Then he directs us toward an archway. "Go through there, and you see the photographs and the artifacts from the Nazi era. I go to the cafe down the block to wait for you."
The five of us go through the archway.
"I don't know much about World War II," Rory says.
Beyond the arches placards, jutting like stele, indicate important dates of the 1930s and 40s as if this is an ordinary historical museum.
It isn't.
As a child, I saw the newsreels and read the accounts in Life and Time before the events slid into history, and now I lose the others as I walk quickly through the exhibits.
Glass cases are surrounded by black and white photographs I've already seen. A child raises his hands before a dozen Nazi rifles. An old woman in a babushka tries to protect a baby from a Nazi guard. The difference now is that the photographs have been blown up to life size and 100m above me as I pass beside the cases.
Light glares down on a hexagonal star cut from yellow sacking that's the applique from a Jewish jacket.
I know Hitler's propagandists chose symbolic hues. Virgin white combined with ominous black and passionate red for swastikas, the yellow of cowardice for the Star of David stitched to clothes of the Juden.
The electric lights haven't faded the star's authenticity.
I turn away quickly and collide with another case.
Zyklon D pellets spill from a green tin canister labeled 'Giftgas.' The pellets that produced poisonous gas for the fake showers are lavender, the size and shape of gravel.
I veer into a passageway of photographs, and hopeless faces of internees stare through barbed wire. Even in black and white, I know their eyes are blue.
I can't breathe, and I make a quick right turn.
It's a theatre where images of the doomed and clouds of smoke billow across the screen. The narrator says over the filmstrip, "The ovens were kept burning night and day."
I retreat through the exit.
But I'm in another hallway of giant pictures. Black and white photos show mounds of spectacles, pits of ashes, piles of rigid bodies too skeletal to render into grease.
The next archway opens into a second theatre, narrated in French but showing similar flickering images. There's no light except that reflected from the screen.
I take another passageway, and when I see a man in uniform at the end of the hall, I rush toward him. "I have to get out of here."
He may not understand my words, but he understands my panic, and he swings aside a curtain. Behind it fortunately is an emergency exit.
Somehow I've ended up on the second floor of the museum, and I flee down the stone stairs toward the sidewalk and the cafe where Sol waits.
