Creative Writing Commons^™

Arbeit Macht Frei, Rebecca Basham

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

"Arbeit Macht Frei," which is translated, "Work Will Make You Free," is a surreal drama that sporadically and without regard to traditional chronological order spans the years of 1931-1947 in Nazi Germany. It is many stories of humanity and its strengths and weaknesses, its triumphs and atrocities, melded into theatrical representation as men and women who are interred in a concentration camp unwillingly build the walls that hold them under Nazi oppression. It is also the specific stories of four individual characters. Heinrich is the camp commander whose work is to construct and run the camp. Herta is the German …