The Extra by Kathryn Lasky Page A

trough. He looked around. “This is the bad dream,” he said.
    She looked at him. What was it about the youngest boys that they all looked like little old men — wizened before their time?
    “Your name is Otto, right?”
    He nodded. “Otto Kunz. My mother is Frieda Kunz.”
    He paused and then added in a barely audible whisper, “But she’s not here.”
    “Do you know where she is?” Lilo asked.
    He shook his head mournfully. The gesture was so slight, so slow, it was as if this small movement caused him profound pain.
    “I have to go to the bathroom,” he said finally.
    “I’ll have the guards unlock the door and take you.”
    “Can you take me to the ladies’? I don’t like to go to the men’s latrine. Sometimes the guards are there late at night.” Again he paused, then added, “They scare me, especially the head guard.”
    “He scares me, too.”
    The boy looked up at her and smiled, then took her hand and gave it a squeeze as he stepped from the trough.

“T here must be some mistake,” Django was saying to the bus driver. “Bluma Friwald is on the list, I am sure. They are shooting scene six, right?”
    “Right,” said the bus driver, consulting his clipboard.
    “And it calls for twelve older peasant women in the square when Pedro arrives.”
    “Yes, indeed.”
    “Well, one of those women is to be Bluma Friwald. I heard Fräulein Riefenstahl specifically say yesterday to bring a tall one for the shot by the village gates. See if they added her name down here someplace.” Then very politely Django asked. “May I look at your clipboard?” The driver handed it to him. “Ah, right here. Bluma Friwald.” Django pointed with his finger to a place on the paper.
    The bus driver nodded. Then he said almost cheerfully, “Well, if Fräulein Riefenstahl wants a tall one — yes, I guess she is in comparison to the others. Bring her along. Can’t hurt.”
    “Thank you, old man.” Django gave the bus driver a friendly pat on the shoulder, indeed the kind of pat one old man might give another old man.
    Lilo had watched this entire performance hardly daring to breathe. So much depended on it. How had he done it? He was incredible. Could she have done that? Had she missed some opportunity to help her mother? She had a lot to learn from Django, but she felt for the first time stirrings of other feelings, feelings that had very little to do with what she could merely “learn” from him. She shouldn’t let other feelings about him get in the way. She thought she had been smart when she had ascertained that the guard named Johan was sympathetic as opposed to the head guard. But that was nothing compared to the information that Django was able to collect. Compared to this! He had made a study not just of the guards but also of the entire film crew, right down to this bus driver, apparently. He knew who was bribable and who was not. Who was stupid and who was smart. He had told Lilo that in camps, he was quick to learn which
Kapos
and guards were really vicious.
    “You must become invisible for those,” he had told her. “They are worse than animals.” How do you become invisible? Lilo had asked. “It’s a skill. You find shadows to stand in during roll calls. You look like this.” Suddenly the light drained out of his eyes. They became dead, as if he had no more life than a stone. There was nothing there. Then quickly he came back to life. “See? What fun is it killing something that’s already dead?”
    Lilo knew that she had to stop being simply in awe of Django and start really learning from him. He had already figured out that the bus driver was less than swift.
    When they got on the bus, Lilo sat next to him. “How did you do that? My mother’s name couldn’t be on the list.”
    “It’s not. The fellow can’t read.”
    “But how did you know that?”
    “I had a hunch he was sort of dumb. I sat right behind him yesterday when we were driving to the set. I saw him struggling to read