Stolpersteine, aka "Stumbling blocks"

In 1992, the German artist Gunter Demnig started the Stolperstein project, an initiative to commemorate victims of Nazi persecution. Stolperstein means "stumbling block” in German, and it is a 10 cm brass plaque that bears the name, birthdate, and ultimate fate of the person who used to live in that location. They are installed in place of one of the stones that make up the pavement. Although there is a directory to find them, you usually just “stumble” across them in your everyday life. It is a very powerful memorial, and tragically moving when you find 8 or 10 blocks together, commemorating an entire family, most of whom perished. Each Stolperstein is placed at the last location where someone worked or studied. They are registered in a large public database where biographical detail of each person commemorated person can be found.

These also exist in Spain - the ones I have seen were people who fled Franco´s regime to France, then were persecuted when it became occupied. A friend of mine recently spoke at a ceremony in Hamburg to commemorate his father´s memorial- his father was a pacifist who was imprisoned very early in the Nazi era but was able to flee Germany after his release. The picture I have above is not from his family, but from others we saw on our trip this spring.

The project has been opposed by some, who find the idea of stepping on the names of departed people to be disrespectful. Personally, I find it a moving commemoration and a fitting way to remember that the people who died were individual people with lives embedded in their community. I would love to see something like this in the US that would better commemorate the individual lives of enslaved people and how their labor was exploited in so many ways to make the country I grew up in.