‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ Sign At Uighur Camp A Bit Too On The Nose

“It’s not like the Party to be this, well, tone deaf, I guess is what you’d call it.”

Credit: Nonethelesser, via Wikimedia Commons

Xinjiang, August 2 – Inmates and administration staff at a facility that imprisons, enslaves, sterilizes, and otherwise abuses a Muslim ethnic minority in China expressed discomfort this week at the eerie evocativeness of the posted exhortation that greets arrivals, a message that in the original German adorned the entrances to locations such as Dachau and Auschwitz.

Chinese characters conveying a translation of “Arbeit Macht Frei” – rendered in English roughly as “Work sets you free” or “Labor liberates” – festoon a sign over the entrance to this camp at an undisclosed location, where Uighur Muslims undergo treatment that has several organizations and Jewish groups clamoring for the international community to stop the Chinese Communist Party from perpetrating what many observers consider one of the few cases where Holocaust analogies apply. Guards and prisoners alike at the camp voiced misgivings at the sign being too on-the-nose, given what happens at and around the camp.

“It’s not like the Party to be this, well, tone deaf, I guess is what you’d call it,” observed a watch commander who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Obviously no one expects this in messaging that targets an international audience, but even internally, this is the sort of euphemism you’d think they’d know to avoid. China didn’t have much direct experience with the Nazis, only with their Japanese allies in the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis, and of course the Japanese invaders were every bit at vicious and racist as the Nazis, but it’s disconcerting to see such a gauche rhetorical move. Uncharacteristic, at least in my opinion.”

“That wasn’t what I expected,” admitted an Uighur inmate in restraints, awaiting his forced sterilization. “It’s easier for the authorities to do what they do if they keep the target population docile, which gets harder to accomplish when you broadcast something that basically screams, ‘We’re the SS and you’re the Jews!’ at every arrival. Just not the slickest line to put up there.”

Shift supervisors at one of several slave labor operations in the vicinity added that the exhortation to work appears to have had no discernible effect on the inmates. “They’re going to work as hard as we force them to, or suffer,” he explained. “The world needs cheap knockoff goods, cheap smart devices, cheap appliances, cheap components, cheap footwear, cheap toys, and cheap raw materials. The only way to make things cheap, in today’s global market, is to cut labor costs, and, by gum, we do that, whether or not some stupid Nazi sign appears at the gate.”

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