The Extra (5 page)

“What are you talking about?” Bluma asked.

The Good Matron now took Bluma’s arm and tapped the
O.
Lilo was astounded by her own blindness, her sheer stupidity. How had they never figured this out? How had they believed that such medical experimentation was said only to be done at Ravensbruck?

“Sterilization.”

“I’m too old anyhow to have babies,” Bluma said.

“They don’t think that way, and your daughter isn’t.”

“They wouldn’t!” Bluma’s face froze into a mask of horror as she stared at the
O
on Lilo’s forearm.

“They will. Today at noon, there is a selection. You might escape, but your daughter won’t.”

“B-b-but only at Ravensbruck. Not here,” Lilo protested.

“They do all sorts of medical experimentation here. Why do you think they finally brought women in?” Good Matron replied.

“It can’t be!”

“It will be. Believe me. I can’t help you both, but I can help you.” She looked at Lilo. “This detail ends in another hour. Meet me at the pig barn. It’s right over there.”

An hour later, Lilo was buried beneath a mountain of pig feces, and now she realized that although there was no God, there was this woman whom she had named Good Matron. Lilo knew she could no longer look to heaven but it would be on earth in a heap of pig shit that she found a divine spark of what used to be called humanity.

From the smelly camouflage, she could hear the voice of the camp commandant, Karl-Otto Koch, in the square as he proceeded with the selection. She could picture him walking with his two leashed dogs and most likely his red-haired wife, Ilse, at his side. There were terrible rumors about this woman and the things she did to prisoners — rumors about skin taken from dead prisoners to make lamp shades. Lilo swore she could hear the click of the woman’s high heels walking across the pavement. The loudspeaker squeaked and hissed, temporarily drowning out the growls and barks of the dogs as the commandant began to speak.

“Listen to me, inmates. Today we shall be selecting two dozen of you to become medical pioneers. This will be your service to humanity, and those who volunteer quickly will be eligible for early release.”

Don’t believe them, Good Matron had warned. Those who resisted would be forced. Furthermore, Good Matron had warned that the dogs Commandant Koch walked with were specially trained to attack recalcitrant inmates.

Lilo was to stay buried until Good Matron came by whistling the melody of “The Watch on the Rhine,” a favorite patriotic tune of the Nazis. But it had to be that song and not what had become known as the
“Buchenwaldlied,”
the official camp song that was blasted through the loudspeakers every morning and evening. She could hear the commandant’s voice extolling the marvelous wonders of the Reich’s scientific endeavors. “You are to be a part of history!” He went on for what seemed like forever.

And then Lilo heard the voice of the commandant’s wife, Ilse Koch. High and shrill, it seared the air. “Ladies — if I might call you Gypsy scum
ladies
— you still, we assume, have breasts. You still have genitals. . . .” Lilo pressed her fingers in her ears. She would stuff pig shit in her ears to block this woman’s voice.
But how will I hear the song? I must hear the song.
So she took away her hands and waited. The shrill voice called out names: “Brenna Wilfmore, Alana Kranz, Elsa Reinhardt, Bluma Friwald.” Every muscle in her seized. It was as if an electrical current had sizzled through her body. On and on it went. And then very clearly she heard the sound at last of Good Matron whistling the tune, and she came out from the pile of pig shit.

“What’s this?” Lilo asked as she peered into what looked like a bucket of bloody guts that Good Matron had brought.

“Pig guts. Slather it between your legs.”

“What?”

“Don’t ask questions. Just do it. And here’s a wet towel to wipe off the pig shit.” Lilo started to speak. “Don’t ask questions!” Good Matron hissed.

“It wasn’t a question,” Lilo said softly. “I . . . I just . . . I know you risked a lot. I don’t want anything to happen to you — that’s all.”

“Just — just go ahead and do what I said.” Good Matron’s voice was breaking. She turned away.

When Lilo had finished, Good Matron sighed. “It might work. Just pretend you are bleeding for the next couple of days. Use your mother’s cloths in your panties. She’ll have enough blood for the two of you.”

