Devil's Workshop Read Online Free Page B

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,