I first noticed them in Rome a few years ago. My guide pointed them out while I toured the old Jewish quarter. Bronze squares affixed to the pavement with the names of Jews who used to live at that location. Jews killed in the Holocaust. He described them using a German word I didn’t recognize.

I saw them again on my recent visit to Amsterdam and Berlin. Lots of them. Now I can’t get them out of my mind.

They are called Stolpersteine (plural, Stolperstein in the singular), a German word that means “stumbling stones” or, alternatively, “stumbling blocks.” They are the brain child of the German (non Jewish) artist Gunter Demnig. You can see them throughout Europe. More than 100,000 stones across 26 European countries, making it, in some respects, the world’s largest memorial.

The germ of the idea came to Demnig one day in 1990 when a German woman who’d lived through the Second World War told him that no Sinti or Roma (Gypsies, as they used to be called), had lived in Cologne. He knew that was a lie and that, in 1940, around 1,000 had been confined to a camp just outside the city, led to the Köln-Deutz train station, and then deported to camps in Poland. To drive home the point, he traced a line from the camp to the train station.

He followed that up in December, 1992, embedding a bronze tile into the pavement in front of the Cologne City Hall on which was engraved the text of the Nazi decree ordering the deportation.

Gemnig didn’t ask for the city’s permission to put the stone there. He simply dug up part of the sidewalk and replaced it with his own. The government intended to remove the stone but, as it had became a tourist attraction, decided to leave it to avoid any negative publicity. Thus began Gemnig’s project to mark out the places where other victims of Naziism lived.

He placed the first Stolpersteine commemorating Jewish victims—55 in all—in Berlin in 1996. As in Cologne, the government threatened to remove them, but then relented based on the optics of uprooting a Holocaust memorial. From there the project spread to other cities in Germany and then to other countries. By October 2007, Demnig had laid more than 13,000 Stolpersteine in over 280 cities. 

Each stone is made of bronze and measures 10 x 10 centimeters (about 4 x 4 inches). The stones are engraved according to a set script. On the top line are the words, in the native language, “here lived.” The name of the murdered person (and the maiden name if the name was changed) appear, in larger font, on the next line. The third line records his or her birth year. Below that is the year he or she was deported. And the last line has the word, in the native language, “murdered,” and, to the extent such information is available, where and when.

I took the following photo in Berlin. The three stones commemorate the Mokrauer family, Alfred, born in 1878, Lucie, born in 1881 and Siegfried Simon, presumably their son, born in 1908. The parents were deported to Theresienstadt on July 7, 1942, and Siegfried to Riga on August 15, 1942. Alfred and Lucie were murdered in Treblinka in 1942 (date uncertain, so not specified) while Siegfried was murdered (presumably in Riga as the place is not specified) on August 8, 1942.

At first, Gemnig did all the work himself, gathering the information, engraving the stone and laying it into the ground.

As the project took off, he realized he needed help. In 2005, a sculptor, Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer, began to partner with Demnig. Friedrichs-Friedländer has since devoted his life to making the stones. He engraves each one by hand, using a chisel, to ensure, in his words, “that the process is purposeful and does not become anonymous.” He works alone, in silence, six days and at least 50 hours a week. He has now completed over 60,000 stones in 20 languages. As he explained in an interview to the BBC, “There are awful days when all I can do is cry. . . . One must be present. One must suffer. If I ever get used to the work, if it ever becomes routine, I’ll stop.”

The Stolpersteine project embodies several pathways toward memorializing Nazi victims. The word itself implies that the memorial is not something you seek out but rather stumble upon in the course of your day-to-day activities. “Stolpersteine are not placed prominently, but are rather discovered by chance, only recognizable when passing by at close distance.” In contrast to central memorial places, Demnig explained, which can be easily avoided or bypassed,”Stolpersteine represent a much deeper intrusion of memory into everyday life.”

The stones aim to humanize the victims by reestablishing their physical connection to a particular space, the residence he or she occupied before being deported. It doesn’t matter what happened to the place after the war, whether the building is still there or has been replaced by something else. Stones can be found in front stores, rebuilt buildings or the same building where the victim once lived.

I encountered these Stolpersteine in Holland in front of shops:

These stones are right outside a someone’s home. Imagine walking past them every time you leave and return to your home.

“Here lived” means that the connection to place has been in some measure restored and that memory cannot be erased by later changes to the physical environment.

Stolpersteine offer relatives a way to remember their ancestors. Nazi victims have no resting place, the bodies having either been burned or buried in mass graves. Installing a Stolpersteine reaffirms the individuality of the person and creates a space where descendants can gather to memorialize relatives. Indeed, while at first Demnig did his own research to discover the names, residences and details of the Nazi victims, the impetus for placing stones now often comes from relatives. Family members who undertake the research must make contact with as many of the victim’s relatives as they can find—to secure their approval and invite them to the stone-laying ceremony. Friedrichs-Friedländer recounts an occasion when 34 relatives gathered from different countries around the world to mark the installation of Stolpersteine. “People have discovered relatives they never knew they had.” In this way, the Stolpersteine project becomes a vehicle to bring family members together and create moments of memorialization.

One descendent held a ceremony in Kassel, Germany, where Stolpersteine were placed in front of a building where her father and his siblings once lived. She told the assembled crowd: “The Stolpersteine serve as a quiet but powerful interruption in our path, asking us to pause, to reflect, and to remember. . . . The past is not so far away. It lives in the stones beneath our feet, and in the stories we choose to tell. These stones put down today remind us that history is not just something in books—it is something that lives in our cities, our streets, our homes. They remind us of the need to protect each other’s dignity, to recognize injustice, and to never be silent in the face of irrational hatred. These stones are not just memorials. They are bridges—between past and present, memory and action, loss and hope.”