When Lilo returned to the barracks, the sight of her mother was so shocking that she felt her own legs start to give way. “Oh, Mama!” She could barely look. Her mother was crumpled up on the lice-ridden cot, too weak to speak. What seemed to Lilo like a puddle of blood pooled beneath her mother. Some of the blood had penetrated the cot and dripped onto the floor.

Two weeks later, Bluma was still bleeding when Good Matron came to them with news. “You’re being transferred. Stand up and look healthy.”

“Why? So they can have more fun killing us?” Bluma asked.

“You’re not going that far east. Not an extermination camp. Maxglan.”

“Where’s that?” Lilo asked.

“Austria, near Salzburg.”

Again the buses came at midnight, but this time it was both men and women being loaded. Lilo caught sight of the boy Django. He gave her a thumbs-up as he spotted her across the yard, then half a minute later fell into a line with Lilo and her mother.

“Never miss a chance to travel with the ladies,” he said, winking.

“What a card!” Bluma muttered.

“Mama, don’t be that way. This is the boy who told me about Papa.”

And now for the first time since Fernand had left, Bluma’s eyes filled with tears. She turned to Django and embraced him.

“Thank you! Thank you.” Her words were like gasps, and she seemed to be clinging to Django for dear life. Lilo watched her mother embrace him and felt an overwhelming sense of embarrassment. Of course her mother was grateful to him, but this seemed a bit excessive. There was the sharp blast of a whistle, the sign that they were to begin boarding the buses.

On the bus, Lilo and Django squashed into one seat so that her mother could have more room to almost lie down in the other seat.

He was a talker, this Django, and a joker as well. But he had an old man’s face, Lilo thought.

“So, Sinti girl, you’re not going to make a smelly bear joke, are you? You know, Romas and their dancing bears.”

“Why would I do that? Are you going to make music jokes?”

“I don’t know. Isn’t that what we are supposed to do? Sinti think they’re smarter than Roma, Roma think they’re better than Sinti.”

“Very childish, I think,” Lilo replied primly.

“No teasing, then?”

“Why would you want to tease?” Lilo asked, genuinely puzzled. But she began to notice that humor and grim sarcasm were Django’s strategies for surviving. Buchenwald was just another stop for him over the past four years. He knew the game. He had learned the ways. One did not simply get food. One organized it, for indeed it was a major endeavor — figuring out the right guard to approach, one willing to break the rules. One had to be a genius at reading human nature, be able to detect the subtlest glimmer in a guard’s eye that might suggest a trace of empathy, a hint of a moral conscience. And for this trip, Django had organized a hunk of cheese that he shared with Lilo and her mother.

“Maxglan,” he sighed. “Now, let me think, what do I know about Maxglan? This will be my fourth camp.”

“What was your first camp, Django?” Bluma asked.

“Ah, Marzahn, just outside Berlin — during the Olympics, would you believe it?” He said this with such delight, as if he had had a front-row seat to every event. “You know, Hitler had to clean up the city, put a good face on things for all the visiting dignitaries and foreigners who came to see the games. So they rounded us all up to keep us out of sight.”

“Your family?” Bluma asked.

His face turned dark. He stared straight ahead. He was no longer a spectator in the front row of the games. “Yes. My baby sister died in Marzahn. Then my father and brother and I were sent to Lackenbach — the rats were plumper there. My mother was sent to Dachau and . . .” He shrugged, and his voice trailed off. “But Maxglan, let me think a moment.” He was quickly his old self again. “Lots of Roma there. I’ve heard through the prison grapevine. So I might feel at home. Don’t worry: I’ll introduce you.” He paused as if to think. Then, scratching his head, he mused, “Local industry. Well, of course there are the Salzburg marionettes. And Mozart — oh, they love Mozart around there. Whole square dedicated to him.” Django talked on for some time. Lilo was just drifting off to sleep when she heard him say finally, “But I can’t imagine why they would be dragging us all the way to Maxglan.”

T
he trip was hard on Bluma. Her dress was soaked with blood by the time they arrived the next day, and they only rested a few hours before there was another roll call.

