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