This Föhrenwald Displaced Person (DP) camp sedar plate (1948) from Holocaust Museum kind of breaks by heart.
The Hebrew says in part "עבדות לחירות " (from slavery to freedom) and the camp stayed open until 1957. Worse, the DP's were living in facilities built in 1939 to house the construction workers for the IG Farben chemical conglomerate which then held laborers during WWII.
It's from the museum's exhibit which I found on twitter from NPR's Scott Simon (twitter, website, email ), who had first attracted my attention with a lighter message:
Happy Passover. Gonna hide the afikomen (matzoh hidden for children to find) where they'll never find it--in their homework.
Many of the camps had the horrible slogan "arbeit macht frei" (labor makes you free) but the only freedom was death, often in the death chambers after workers were too sick to be of use to the Nazi war machine.
And now the chilling phrase is being used again on a bridge overlooking the decaying industrial complex of the Packard Plant in a dying city "lord[ing] over the hulking plant that once created luxury cars and now serves as a decrepit 40-acre squatting grounds for the homeless..." as reported by CBS news on 2/5/13.
To read about Föhrenwald at Remember.org here's a Shoah lecture from the late Henry Cohen who managed the DP camp and went on to become an urban planner, a prominent New York City official in the Wagner and Lindsay administrations and a dean at a retired dean at the New School for Social Research (bio from Cohen's NYT obituary.)
