The Extra (26 page)

“Ready for what?”

“Ready to be free.”

“I have to tell you something, Zorinda.” Lilo’s voice grew weak. She paused to gather strength. “I met a boy, a boy when I was in the first camp, Buchenwald. It’s a long story, but we were together then in Maxglan, and, well, I fell in love. I don’t know where he is, I don’t know if he is still alive. I can’t explain it. I know my mother is dead. Same with my father. It sort of came to me in a dream, but so far . . . well, not with Django.”

“Django — is that his name? Like the musician Django Reinhardt?”

“Yes, but not
the
musician.”

“I think he’d be a bit old for you.” Zorinda gave a soft chuckle.

“Yes.” Lilo smiled. “But this Django is also a very good musician. A guitarist.” It felt good to talk about him with Zorinda.

“Then you have to live, Lilo. Don’t you see it? If you don’t live, it’s like killing hope, your hope for him to be alive. Would you want him to wish himself dead?”

The idea shocked her. “No, never!” Her eyes were wide with horror. “Never!”

Lilo was in recovery for two days. During those two days, Zorinda brought her food and not scraps. Good food.

“Where do you get this?” Lilo said as she chewed on a hunk of bread with some ham.

“There’s an inmate. Very educated woman, a metal engineer. They release her every day to go work at the Siemens factory. They make something called the V-2 rockets there and munitions, you know. She brings back food for us.”

“Just for us?”

“No, for a few of us. But there are others who work there as well. They are able to get food, too. We have to get you strong really fast. I’m telling the overseer for our barracks that you are ready for work detail tomorrow.”

“What’s the work?”

“Making socks for the soldiers. I work there, too, on the days I am not in the surgery.” Zorinda smiled. Her dark eyes, which tilted slightly, got the most mischievous sparkle. “We make them thin in the toes and the heels so they wear out and give the soldiers sore feet. A little trick.”

“How do you do that? A sock is a sock. You just sew it or knit it.”

“Not here. The socks are made on machines. There’s a way we can set the machines to do our dirty work. No one ever notices. They are only concerned with us making our quota for the day.”
An unnatural obsession with order.
The words tolled again in her head.

“Lilo . . .” Zorinda lowered her voice even more. “Things are happening. The word is they want to march us north to another camp. They are worried about the Russians. We aren’t that far from Russia here. Not really. If they cross the Oder, the Rhine, East Prussia will fall. That’s why you have to be strong, because they’ll march us north when the Russians come.”

“North? How soon?”

“I’m not sure, but when it does happen, it’s our chance, Lilo . . . our . . . our . . . Mississippi.”

Lilo closed her eyes. She tried to imagine running as she had before. Could her legs ever be that strong again? Could her feet be so fast? So swift? They said it was a march, but if there was a chance to run away, could she do it? Could she and Zorinda do it together?
Miteinander?
Life became so complicated. Every time you thought it was just you, only you left, another came along. She looked at Zorinda and put her hand on her shoulder.

“I am strong.”

B
ut it would not happen for more than a year, and when it did, it was not a march, as Zorinda had thought. It was not anything like the Mississippi. First, it was just another transport train, this time to Landsberg, a subcamp of Dachau. They arrived in January 1945. For the first few weeks they were there, both Zorinda and Lilo were taken each day with a handful of the healthy prisoners to work at a Siemens plant. They were thrilled, as this was where they could get news.

In the textile factory back in Ravensbruck, making socks, they had first heard that the Allies had successfully landed on the beaches of Normandy. During their first week at Siemens, while winding thin-coated wires on spools for electrical motors, they heard that the Russians had liberated Auschwitz. Then just a few days later, the Red Army had crossed the Oder River and was said to be within fifty miles of Berlin. By March, word had come that the Americans had begun crossing the Rhine into Germany. And that was when their work at Siemens stopped. Completely.

“It’s not good,” Zorinda said two days after their work at the factory had halted. “They don’t want us going back to work. They’re losing the war, and they don’t want us to find out about it.”

Lilo knew Zorinda was right. What the commandants of the camps feared most was that their prisoners, despite their horrendous physical condition, would take heart and find the energy and the strength to rise up. “But that is the good news,” Zorinda added after a moment.

“Wait, I thought you said it was not good news.”

“Mississippi — our Mississippi!” Her eyes danced with delight.

“You mean a march like the one we hoped for?”

“Yeah. They’ll want to get us out and not leave a trace behind. Just you wait. Our chance will come again. The Allies are getting closer. The Nazis will march us north.”

At that moment, a barrage of shots cracked the air. They grabbed each other’s hand.

“You’re right,” Lilo said. “They don’t want anyone left behind to tell what’s gone on here when the Allies come.”

For three days, there were selections nearly every morning and often in the evening to weed out the weak and kill them before the remaining prisoners marched north. Lilo and Zorinda teetered on a strange border between fear and hope. Fear that they would be in the next selection but hope that the Allies were advancing.

Late in the evening of the fourth day, there was one more selection, but this time the guards did not even bother to take the bodies to the crematorium. They were left on a pile of fresh corpses from an earlier selection that day. Then there was the roar of engines as eight SS men entered the camp on motorcycles.

Zorinda went to the barracks window. “It’s about to begin — the march.”

Lilo looked at her and then at the immense pile of dead bodies near the selection ground. “We have to get out there.”

“Where?”

“That pile of bodies.”

“What are you talking about?”

“We’re not going,” Lilo said firmly.

“What! Have you gone crazy?”

