A museum. A mausoleum.

Today I went to a house where many people live. Lived. Live. There were many children. They can't move out from the walls. Their hands reach out, stretch out for hope, grasping, tiny fists protruding from the cold cement. You'd only believe, really truly believe, if you saw it for yourself. And the children speak in wheezes because they've been covered, screaming for so long. David Irving preaches to the masses to mask their dismay. Hidden from view. Hidden from sight. Site. The sites are all but locked up. A couple remain open, but they are ghost towns. People hide their ghosts in them. I don't know whether there was more death when it was all running, or now that they are shut.

But the unreal solidness of the building speaks for itself:

COME AND SEE THE REAL THING, COME AND SEE THE REAL THING, COME AND SEE.

There is a barbed wire to keep us out. Next to this station. But I remember that there was also barbed wire to keep them in. They missed a few, the 'survivors'. But Frankl said that the "best of us did not survive". Yet there was this man when I got here. His eyes lit up the room, I couldn't help but smile. The voices of this stale room seemed to fade when he talked. The number on his arm seemed to be the only link to his solid, ghostly surrounds. He told me that:

EVERY DAY IS BEAUTIFUL.

At that moment, you'd find it hard to disagree. He grew up to be a charming man. From thin to a jovial roundness. He met his wife in Berlin I think it was. And she always waits for him.

But one thing that lingers, from that eerie solidness, from the crumbling density.. is the burning. The piles of burning books. Items of clothing. The smell. It invaded your senses. You could feel it on your skin. And the glow is there when you close your eyes.

"That was only a prelude, where they burn books, in the end it is men that they burn" Heinrich Heine.