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August 25, 2007

Tarot cards from a concentration camp

Boris Kobe, c. 1945

Tarot Cards from Allach Concentration Camp, scanned and exhibited by the The Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies at the University of Minnesota, are the work of Boris Kobe (1905 - 1981), a Slovenian architect and painter who was a political prisoner at the concentration camp of Allach, a sub-camp of Dachau. Kobe survived and, the Minnesota museum reports,

...After the war, Kobe did no more work as far as is known about his camp experiences. He was, however, a major Slovenian architect. One of his major projects was the restoration of the Ljubljana Castle. ...
The cards shown below were drawn with double images: for every one that is "right side up," there is an inverted section. Both views are shown below, hence there are two Roman numbered cards for each with scenes from Allach Labor camp.

Boris Kobe, c. 1945
This card is the last in the Tarot deck's Major Arcana, number 21, The World (both views) and shows the Allach concentration camp destroyed and in flames.

This was the actual liberation of Allach, a Dachau sub-camp by the 42nd Rainbow Div. on April 30, 1945. There's a description of the event at that link.

Here's another photo of Kobe, also known in Slovenia as Borisa Kobeta. He seems also to have painted a portrait of The Writer Janez Trdina in 1969, which is in the Dolenjska Museum collection.

Slovenia is east of Italy, south of Austria, north of Croatia, and shares a small border on its northeast corner with Hungary. Here's a map, one in a nice collection of maps of Europe at the University of Texas.

Here's the link to all the cards again... You can keep clicking through to very high-rez images. The downloadable image of the XXI card is 1885 by 2873 pixels, and 2.5 mb.

via boingboing via whistlinginthedark.com

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 7:08 PM | Permalink

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