Devil's Workshop

3

Lebo encouraged us as we crept through the maze of forbidden tunnels underneath Terezín, and he never gave us away when we trampled on some ancient sign saying or ZÁKAZ VSTUPU! or ACHTUNG, MINEN! We kept finding more and more hiding places in the sewers sprinkled with sand, forgotten stores of planks and gas masks, passageways and crawl spaces, and it didn’t put us off one bit when we found an execution chamber filled with spent bullet shells buried in the sand. We brought them to Lebo and he stuck them in his satchel.

Lebo could make a bullet shell whistle louder than any of us. We would hold races in the catacombs, where he would clock our time with a stopwatch while we ran back and forth through the water that gushed from underground, and he always had some story to tell to comfort the littlest kids, who still got lost and frightened in the dark and felt cold every now and then.

Being friends with Lebo was the best.

And the thing that made him happiest was when we brought back tracings of the words we found on the walls of the tunnels and bunkers, deep underground — initials, dates, and messages carved with spikes, keys, and fingernails. He stuck them all in his big black satchel, because he was a collector: his passion was to know and remember everything connected with the days when the fortress town was a prison and a torture chamber and an execution ground.

He wanted to find it all and preserve it.

We were just kids, so we didn’t take it that seriously.

Creeping through the catacombs, wading through puddles with blind cave newts, we explored the bunkers and firing cabins under the outermost bastions. And as boys and girls, future male and female soldiers, enchanted by the perpetual gloom and dripping water, we were soon exchanging shy kisses and fleeting touches. Amid the flicker of candles and the smell of dripping wax, how could we not, given that we were practically always together, not to mention our sneaking suspicion that it wouldn’t be long before we’d be ordered off to school, or maybe to some faraway garrison. Our favourite place to play was in the crawl spaces between the ramparts and the other forgotten parts of town, as far away from other people as possible.

Some days we grazed the flock with stakes, some days without them. A goat on a chain would graze a circle in the grass by nightfall, and the next day we’d just move the stake. On sunny days — and there were plenty of them! — we often let the goats run free. They’d always find their way to where the grass was thickest. If a goat ran away, we could track it by its droppings. They were black, which made them easy to spot in the red grass.

But even back then Lebo knew it had been decided and that Terezín’s days as a living town were numbered. The army was leaving.

Lebo also knew the only part of town that would be preserved was the Monument, where the eggheads, in return for their cushy income, worked, as Lebo put it, hand in glove with the government, so they couldn’t have cared less that the town would be torn down.

That was why he was so obsessed with every spike, every inscription, every bullet shell, each and every human bone we brought him back from our wanderings.

He wanted to save it all.

Being a kid, I never thought to ask him why. None of us did. He wouldn’t talk to anybody who asked him why the town should be preserved. Rolf the journalist was the one who eventually came up with an answer for the world. And now, if I want to ask why we shouldn’t let this town of evil collapse and let the grass grow over all the long-ago death, all the long-ago pain and horror, why not just let it disappear, Lebo can’t answer. All I hear now is the rustle of the grass, all I hear is the echo of footsteps in the ruins, the drip of water in the catacombs. It’s over, and nobody can answer me any more, because it happened: the town of Terezín fell.

Mr Hamáček drove slowly while I just stared in amazement. In the days before I was in prison, every once in a while a swarm of Tatra 613s would come speeding down the road, which meant the government was coming to town for some war anniversary. The rest of the time it was just horse-drawn wagons, tractors from the collective farm, and every now and then a clunker or two like Mr Hamáček’s. Now the cars zoomed by, one after the other. Mr Hamáček explained that while I had been locked up, we had become part of Europe and there had been a tremendous influx of all sorts of new cars. I was amazed at the petrol stations, as lofty and clean as any spaceship I’d ever imagined, and as Mr Hamáček’s Škoda lurched to a stop at one of the pumps, I didn’t get out for fear of being crushed by all that open space, I didn’t even peek out of the window. And that was before I had any idea how Terezín had changed.

I kept an eager lookout for the sign that said WITH THE SOVIET UNION FOR ALL TIME AND NEVER OTHERWISE. For my whole life it had marked the goat herd’s outermost post. But now it was gone, disappeared, nothing but a long, soggy field at the edge of the ramparts.

As we drove into town we were greeted by silence, the silence of a destitute if not yet dead town, a town that had sunk into appalling poverty after the army left.

Almost no one came here any more.

What few tourists there were wandered around the Monument, up and down the educational trails they had put in to commemorate the genocide.

We drove through Manege Gate, the Škoda shuddered to a stop on Central Square, and I froze.

