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Reviewed by:
  • The Extra by Kathryn Lasky
  • Elizabeth Bush
Lasky, Kathryn The Extra. Candlewick, 2013 314p Trade ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-3972-3 $16.99 E-book ed. ISBN 978-0-7636-6712-2 $16.99 R Gr. 7-10

Lilo Friwald, whose father is a highly skilled watchmaker, and her Sinti Gypsy family tend to look upon the Roma Gypsies with a degree of derision, but now that Hitler has tarred all Gypsies with the same brush, they can no longer afford to indulge in social distinctions. Mr. Friwald is separated from his wife and daughter and is since presumed dead, Mrs. Friwald has been sterilized at Buchenwald, and now she and her daughter find themselves plucked from their Austrian camp to mill around as Spaniards in Leni Riefenstahl’s new film. They are still prisoners, penned up under guard and given little better rations and clothing than in the other camps, but Lilo gains a friend in Django, a Roma teen veteran of several camps who has become expert at “organizing” food, information, and perks, and who wisely advises Lilo to become indispensable to the film. Even Django’s advice is not enough to save Lilo and her family from deportation once the filming is done, but she manage to escape and survive to liberation, surgically sterilized but alive and with hope of finding Django at the war’s end. Lasky bases her fictional story on available information concerning Riefenstahl’s filming of Tiefland, and her portrayal of the auteur as a brilliant but jealous, mercurial, and devious powerbroker is chilling indeed. The war’s Gypsy genocide is undertreated in literature for youth, and this brings the plight of the Zigeuner during the Holocaust (or, in their terms, the devouring) into sharp relief; the irony of the layers of deception and fiction that drove the Nazi regime will not be lost on YA readers. Historical notes are appended.

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