Concentration Camp Card Deck from Dachau, 1945

[Laisrean]

http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/24/concentration_camp_c.html


The University of Minnesota Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has scanned and published a full set of playing cards created in 1945 by an inmate at the Dachau concentration camp. They are the size of normal playing cards.

[Willow Rosette]

Those are heart breaking images.

[Rick]

You ought see the Dachau display at the 45th Infantry Museum in OKC (the 45th was, basically, the Oklahoma National Guard at the time of WWII, & is the unit tha liberated Dachau). I had tears in my eyes the entire way through it, especially when reading the original report sent from the commander of the 45th to HQ describing what they discovered there. I remember muttering "Bastards!" a lot through gritted teeth...

[Willow Rosette]

I dont think my heart can handle things like that. I would be bawling like a baby.

[omar]

I visied Dachau in 1969. Bad vibes there.

[TerminallyUnique]

Been there a few times myself. Never stood in a place that felt like that before or since. The place screams constantly.

I definately dont need a deck of cards to remind me of what I saw there, but it is important that noone forgets the enormity of what happened.

[HedwigHarfang]

Those pictures are indeed awe-inspiring. In me - the grandson of someone gassed and the nephew of someone who survived Auschwitz and Belsen - they also inspire respect for someone daring enough to create them when presumably they were under constant supervision and constant physical, spiritual and emotional pressure. They show a skill that I envy and to me they fill me with respect for someone who could overcome the reluctance I would feel to do same. I can draw reasonably well (we were all taught and I enjoyed art at school; I have contributed drawings to newspapers under a pseudonym but none alas have been published!) but not at that sort of time under those sort of circumstances. Louise draws a cartoon strip about politics in the UK and she says that the biggest gaps for her are when she is feeling under stress and so knowing what state of mind artistic creation needs, we are both amazed by the quality and only wish that more had been published on the site.

As for visiting the sites themselves, I went to Auschwitz privately after the Berlin Wall came down (I had been to the USSR previously, as a Russian culturally speaking I was given a lot more leeway when I visited than a normal western citizen, but before 1989 I never felt safe in Poland because of the constant political agitation from the sixties onwards) and like Terminally Unique the spiritual stress was unbearable. I managed to complete the tour because I felt I had to (Rosie had just died and I felt I owed her one for what she had explained to me about it) but I got out of the place and back to Krakow as quickly as I could. I've been back to Poland since but the atmosphere there remains rather dodgy for someone of Jewish appearance like myself so I do feel sadly lessons that needed to be learned weren't; I appreciate that Auschwitz was mainly established as a prison camp for Poles themselves and it was only later it became the main site for the Final Solution and its perpetration, but for a long time any reference to the Jewish deaths there were smoothed over into anonymous "victims of fascism"; equally however Jewish groups that get upset at Polish Catholics using it as a site of pilgrimage and memorial as well are underestimating the Polish tragedy that occurred there too.

However Louise remarks that when she went there she felt nothing, although she couldn't eat anything while in the town of Oswiecim or when she returned to her hotel in Krakow. She said to me she had heard that no birds sang there even in the middle of summer, and she as an empath felt a strange sense of ...liberation when she was there and heard birds in the trees around her. It was only on the train home when she saw the inscription on a vandalised seat "POLSKA DLA POLAKOW, ZYDZI DO GAZU" (Poland for the Poles, Jews to the gas) that she burst out crying. It wasn't until I explained she had been a German inmate of the camp during the war and that she had actually been instrumental in helping a lot of the other inmates to survive alongside her that she understood why she had felt almost a sense of joy at being there.

It was also shocking to her that a complete stranger - English - came up to her and said, "Hello, Louise!" before disappearing off again; probably a past life throwback to that time who was switched on quickly by being there and recognised her spirit enough to greet her under her current name! The place warps people's spiritual memories so much that I think people have different experiences of it based on their spiritual or familial experiences and for her spirit I think it represented a time when she was more secure in knowing what she was doing there than subsequently when she was packed off to the Russian front in a punishment batallion and spent years shuttling around Eastern Europe before emigrating to America (I as her pre-war Jewish girlfriend had been pushed out a window in 1939, so I never had to suffer anything like what my grandmother and aunt went through and as a British Jew in this life I was utterly safe from anything happening to me personally when I was reborn in 1941).

In fact going to the political conference at which I resigned in 2005 was more painful for her than going to Auschwitz. It is odd what resonates with people but she felt very guilty for a long time afterwards that she had had such a "positive" experience of the place. Knowing why I think put her mind to rest that it wasn't that she had been a Nazi guard or kapo, just that she had been one of the ones who acted as an angel there saving people from certain death. As she was a man in that life I doubt that she ran into my aunt, Rose Hecht, but Rosie was saved by such people in other situations, so I knew a lot more about it from her survival.

EDIT - click on the pictures on the BoingBoing (:D:D:D!!!) link and you will get more of these incredible images. He would have been the same age as Louise was in that life...as an architect and designer evidently he already had a talent, but this is a talent that survived under those kind of conditions which would make both of us crumble into little pieces and be unable even to think about drawing. (That's Louise's drawing of me in my sig :):):).)

[FiresSong]

I couldn't get through all of them. *shakes her head*