its treatment of Gypsies, Switzerland was
neither
neutral
nor a
haven; rather, it served as an early model for the Third Reich, lacking only the willingness to adopt the ultimate solution to the Gypsy menace: execution in death camps. During World War II, no Gypsies—Roma, Sinti or Yennish—were offered asylum by the Swiss government.
Not one.
All Gypsies
who sought asylum from the Greater Third Reich wer
e deported back to Germany, with
most of
those deportees
sent on to concentration camps.

So the Domanoffs and baby Luminitsa were not welcomed with open arms by the Swiss go
vernment. Fortunately, Swiss authorities were unaware
of their origins. The Domanoff
s and little Luminitsa were able to stay in Switzerland only because Andre’s uncle, a Swiss citizen who lived in Z
ü
rich, knew of their impending arrival and was able to obtain high-quality papers for all three, including passable birth certificates and work papers.

Their papers showed them to be German, of Polish and Swiss her
itage, who had moved to Sankt Gallen Switzerland from Liechtenstein in 1940. Of their Romani heritage there was no mention. They were able to keep their names, except for baby Luminitsa Krietzman, whose birth certificate proclaimed “Luminitsa Domanoff,” born in Sankt Gallen, Swit
zerland,
23 April 1943.

Nineteen years later
, thanks to the heroics of Malina Lublinski, the determination of Andre and Mishka Domanoff, and the assistance of dozens of Romani partisans and sympathizers,
I would be born a Swiss citizen in Lucerne, on
23 August
1962.

There is no mention of my origins as a Romani Gypsy on my birth papers either, or those of my parents, Luminitsa Domanoff and Jurgen Reiniger, who were married in 1961. But I know my R
omani identity—my clan and my heritage—and I will never forget.

13

Sophia Fellini’s announcement of her husband’s infidelity had been intentional, Yoko Kamimura concluded. But for what reason? Was she trying to shift suspicion away from herself and onto her husband’s assistants? If so, she would have been more successful if she hadn’t exposed what could be her own motive to kill her husband: jealousy. Surely she would know that. What game was she playing?