My aunts, among the few original inhabitants who had stayed, since they had nowhere to go, were now little old ladies, and the handful of other people stumbling towards us over the bricks and rocks and beams littering the ground, hair sticking out every which way, looked like castaways. They welcomed me back as a local son — old gents, old maids, and a couple of ghostly older men, mental cases and cripples who used to be soldiers. Now they were disabled and lived, literally, in holes in the ground.

The brick walls of Terezín’s underground tunnels were caving in, black groundwater lapped everywhere. The massive gates, designed to withstand Prussian cannons, were crumbling bit by bit. Nobody weeded the grass on the ramparts any more.

The goats? Mine had either all died or were so old I didn’t recognize them, except for a couple of young females and a single little billy goat, Bojek, headstrong, punch-drunk, and now nearly blind. I think he used to snuggle up to my scabby knees when I was a boy. I hadn’t forgotten that long-ago affection.

I made note of people’s warnings that the mental cases were stealing, eating, or selling the goats. I took up my duties with the flock as soon as I was settled in.

Lebo and Mr Hamáček brought me to one of the buildings on Central Square that they’d taken over and turned into the centre of the crumbling town.

They lived in a room filled with old bunk beds made out of planks, I was told Lebo’s illegal birth had taken place on one of them.

The Monument had been planning to build an office here, but the stubborn residents had blocked it.

On one of the bunks I tossed a plastic bag with a toothbrush and a half-empty tube of toothpaste, that was all I had.

My aunts gave me a facecloth, a sweater, some socks and a few other belongings from the people who had left, and I had a home.

The building, which soon came to be known as the Comenium, was a squat. Lebo had occupied it along with a few other people whose homes had been demolished, just like my family’s had. It served as a clubhouse for the stubborn residents who had decided to stay in town. Or had no choice but to stay, since nobody wanted them anywhere else.

Aunt Fridrich still operated her laundry, and on the ground floor she and the other aunts had brought in cookers, pans, pots and so on, and set up a cookshop.

Nothing fancy — after all those canteens of clamouring men and clubs for officers like my dad, it was a pitiful place. But you could almost always get a bowl of soup or cup of tea.

The scholars and eggheads and board members didn’t come here. They stayed in the Monument, tending to their state-funded trails that highlighted the wartime horrors, running their fingers over maps of the disappearing town hand in hand with the government engineers, carving out the lines of destruction.

Lebo had broken with the board members and scholars. At first they ridiculed him for his demand that not a single brick should disappear from the town, not even in the modern era, as he put it. Of course they did it behind his back, when no one was around. Lebo had been born in Terezín during the war, and that fact alone froze the blood in a lot of people’s veins, so it wouldn’t have been fitting for the researchers and board members to mock him to his bony face.

At first the researchers called in some of the people who’d passed through Terezín as prisoners, and a lot of them said: It’s about time, this whole town of death and humiliation can go to hell! Take this train station, where hundreds of thousands went east and never came back, and wipe it right off the map! It should only exist in textbooks!

But others were of a different opinion, and as one debate led to another the bricks continued to crumble.

Until the government, advised by the researchers and board members, came to a decision.

The Monument would be preserved, but not the town. There wasn’t money for it.

Lebo stayed out of the arguments and withdrew from the Monument. He had been hardened in Terezín as a baby, and as far as time was concerned he had a clear advantage over the older prisoners. He didn’t want to squander it debating.

Old homes. Broken cobblestones. Trickles of dirty water flowing from cracked sewer pipes. Collapsing barracks filled with cats and pigeons’ nests. The whole derelict town surrounding the Monument.

They didn’t want us there. We got in the way of the bulldozers. It was easy for them to round up a few unsuspecting mental cases and stick them in the nuthouse, hoodwink a couple of grannies and grandpas, nod them in the direction of some blocks of flats and watch all trace of them vanish from the world.

But we were the last inhabitants and we weren’t giving up.

Most of us moved into the building on Central Square.

The people from the Monument never liked Lebo. But compared to how much they hated him later, when we joined forces with the world and Lebo became the Guardian of Terezín, it was nothing.

The first few days I just sort of straggled around the sad town, reinforcing my heartache. Lebo left me alone.

But soon I realized: I was now the only one who called Lebo ‘uncle’.

All my fellow pupils, everyone from that bunch of kids who crawled through the catacombs under Lebo’s guidance, wading through underground streams looking for objects from his days as a child, was scattered around the world. Everybody who could had left the town.

That evening I stood on the crumbling ramparts alone, gazing out at the tall grass that hadn’t been properly grazed for years, and thought about Terezín.

