The Extra (6 page)

“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.

L
ilo 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 been 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.

“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.