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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