The Extra (27 page)

Before she became a documentary filmmaker, Leni Riefenstahl was a dancer and an actress. In her early acting career, she was known for a series of movies called “The Mountain Films.” These movies were romantic epics that celebrated the rugged landscape of the Tyrol and Dolomites mountain ranges, with their lofty noble peaks. Her career path had been set as the gorgeous star of these movies until she moved to the other side of the camera and began directing documentary films celebrating Hitler’s Third Reich. Her landmark documentary,
Triumph of the Will,
chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremberg, which was attended by more than 700,000 Nazi supporters. It is undeniably one of the most brilliant documentaries of the twentieth century.

Shortly after this, Riefenstahl decided to produce, direct, and star in a dramatic feature film based on a Spanish folk opera,
Tiefland,
which tells the story of a beautiful Spanish dancer who falls in love with a handsome shepherd. Riefenstahl planned to begin production in Spain. However, because of the Spanish Civil War, filming could not begin until almost five years later, and by then World War II had already started. Financially underwritten by the Third Reich, production on the film began in Germany in 1940. Since there were no Spanish people in Germany, Riefenstahl decided to use Gypsies as extras and stand-ins. She had a ready source of Gypsies, as they had been rounded up along with Jews and homosexuals and put in internment camps.

Riefenstahl was prepared to do everything in this movie, from writing the screenplay to directing and starring in it, but there was one thing she could not do and that was ride a horse. A Gypsy girl who was an excellent rider was drafted. Anna Blach, a teenager, was assigned to stand in for Riefenstahl during the riding scenes. So it is upon Anna Blach that I have loosely based the character of Lilian Friwald.

In 1935, the Nuremberg Laws, which included policies concerning racial purity, were passed. Among the first victims of those laws were the Romani people, or Gypsies, as they were more commonly called. Not only did these laws restrict the civil liberties of the Romani people, but they also allowed for the practices of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit, which, under the guise of scientific exploration, carried out medical procedures on the Gypsies. Supposedly the data would help formulate new Gypsy laws that would, like the “Final Solution” for Jews, help resolve the “Gypsy Question,” or
Zigeunerfrage
(
Zigeuner
being the German word for Gypsy). In short, the Nazis were searching for a legal method to incarcerate Gypsies. The question was how to do it.

It took some time for these practices to spread east to Austria, where Anna Blach and her fictional counterpart, Lilian Friwald, lived. And it was not until the late summer of 1940, two years after Germany’s annexation of Austria, that census and documentation procedures such as fingerprinting began in Vienna, threatening families like the Blachs and Friwalds.

There were several internment camps that were dedicated to the incarceration of Gypsies. Riefenstahl made her first selection of Gypsy inmates from one called Maxglan. As Jürgen Trimborn writes in his biography of her (
Leni Riefenstahl: A Life,
Faber & Faber, 2007), “Riefenstahl not only had the power to have people released from concentration camps but could also arrange to have them sent there.” Many of the Gypsies Riefenstahl chose tried to bargain with her by asking that a relative not be sent on a transport east to where the new death camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau, were being constructed. Anna Blach was one of these Gypsies. She requested that her six siblings be released from concentration camps. In fact, one was but was then promptly rearrested. Upon the conclusion of her work on the movie, Anna was sent to Auschwitz and was the only one of her family to survive the Holocaust. Rosa Winter was another extra. According to Jürgen Trimborn, when Rosa found out that her mother was to be sent from Maxglan to a distant concentration camp, she escaped from the
Tiefland
set in an attempt to see her mother before she left. Rosa was captured and sent to prison in Salzburg, where Riefenstahl visited her. Riefenstahl apparently anticipated a touching scene of apology and forgiveness, but when the young Gypsy proved too proud for that, Riefenstahl had her sent to Ravensbruck. Like Anna Blach, Rosa was the sole member of her family to survive the war.

In December 1948, Leni Riefenstahl was brought before the first of four tribunals that attempted to determine if and to what extent she had supported and profited by the Nazi regime. It was before the second of these hearings that an illustrated German magazine
Revue
published the scandalous stories of the film slaves. Riefenstahl consistently lied throughout the proceedings. Yet at the time, there was not enough evidence to convict her. In 1949, in another tribunal, she was found to be a “follower” of Hitler, but this finding did not warrant her incarceration.

Perhaps one of the people most knowledgeable about the film slaves was Nina Gladitz, a documentary filmmaker who in the 1980s contacted some of the surviving Gypsies who had been extras on the film. She made a documentary called
Time of Darkness and Silence.
Leni Riefenstahl sued Gladitz and managed to have the film taken off the market and made completely unavailable. At the time of writing this book, the film was in a vault controlled by the Riefenstahl estate.

Leni Riefenstahl not only survived but thrived. She was the master of reinvention. She became an excellent still photographer. She wrote several photography books and made films on the Nubian people. She learned how to scuba dive when she was in her seventies and became an excellent underwater photographer. She lived to be 101 years old and at the time of her death, in 2003, was in a relationship with a man more than forty years her junior. It is disturbing that in the early 1970s Leni Riefenstahl was celebrated by many distinguished feminists as a shining example of women’s rights. In the opinion of this author, this was truly a misinterpretation of what it means to be a feminist.

I would like to add a final word about the Gypsies, or the Romani people. Within the population of Romani, there are different groups. Two major eastern European groups are the Roma and the Sinti. They speak different languages. The Sinti speak Sinti Manouche, while the Roma people speak Rom. Generally the Sinti are less nomadic than the Roma and by the 1920s lived in cities and worked as craftsmen and small shopkeepers. The Roma were known for their musical abilities, and they often worked as circus-animal trainers, as well as dancers. Both groups are thought to have migrated out of India around AD 1000.

Today the Romani people live widely throughout Europe, England, and the United States. Over the years since the Holocaust, many Romani have contributed greatly to the world of art, becoming famous musicians, artists, and writers. In particular, Ceija Stojka, who survived the Holocaust, was the first Romani to write a book about it:
We Live in Seclusion: The Memories of a Romni.

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