Eye Wit by Hazel Dawkins, Dennis Berry Read Free Book Online

Hamburg’s many markets and fairs (but not for other Roma; Roma never tell fortunes for one another). For the last two years, her mother also had foreseen her own death, as do many Roma.
    “Death b y angry hands, my darling, soon,” Floritsa told Luludji many times. “You must concentrate, my sweet Luludjiyo. Soon you will replace me.”
    In June of 1939, a Prussian soldier, Lieutenant Von RosenSomething, strode the stree t, resplendent in his uniform. T he Prussian’s precise identity has been lost in the oral history of my Gypsy family—perhaps V on Rosenstien? Von Rosenkrantz? The Lieutenant was accompanied by his bride-to-be, a local burgher’s daughter. On a whim he stopped by Floritsa Komorov’s tent for a reading on his upcoming marriage. He list ened but a few moments before becoming enraged with Floritsa’s carefully worded forecast of “tumult and longing.”
    “You filthy sow!” he bellowed. “How dare you!” He drew his sword.
    Floritsa’s payment for her seeing the Lieutenant’s future was the loss of her head. The Prussian burst from the tent, the seer’s head impaled on his sword.
    “ See what happens, Schweinen! ” he said to the Gypsy merchants lining the street. “This will be your future in the Third Reich!”
    The Lieutenant was neither arrested nor charged for Floritsa K omorov’s murder. But his would-be wife , appalled at witnessing her fiancé’s violent nature, refused to see him again.
    Luludji, cringing at the back of the tent, followed the Lieutenant out of the tent and glared at his back. “Your beastly family shall be cursed forever,” she muttered. Then she held her hand to her lips and reached up to the hand-lettered sign above the tent, placing her fingertips on her mother’s name, Magie Seher Floritsa Sees All. “Goodbye, Mama. I shall not forget.”
    She returned to the tent and a moment later emerged with a piece of paper that she taped over her mother’s name. The sign now read: Magie Seher Lulu Sees All.
    “Magic Seer Flower” would be replaced by “ Magic Seer Little Flower.”
    Over the next eleven months, Magie Seher Lulu’s fame grew. Her v isions were precise, never couched in maybes, but certainties. She foretold the gender of babies, predicted deaths , and foresaw fires about to consume homes and businesses—all with a clarity no other Gypsy fortune teller in Hamburg could match. She foreswore the Tarot cards her mother had used, instead preferring her mother’s crystal ball, now mounted on an elaborate ly worked copper base made by Besnik Komorov, her father. When practicing her craft, she would drape the ball with an old scarf from her mother, bow her head and mumble a prayer to the Virgin Mary. “ Mother, l et me see the truth.” She would open her eyes, remove the scarf from the ball and look at it until a scene swirled and formed. Then she would speak. Her visitors learned to pay attention.
    Magie Seher Lulu never forecast what was happening in Germany. She didn’t need to. Everyone knew what would happen, most of all the Gypsies in Germany.
    In May 1940, Reich Minister Heinrich Himmler ordered that all Gy psies residing in Hamburg be deported to the Lublin District of the Generalgouvernment—the “Greater German Reich,” that part of Poland not formally annexed to Germany. The Hamburg Gypsies’ destination would be the concentration camp at Majdanek, near the city of Lublin. At Majdanek, those not able to work under slave labor conditions, and those who put up any resistance to the guards, were shot in the back of their heads and fell directly into graves they had just dug.
    Luludji’s father refused to dig and was shot. Luludji chose life and went to work in the camp’s warehouse, sorting the clothes and belon gings of murdered victims.
    At the camp in the summer of 1942, Luludji married a co-worker, Hadji (“He who visited a holy place”) Krietzman, despite the ban on Gypsy weddings that was harshly enforced––if the Gypsy