“Get her up. She must be standing! Otherwise . . .” Django was hissing orders like a commandant. But Lilo knew he was right. If you didn’t stand, if you didn’t move, you were as good as dead. This stop, Maxglan, was a reprieve of sorts. They had gone east, but they had not crossed the border into Poland, where the most notorious of the extermination camps were rumored to be. Maxglan was, according to Django, halfway between a work camp and a holding area like Rossauer Lände. But it was not in Poland, and that was the crucial fact.

Lilo was beginning to realize that the phrase “Otherwise you’ll end up in Poland!” was a story within itself. It did not need a preface, and the epilogue was death.

Lilo and her mother had briefly held out hope that Fernand Friwald might be at Maxglan, but they soon learned they were the first transport into Maxglan in the last two months.

It was chilly, and the evening swirled with rags of mist. Lilo glanced up at the watchtowers, where guards stood with rifles pointing down at them. She hitched her mother up by the elbow, then surreptitiously snaked her arm around her back so that it looked as if she had been crowded just a bit by her mother and the woman on the other side of her. “You can lean back on me, Mama. Not too much, or they might see I’m helping you.”

She felt the slight weight sink against her arm. She could feel every bone in her mother’s back.

“I don’t believe it!” There was a hushed awe in Django’s voice.

Then her mother’s voice, just a soft exhalation of wonder. “His girlfriend!” She spoke as if in a trance.

Lilo turned her head in the direction they were looking and caught sight of a tall lady, dressed in fine wool slacks, carrying a briefcase.

“No!” Lilo whispered. “Her!”

As the beautiful face emerged from the night gauzy with fog, it was as if she had climbed out of the billboard. Leni Riefenstahl was here at this stinking, run-down camp. There were two different realities colliding in the camp of Maxglan. It was not supposed to be this way, Lilo thought. Leni Riefenstahl belonged on the billboard, hovering in the moonlight of the clock-tower square, or on the movie screen in the Palace Theater, but not here — not here with them, dirty Gypsies, women still bleeding from terrible operations.

Two assistants preceded her and occasionally motioned for her to come take a closer look. Lilo guessed that there were more than 250 prisoners lined up. But she wondered what these three people were doing — the lady in the slacks with her briefcase and the two men not in uniform. She leaned around the woman who stood next to her and called to Django, who was standing next to another Roma boy, just a child really.

“Django, what is it?”

“Casting call.” His dark eyes sparkled. She saw him bend down and whisper something to the small boy. The boy stood up straighter and squared his shoulders.

“What?” She had never heard these words. “What are you talking about?”

“The movies.”

“Like Hollywood?” She saw the beautiful lady raise her hand to her face and close her thumb and forefinger to make an
O
. “What’s she doing with her fingers?”

“Framing us — like in a camera lens,” Django replied. “So look sharp, Lilo. Here she comes.”

Lilo felt her mother slip down toward the mud. “I can’t do it. I’m losing too much blood.”

“You can, Mama! You can.” Lilo gave her mother a sharp poke. She felt her mother gasp and straighten up. It was just in time. The woman was a few yards away, picking her way through the mud in her beautiful alligator boots. She carried a small notebook and sometimes paused to write something down.

“What do you think she is writing in the notebook, Django?”

“Oh, that you are pretty and perfect for a part.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Okay, that I am so handsome that I should play the lead.”

“Yeah, you’re a regular Clark Gable!” Lilo said.

The woman was walking more quickly down the line of prisoners. The face in the poster, the face of Leni Riefenstahl, was inches from her own.

“This one, Hugo. This girl.” Then she again held her hand to her eye and closed her thumb and forefinger, and swung the “lens” directly at Lilo. She looked back at the woman through the
O
formed by her fingers. The eye glimmered darkly. Lilo would never forget that eye. Lilo found that she seemed in some uncanny way to know exactly what to do. She tilted her head saucily and pressed her mother closer, her head resting lightly against her mother’s. Then she smiled so that her dimple flashed.