Berlin: Stolpersteine

I’ve known about the Stolpersteine for a long time, but had never seen them before now. Maybe I’ve been busy looking up, as one does in a city of monuments. Maybe these stones in the sidewalk were dirty, blending in with the sidewalk, and I finally stumbled upon (appropriately) some that had been recently cleaned.

A Stolperstein is a concrete cube the size of a sett, or cobblestone, covered by a brass plate engraved with the name of a victim of the holocaust. The name means “stumbling stone”, a metaphor on several levels. A Nazi expression, when stumbling over a stone, was, “A Jew must be buried here;” a Stolperstein, in German, can metaphorically refer to a potential problem, just like a "stumbling block" in English; and in German as in English, to stumble upon something means to come across it by chance. Also, during the Nazi regime, Jewish cemeteries were destroyed and the gravestones often used as paving stones. The desecration of these stones was implicit, as people walked on the inscriptions.

The Stolpersteine project was started by artist Gunter Demnig, who placed the first stones illegally in May of 1996. Now there are some 60,000 of them across Europe, and 7,000 in Berlin alone.

These Stolpersteine I came across by chance right next door to Ezra and Katharina’s apartment. However many times I had passed by, I’d never seen them before. Katharina said someone had recently cleaned them. Citizens continue to honour the fallen ones. Sometimes it’s the smaller memorials that hit deeper than the big monuments.

The first stone, above, says: “Here lived Oskar Blemenreich, (born) 1879, deported 2.4.1942, murdered in Warsaw Ghetto.” The rest, you can figure out.

Max survived, but lost his wife and 5-year-old son

A block away, on the Hauptstraße thoroughfare, there is a small waterpark and memorial plaque with a list of concentration camps. This is what I find about Berlin, that history, however painful, is not buried and forgotten. Rather, there are reminders everywhere, with the apparent resolution that it will never be repeated.