Stolpersteine also help communities in Germany explore their unsavory past. Schools and other civic organizations have taken on Stolpersteine as a lesson in examining their community’s history. A retired school principal in Berlin coordinated a set of stumbling stones with his neighbors. “It was really the first time our apartment building felt like a community” he said. Twenty-five visitors from Israel came to the Stolpersteine ceremony in front of his building. He felt that during the emotional ceremony, “we were able to show our visitors exactly which apartment their family members had lived in. It felt like a small but important encounter with the lived environment of their relatives.”

A number of schools in the German-speaking world have integrated Stolpersteine into their curriculum as a way of confronting their past. Students work together to research local Holocaust victims. Friedrichs-Friedländer describes his own youth in Germany as “a series of unanswered questions. . . . Teachers, parents… nobody wanted to tell you anything. It was as if the Third Reich never happened.” The stones are an antidote—a stumbling block—to forgetting the victims of the Holocaust. They are literally embedded, in broad daylight, into the city’s infrastructure. And, Demnig notes, “they demonstrate that neighbors and friends must have seen and known what was happening.”

As with any conceptual art piece, the process is part of the artistry. Those who initiate the process of making a Stolperstein become participants in the project. The process involves research, getting governmental approval for putting them on public property, dealing with any public debate and the possible objection of residents to having them placed in front of their homes, fundraising (each stone costs €120), manufacturing them, attending the ceremony to mark their installation, as well as their continued care and preservation.

There project’s web site (the English page is at https://www.stolpersteine.eu/en/) offers a guide for the process.

About 80,000 of the 116,000 Stolpersteine are in Germany, about 10,000 in Berlin alone. But they are also becoming ubiquitous in cities throughtout the Netherlands. There are over 15,000 in that country, in over 110 Dutch cities. I passed by many as I walked to the Holocaust Museum in Amsterdam, in the Plantage neighborhood, where many Jews lived before the war.

Not everyone accepts the Stolpersteine as an appropriate means of commemoration. The city of Munich passed a law banning them on public property—at the urging of the local Jewish community! The then President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany objected to the idea that the names of murdered Jews be inserted in the pavement, where people might step on them. They can also be disregarded and profaned, as illustrated by this photo I took in Berlin of scaffolding on top of a couple of Stolpersteine.

It’s not that the Munich government is against memorializing Jews who lived there before the Holocaust. To the contrary, its mayor has stated that “it is important to me that we find forms of individual remembrance of the victims of the Nazi era in Munich.” Rather than Stolpersteine, the city is putting up memorial plaques, Erinnerungszeichen, outside the victim’s last known home or workplace, containing their details and a grid-like portrait engraved into it. The city feels that this is a more respectful means of commemorating its Holocaust victims.

Seeing the many Stolpersteine in Berlin and Amsterdam got me thinking about whether I could get some placed in front of my great grandparents’ home in Zambrow, Poland. This goal, however is unlikely to be realized, because, not surprisingly, the Polish government (at least the previous right wing one), as well as most local governments, are against it. A few have been placed in cities such as Poznan and Wrocław. But, as an article explains, “it was almost impossible for any ancestors of people who perished in the Holocaust to have the stones installed” in Poland. A ceremony to install Stolpersteine in Kraków in 2018 had to be canceled “due to the Institute of National Remembrance’s (IPN) and the local authorities’ opinion that the stones are ‘foreign’ to the Polish culture of remembrance. In other Polish towns the struggle of many families to obtain permission continues.”

During my recent trip to the Netherlands, I spent a day in Delft. Walking around the picturesque town, I thought to myself, “I wonder if there are any Stolpersteine here?” I put the query into ChapGPT which generated a list of streets where they could be found. One of them was close to the restaurant at which we had dinner. I walked down the street, and, sure enough, there they were:

Only 46 Jews live in Delft before the war. I don’t know if any survived, but these Stolpersteine tell us that among the victims were the De Roode family, deported in 1943 to Westerbork and then murdered in Sobibor on April 23, 1943 (left) and the Van Der Stam family and Mina Rubens, also deported in 1943 to Westerbork, and then murdered in Auschwitz on January 13, 1943 (right). May their memory live on.

Actually, I need not have consulted ChapGPT because, as it turns out, there is now a Stolpersteine app, avaiable on the Apple and Google stores!

The app is pretty amazing. It opens with the scroll of those murdered on the day as well as particular “Stones in spotlight.”

There’s a search features that allows you to search a person or city. The search by name feature doesn’t seem to work very well, but a search by place gives you the addresses where Stolpersteine have been placed. Here’s what turned up when I entered the city of Delft:

The map feature is even more impressive, showing you where Stolpersteine have been placed and allowing you to zoom in to see their exact location.

What started as a grass roots project in the mind of Gunter Demnig has now become one of the most profound memorials to the victims of the Holocaust. (Actually, now Stolpersteine are being made to commemorate those who survived but were forced to flee.) They are helping to preserve memory and increasing the odds that the Holocaust will not be forgotten. They serve as a gentle reminder of the lives lost as one passes by them during one’s daily activities. It will be up to future generations to ponder their significance and care for them as a way of preserving the memory of those whose lives they commemorate. Holocaust memorials and museums may demonstrate the enormity of the Holocaust, but perhaps these small squares, affixed to the pavement of European streets, will end up having the greatest impact on the preservation of memory. Thousands upon thousands of squares that proclaim: “Here lived.”