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

celebrants were caught. Both Luludji and Hadji were 16 years of age, and their marriage ceremony was conducted quietly, quickly and secretly by a Romani cle rgyman from the barracks while the camp guards were dining at the mess hall, the usual celebratory music and dancing at a Romani wedding replaced by happy hugs and kisses all around.
    Despite the horrors she had already experienced, Luludji was dete rmined that her family survive. She became pregnant immediately. On April 23, 1942, her daughter, Luminitsa (Light of Dawn) Krietzman was born in the barracks at Majdanek with Gypsy midwives attending.
    A gracious God and the flowering of life had produced the “Light of Dawn,” Luminitsa Kriet zman. My mother.
    Exactly a month later, Reichsführer Himmler ordered that all Gypsies in all Generalgouvernment concentration camps be transferred to one camp: the Special Gypsy Family Camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as the first step of the “Final Solution for the Gypsy Menace.”
    When she was transferred to Birkenau, Luludji Krietzman, still lactating, was without child—deliberately. She knew the sign over the entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau, A rbeit Macht Frei (work shall make you f ree) was a cruel hoax. Indeed, as many in her group had deduced upon seeing that sign up on their arrival, Arbeit Macht Fre i durch den Schornstein (work brings freedom through the chimney) would be more accurate .
    Luludji knew she and her husband Hadji would not survive Birkenau, and she was certain baby Luminitsa would have been doomed as well. So she had left baby Luminitsa in the care of another Romani family at M ajdanek, the Domanoffs. She knew that Andre and Mishka Domanoff, who were supposed to leave for Auschwitz-Birkenau the day after Luludji and Hadji left , had hoped to escape before then. In her heart of hearts, as confirmed by her treasured crystal ball, Luludji expected that no Gypsy who reached Birkenau would leave alive.
    At Birkenau, after meeting Dr. Josef Mengele, the “Angel of Death,” she was certain.

11
     
    At the morgue, Dante Nicosian was waiting for Dan in his office just outside the white-tiled examination room that was visible through the window behind Dante’s desk—the only window in Dante’s office. Facing his desk was a much prettier scene: a hand-painted mural of Dante’s ancestral village, Nicosia, in the armed-truce island state known as Cyprus.
    Dante handed a red file folder to Dan. “Here’s my report on Marco Fellini, number seventeen.”
    “All right, and here’s the arrow you wanted to see.” Dan handed the bagged arrow to the dapper ME.
    “Excellent.”
    The ME held the bag up, examining the arrow. He walked to his computer and tapped the keys rapidly, looking back and forth from the bagged arrow to the words and pictures on the screen. Finally, he gave a nod of satisfaction. “Ha! Just as I thought. It’s exactly the same. That’s what I want to talk to you about. Come on back.”
    Dante Nicosian held the door to the examination room open, then led the way. “Number seventeen is back here.” He strode off towards the last of three examination tables holding corpses, and Dan followed, once again struck by the absolute sterility of the room. Everything was as white as Dante’s teeth. Only the corpses showed any color, and even they were only off-white, except for one stitched-up African-American, whose hues mixed black, brown and blue.
    Number 17 looked like a ghost.
    The ominous haunting strains of Mozart’s 25 th Symphony barely covered the sounds of the high-volume ventilating fans Nicosian had insisted upon when the examination room had been remodeled a couple of years earlier. A big help, those fans, but the smell of formaldehyde, mixed with something else that Dan always identified as the odor of death itself, couldn’t be eliminated entirely.
    “As my report indicates, Marco Fellini was killed by an arrow identical to the one that wounded the balloonist, the same length, same