Devil's Workshop Read Free Page A

pulled up short, his legs frozen with horror, and I helped him.
    So they called me back the next time. And the time after that.
    The prison directors were amazed that when I walked with the prisoners, they didn’t whimper, didn’t scream wordlessly like animals, didn’t struggle. They were calm and quiet, I suppose because I was calm. My head, my mind, my legs were used to the twists and turns of Terezín’s tunnels, the gloom and concrete of the cells and bunkers, the iron of the bars, so nothing in my body or mind rebelled against the rooms of death, and I didn’t vomit, or pray under my breath, or have nightmares, or break down in tears afterwards, which, I was told, often happened to the jailers who were paid to escort the condemned to their end. I wasn’t paid, they just shortened my sentence. None of the jailers or other prisoners wanted to do it, but it didn’t bother me, walking past the death cells, trudging down the corridors that led to the trapdoor – I’d grown up playing in places like these. The people they executed in Pankrác in those days were serial killers, fraudsters, rapists, vicious gangsters. They weren’t war heroes like my parents any more, by that time most of the heroes like them were six feet under. So what? I thought as I led the prisoners on their last journey. Saboteurs of the socialist economy, rapists and heartless killers – they knew where they were going and why. Mr Mára and I were never rough with them, just firm.
    In quiet moments I’d sit next to Mr Mára, watching him operate the equipment, his long fingers dancing across the prehistoric keyboard, waiting for the coded radio command from the central office: Block B, prepare for winterizing!
    At this or some other agreed command I would get up and go to the cell and take the prisoner away under the jailers’ supervision and then calmly, by myself, lead him down the corridors to Mr Mára, who meanwhile made everything ready.
    When we came to the last room, some of the prisoners had beads of sweat on their forehead, their legs would freeze up like the Slovakian giant’s. I would help them. Mr Mára and I called it ‘seizing up’, like an engine. Even the calmest ones, who were quiet as we walked, or who teased and joked with me, about how I must be looking forward to the swill tomorrow, say – even they would sometimes suddenly seize up in horror, feeling queasy, about to vomit. My strength and my calm sometimes ceased to work on the threshold of the ropery. But Mr Mára always knew what to do.
    I wasn’t involved in carrying out the sentence.
    I just assisted with the preparations, and sometimes when it was done I would go and clean up with the bucket and rags and detergent.
    I don’t want to do that ever again.
    There were often long spells between carrying out the sentences. Then Mr Mára would let me sit at the computer, and my fingers, pale and peeling from the harsh detergent and countless buckets of water, would whizz across the keyboard, playing a game with dots that floated around the screen, crawling through fences and shooting each other. I would play the game and forget where and who I was, forget the screams and death rattles, forget the shit running down trouser legs, forget the faces of men turned into puppets by death, forget that I too was turning into a mindless puppet, reacting to the orders from the prison radio and the orders of Mr Mára, forget that everyone else in the prison hated me. It was probably one of the world’s first computer games.
    Thanks to Mr Mára’s teaching, I didn’t type with two fingers any more, like I used to on the old-fashioned typewriter at school. Soon I was almost as good as he was. He even had to adjust the game’s settings based on my scores.
    He wanted it to be used as a war game, for training.
    We were constantly improving it.
    I would’ve done anything that Mr Mára asked me to.
    By that point I had a cell to myself, since the prison officials were worried the