I drove the little goats into their shed and fastened the shaky door with a chain as a warning, a sign saying, I’m here now, I’m back, look out! I didn’t want the mental cases killing and eating any more goats. The main ones I had my eye on were Kamínek and Kůs. I’m sure those bums would’ve been glad to drag their prey off into some cellar, their homeless berths stuffed with blankets and rags. Yes, my herd had been sold, killed off and plundered just like the town. Old billy goat Bojek, once a head-butting monster, now just limped along. Don’t worry, Bojek, I promised him, I won’t give you up.

Where is everyone? I asked the silent battlements.

And suddenly I realized I was standing on the spot where my dad had fallen from the ramparts.

It’s like there was never even anyone here, isn’t it?

Lebo. He had followed me. His black suit blended in with the gloomy mass of the night horizon. Only his eyes shone in his enormous skull.

You know, your father wouldn’t have agreed to end Terezín either. He was devoted to this town. It was right here somewhere — Lebo waved his hand towards a dusky patch of red grass beneath us — that he pulled your mother out of the grave.

Grave, well, Lebo said, pausing a moment to swallow. It was a pit. I was little, so I don’t remember, but they say there were pits everywhere.

What? I said. I didn’t know anything about this chapter of their lives.

That’s right, he pulled her out, Lebo said. And there, as night fell over the ramparts, Lebo told me the story my dad had told him once upon a time.

They were run ragged, all those Soviet troops and liberators of Terezín, when their formations came through Manege Gate to Central Square. There was typhus here, you know. They couldn’t even drink the water. Plenty of them had vodka in their canteens, but not your dad, he was just a boy, and that army drum weighed him down something awful.

And right here — Lebo gestured with his right hand — he came to lie down right here, set his drum down on the grass by the pits, and all of a sudden he looks! What’s that moving around in there? A naked girl, sitting on top of a pile of corpses, an absolute skeleton, and she’s waving to him. So he tears his strap off his drum, throws one end to her and pulls her out of the pit. She was Czech, he realized from the words rasping from her parched and blistered lips, which for him, being a Czech boy, was cause for celebration. In all those battles and offensives as the Red Army dashed to the aid of Prague, he just banged his drum, you understand, he wasn’t in a position to talk to any civilians.

The Red Army had scooped him up in some Czech village in the Carpathians, or maybe it was Ukraine, that’s right, and your father became the son of the regiment.

So he pulls the girl out, lays her on the grass, and peels off his shirt to cover up her shocking, skeletal nakedness. It was a sunny day in May when your parents met. And then he hears the Russians laughing and looks up and sees them walking along with the Czechs who took up arms and rebelled, and they’re putting the Germans they captured into the typhus camp, which had been emptied of Jews — about four thousand all together, hundreds of women and children died in there. Probably some of those little bones and messages and hairpins you brought me came from them, I can’t tell them apart. So the Russians and Czechs were herding the Germans past the typhus pits into the camp, but a few of the Russians turned aside and went over to your father, their brother-in-arms, and they had water! Right, so they gave the girl a drink too. You must keep that girl now! the Russians told him with a devilish grin. Whoa ho, the molodets has found a girl! So we hold wedding now, no? Teasing him like soldiers do, but your father was crazy with thirst, so he just nodded deliriously and that was it, the marriage was set. The army doctors managed to pull her through, against the odds. She had typhus, sure enough, not to mention being completely exhausted from giving birth! Just imagine, Lebo says, and I feel his hand on my shoulder and I don’t want to ask a thing.

You know why she was in the pit? Lebo says. The forces of law and order sentenced her to death for getting pregnant here in Terezín, that was her offence. But the Russians came so quick that the Krauts didn’t have time to shoot everyone they convicted. And that’s why you’re here, do you understand now?

No, I don’t, and I don’t care! I said, stamping so hard it raised a little whirl of red dust.

I know what you mean, Lebo said. I stopped caring who my father was a long time ago. They probably killed him anyway. Lebo shrugged.

We stood, looking out from the ramparts. The pit my mum was in when she waved to my dad was almost exactly the same spot where my dad fell off the ramparts. It was strange.

Ah, who cares, I said, shrugging my shoulders like Lebo.

We looked at each other, Lebo’s enormous hand on my shoulder. And in a flash of understanding, the two of us sealed a pact never to talk to each other about our parents again.

Then Lebo told me how the Russians held a wedding, a war wedding in Terezín.

Your father stayed here with your mum, and out of nothing he created the most famous regimental music in Czechoslovakia, the military band of the town of Terezín, known far and wide beyond the town borders, and believe me, for an army boy, a shrimpy little rat-a-tat-tat who grew up poor, that was no joke! Your father put all he had into this town! You should carry on his legacy.

