It wasn't a theme park - -
So macabre. I dream that I am breaking into a concentration camp; that I couldn't afford the entry fee to look at murdered life...
There was a tunnel next to a wood, half covered with foliage and concrete. It was quiet and dark. Hushed tones to exchange wristbands in...tagged and ready...
The walk through was wet, slimy and arduous. I imagine it thriving on hate and that the dank is all that remains when that red energy has gone....the embarrassed ugliness of being wrong and blind.
The tunnel opens up to a courtyard through an iron gated door. There is no breeze. Cloying fetid sadness and stale air.
A handful of people mill around, peering voyeurists into burnt graves...
In the middle the gravel crunches underfoot, to the edges it is worn into dirt. And I'm with 2 people. I do not know but they wanted me to see. I feel burdened by guilt and pride. I feel heavy for breathing. In the stone rooms to the side, concave chambers with different purposes but ultimately all the same intent:
One plaque reads 'for the eucharist'. I'm not religious and I don't know it's meaning. I haven't read up on where I am. Only that it housed death and fed it lives.
I, too, peer in and there is a makeshift altar and pews. But the image doesn't sit right, the back wall is sooted and I wonder when in panic they were burnt here. Whilst they worshipped and prayed. Lambs. So many lambs.
The others are nodding, small smiles as if they hold all the understanding they need.
'See? How they tried...they didn't know'
But culpability persists. The officers, the soldiers, the staff - the people - they knew.
They must. And how did their consciences get salved to the cries? How did they sleep and know what the morning, the night and the day held.
It wasn't my order. It wasn't my intent. I just carried the scythe and dealt the blow whilst I watched the world order burn and crumble.
Whilst flames raged. Fires uncontrolled and borne in passion of persecution.
I turn from this and cross to a bureau with an old desk light, so close to the others that mimic it that there can have been no dignity in open interrogation. They stand by a double large wooden door, hewn from thick stoic timber...
The love bureau it is called, the plaque on a plinth states. And I read that at times romances blossomed between those that were captive and the captors. Like the worst Stockholm syndrome. Knowing that there was no escape and that only small gestures, small moments, sustained the stillness of the waiting tomb.
When these romances came to light, both individuals were brought to each desk and made to talk about everything. About the sordid and the spiritual. About why and when and what. And that small moment, the small sparkle of light, was extinguished by others who had no heart. Who could envisage no humanity.
I imagine sitting and hearing my heart say one thing and listening with false hope as I was told so many others. So many lies by heads that those doubts ripped my life blood with more pain from my chest than any other physical torment and choke...
Because this love bureau beat at the heart of hate. Because to break another is to take hope. To turn love into doubt and shred it is to take what makes us human and makes us all monsters in skin...
To hate is to love in fear, and to twist it into a devil that doesn't accept life. Doesn't accept truth and love. It feeds on the lust of the easiest way out and makes a mockery of those who have faith enough to believe in the goodness of the individual. In the innocence of the idea that love will out.
That is what I dreamed last night. A concentration camp so grotesque that it never existed...and my mind made it real for a night.
When I woke I heard the sound of my child from the room next door. Heard him cry for mum and a dad, who couldn't stay....
It was 5.30am and dawn had broken through the dark. But I am still alone in waiting. And the love bureau is closed.