“Not at all.” Lilo was thinking how those long years ago she had hidden in a pile of pig feces and escaped the sterilization operation. Well, too late for that now, but she still had her life and hiding in the refuse of death might save them.

“Listen to me, Zorinda. On this march, there will be guards all along the way. They’ll shoot anyone who’s not moving fast enough. If we can find any chance to get away and run, we’ll be lucky. But that’s just a chance. If we stay here, hidden beneath that mountain of death, we’ll be safe. Do you understand? Safe without having to move an inch.”

Zorinda shut her eyes for what seemed forever. There was a static bleating over the loudspeaker. “All prisoners assemble to march in Workshop Square.”

“This is our chance. Workshop Square. The lights will be on there. The rest of the camp is dark.”

Hundreds of prisoners began pouring out of the barracks to assemble in the square.

“This way!” Zorinda hissed. She knew the lay of the land much better than Lilo. They slid between the shadows of buildings. They could hear the chaos in the square as the warden’s shrill voice seared the night. Occasionally there was the crack of a pistol. Another prisoner shot dead, deemed too weak to march. Lights went on in all the barracks as SS men searched for any who had lingered. But ahead, a mere fifty meters from where Lilo and Zorinda crouched in the shadows, loomed the mountain of the dead.

“Now!” Lilo hissed, and they sprinted across the flagstones. She sprang for the pile. There was a soft thud. She shoved bodies aside and then burrowed down. She could hear Zorinda nearby.

“You here?” Zorinda asked.

“Somewhere,” she answered.

“Let’s hold hands.”

Lilo reached out. There was a hand but it was that of a dead woman. Thin and bony and very stiff. Lilo’s fingers swept over the face of another dead person, then a breast, and she felt the cavity where the bullet had torn away half the chest.

“Here! Here!” Zorinda whispered. And finally their fingers touched and intertwined. They heard the sound of the motorcycles and a few jeeps. Cutting through the noise of the vehicles were the commands barked through a bullhorn, punctuated by the occasional gunshot when another prisoner was deemed too weak to walk as they were herded like cattle onto the road.

Then at last, a quiet descended on the camp. They could still hear the occasional boom of the artillery and the sound of planes overhead. But toward dawn, the two girls fell asleep, their fingers intertwined.

When Lilo woke, she heard someone gagging and then the sound of vomit hitting the paving stones.

There was a strange garble of words.

“What the hell!”

They didn’t really understand the words, but they knew it was English. That much they did understand. Lilo felt Zorinda squeeze her hand.

“English!” Zorinda whispered.

“I know!” Then there were other voices. Some spoke French. French! The Allies were here! Not phantoms but real. They began to squirm themselves loose from the wreckage of death and the shameful pile of skin and bones.

It was Zorinda who first staggered out.

“What?” A black man lowered his gun and wavered a bit. Then Lilo appeared. Three other soldiers came up. They looked in disbelief at the two girls.

“Wh-what . . . ?” the black man was stammering. “They’re alive.” Lilo and Zorinda looked at each other.

“You speak English?” the black man said.

“Little bit,” Zorinda replied.

“Get Bill. He speaks German — bring him here fast.” He looked now at the two girls and began pulling things from his rucksack. “Here . . . here, have some candy, and I got a Hershey bar in here someplace and coffee in this thermos.”

They each took a swallow from the soldier’s thermos. He unwrapped the Hershey bar, broke it in two, and handed each a half. Lilo took a bite of the chocolate and closed her eyes. It melted in her mouth. It was the most delicious thing she had ever tasted. Another soldier arrived. He began speaking German. “You all right, ma’am?” Her eyes were still closed, but she nodded.
Ma’am — he called me ma’am,
Lilo thought. But that is what she was, of course. She had lost her childhood. Almost five years it had been. She was almost twenty years old. She was a woman, although they had scraped out the innards that had defined her as one.
But I am still a woman,
she thought fiercely.

She felt an energy flow into her.
If I keep eating, if I grow strong, I . . . But no more running as fast as I can. No more. The gingerbread man can stop. The race is over, but the search begins. I . . . can organize . . . my love.
Django’s face loomed in her mind.

I’ll find him,
Lilo thought, and took another bite of chocolate.
I’ll find him.

The Extra
is a work of historical fiction. It is fiction, but it is rooted in history and based on a true story. It is a Holocaust story, but one that has for the most part slipped between the cracks of history. It is the story of two people, one real and one fictionalized: Leni Riefenstahl, a real person who rose to prominence during the early 1930s as Hitler’s favorite filmmaker, and Lilian Friwald, a fictional Gypsy girl who became Riefenstahl’s stunt double in the making of the film
Tiefland.

As a writer of historical fiction, I work within a tradition in which facts are used and at the same time altered slightly. I would like to be as clear as possible as to the changes I have made. Most of these alterations have to do with dates or time elements. Despite the wealth of material on the Holocaust and the Gypsy internment camps, there is a lack of detailed source material concerning the timeline of certain events, especially the filming schedule of
Tiefland.
It is debatable when precisely the filming began in Italy, but it was sometime between 1941 and 1942. Although sources indicate that all of the film slaves from Krün were transported east, I have, for the purposes of my story, left some behind. In addition, the jail at Rossauer Lände in Vienna did not open until a few months after the time indicated in this story. And finally, the term
porajmos,
which means “devouring” in several dialects of the Romani language, did not come into common usage for genocide of the Gypsy people until years later. I have tried to remain faithful to the historical period in which all these events occurred. I did not alter dates of small details to subvert history but rather to serve the purpose of storytelling. It would not be good storytelling if the essential fabric of the historical period was sacrificed in the process.