And for the first time Lebo confided in me his plan to save the town. He had been drawing on his contacts for some time already, pleading and begging and sounding the alarm to all corners of the earth.

You know, he would have been proud of you, Lebo said, gesturing in the twilight at the spot down below us where the tall grass trembled in the gusts of evening wind.

That’s where my dad breathed his last.

If he hadn’t died that way, the town’s undoing would have killed him for sure, Lebo said.

He was probably right.

Just imagine a military marching band, the proud blare of brass, in these ruins!

That’s how my dad saw the town’s ramparts in his final moment, as he went flying past. It was a good death, especially for a liberator of Terezín.

And I made up my mind right then and there to dedicate the rest of my life to Lebo’s plan to save the town.

We set to work that same night.

Now I could finally view my childhood as a closed chapter.

We went straight back to our building, to my bunk. Lebo slid a desk next to it. He looked at me, smiled and nodded, then pointed to the wall: an Internet hook-up, the same as the one in Pankrác, a shiny, tiny thing.

I nodded. This was where the Monument had planned to put its office.

You know what I did in prison, Lebo?

He shrugged. Did he know or didn’t he?

We left it at that.

Lebo pulled out an old satchel filled with notebooks and scraps of paper, the satchel he’d stuffed with our copies of the messages scratched by fingernails. Sometimes there was also a name, and some of the people had survived, or their relatives had survived, and now they were out in the world.

He’d had decades to find them, based on all the notes we’d found beneath the town. He had pages torn from encyclopaedias, educational books and memoirs. Now Lebo sat down next to me and began to dictate from memory, weaving his web of connections and contacts that were going to save Terezín.

Yes, we spent that night, and the following days and nights, writing letters, cries for help, pounding on many doors. We fought for the dilapidated town by begging, sending pleas to everyone who’d ever been here, and their relatives and friends as well. We sounded the alarm.

As time went by, we partitioned off my bunk with boards to make a computer room. My desk was quickly covered over with notebooks, stacks of floppy disks. We didn’t want to move out of the bunkroom.

No matter what.

I would sit at the computer, fingers flying over the keyboard, while Lebo paced back and forth, or more often sat on a bunk and dictated.

Even later, when we had some of our students sleeping in the room, exhausted by the evening sittings, we didn’t care, we worked.

Lebo knew which important people we should contact. He’d had decades to seek them out, plus the Internet and me. He knew who to turn to.

He had gazed up at some of the survivors from his Terezín cradle, a shoebox hidden under the bunk he was sitting on right now. He wanted their money, and their influence, and the money and the influence of their relatives and friends.

I would never have believed the rocket-like rise of our cause if Lebo hadn’t been reading me the replies. Plenty of people agreed to help us, no questions asked. Those were the kind of people Lebo was looking for, people who didn’t wonder whether or not the old town of evil should be torn down, who didn’t need any deliberation or discussion, because they knew that every splinter of every bunk should be preserved, every battered brick, every corner of the old fortress. Every inch of Terezín should exist always and for ever, and, as Rolf would later write, feed the memory of the world.

I didn’t care about memory, though. I just needed a place to live.

I really hoped Lebo could save the town. And I hoped his contacts could feed us all — everyone living here, even the ones who were only half alive. My aunts, the old men and women, the drunks, cripples, and mental cases, the ones who couldn’t leave Terezín. If the bulldozers came, they’d have nowhere to go, as I’ve said before.

And that evening, when we walked home from the ramparts together, Lebo started broadcasting the news of the fortress town’s destruction to the world. From then on we wrote letters every day, oftentimes working for nights at a stretch.

Soon the replies started coming in. The people Lebo knew already wrote to the others that he was OK. And soon everyone wanted to get a look at Lebo, Guardian of Terezín, as Rolf dubbed him in his article.

Rolf’s reportage was published with a photograph of the giant Lebo dressed in black, gazing out from the ramparts into the reddening twilight as he declared, This place of dreadful horror must be preserved for the memory of humanity. Of course Rolf made up the ‘memory of humanity’ part — Lebo didn’t talk about his activities. And he had no intention of feeding the world’s memory. He just wanted to feed the dying inhabitants of Terezín.

Our work had just begun.

Rolf ’s article was reprinted in many languages, it was published all over the world, so it wasn’t just academics who could speak for Terezín any more, academics installed by a government that didn’t want to pour billions or even millions into a decaying town with no army. Now there were other spokesmen for the town besides the board members and researchers, feasting off of their cushy incomes and keeping quiet about the coming of the bulldozers. The world had found out about us. Visitors started arriving.

And that was the beginning of the Comenium.