Jáchym Topol - Devil's Workshop

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.