Detroit, MI – A make-shift sign recalling the one at the entrance to the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz has been met with outrage by Jewish groups.
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The Detroit Free Press (http://on.freep.com/WsYHcj) reports that the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” have appeared in a make-shift sign over the archway entrance to the historic Packard Plant in Detroit. The phrase, meaning “work will make you free,” are the same German words that were posted at the entrance to Nazi camps in Poland.
Heidi Budaj, regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, the leading Jewish civil rights group in America, said, “This graffiti is offensive to Jews and particularly to Holocaust survivors.”
Executive Director of the Holocaust Memorial Center Zekelman Family Campus in Farmington Hills, Stephen Goldman, concurred, stating, “This message is offensive on so many levels. It needs to be taken down.”
On Monday, John Bologna, an attorney speaking on behalf of the owner of the site, said it is the owner’s intent to have the sign removed. As of Tuesday afternoon, the sign remained.
It is unclear as to who put the sign up, or what the phrase is intended to mean.
So, socialist paradise Detroit is officially a labor camp?
Come on everybody!
Those days when holocaust survivors were in the workforce are over. Nowadays, such a sign doesn’t bring nightmares to anyone. It might be annoying to some, but that’s it.
As former president kennedy said: We should not make an issue out of non-issues when there are real issues.
There’s many anti-semitism out there which need to be tackled. By bringing it up for such narishkeiten we diminish the importance of it.
What’s the contact name , number or email adress of the plant ?
Our bailout dollars at work.
Some idiots idea of a joke…a very sick joke!
No your bailout dollars have nothing to do with it. Packard City has not been used by the industry in a generation. It is an empty urban ruin. Once again, the headline should read “Troublemakers Make Trouble.” I cannot understand why so many people want to give them the attention they desire.
it would have been better placed on the entrance to a FORD plant.i suppose these jew-haters don’t even know history !
To @2 How many of your relatives went through the camps and died in the camps? Most of my family!! You would not be so outspoken if you lost most of your family!!
Big deal it’s time to wake up and realize that it’s 2013 not 1940. You gotta move on in life not live in the past.
to #2 and #11 – You know nothing about human emotions. What if the sign said “Welcome to Auschwitz”? well, that is what this sign signifies to the survivors and their families, and its unacceptable.