Guest Author - Holly Fox

Stolpersteine – Stumbling Blocks

“What does it say?” My three-year-old charge pointed to brass cobblestone, set flush with the other cobblestones in the sidewalk.

Not sure I should be the first one to tell him and his brother about the deportation and mass murder of eleven million Jews, Roma, homosexuals, and politicians, I hesitated.

Then I read the brass plaque out loud: “Hier wohnte Pauline Wolff Jahrgang 1870 Flucht in den Tod 14.7.1942. Here lived Pauline Wolff. She was born in 1870 and died in 1942.

I didn’t translate the “Flucht in den Tod” part. Escaped to death? Suicide. I wasn’t sure how to explain it myself. The stone next to Pauline’s was for Anna Messias, née Hesse, born in 1867. According to her plaque she was deported in 1942 to the Terezín concentration camp, then to Minsk. What happened next is unknown. The text ends with “???”.

The five-year-old touched one of the stones with his shoe. “Don’t do that,” I said. “It’s like a grave.” He of course had no idea what these stones meant. He only knew that we saw dozens of them every time we walked to the park.

I first noticed these brass cobblestones in Hamburg’s Eppendorf neighborhood, then in the streets around the university, in Altona near the harbor, and then one remembering a senator in front of the city hall. Each stone told little more than the name of the victim, the year they were born, and the year they were deported or killed. I had pretty much told the kids everything but without the context of the Holocaust they had no idea what the words meant, even in English.

In this house, just down the street from their home, Pauline and Anna had lived. They went grocery shopping in this neighborhood, met their friends for coffee, walked along the Isebek canal. Eppendorf is lovely, green neighborhood, not far from the Alster Lake. Without any personal details, there’s no reason to believe that these women hadn’t had the nicest of lives until Hitler and his National Socialists came to power.

There’s a tendency, both in Germany and abroad, of almost being numb to the Holocaust. We’ve all seen the movies, we’ve done the history projects, we’ve had the heartfelt discussions about racism and prejudice. But these stones always make me stop. I want to read the names. I want to know who lived here. They aren’t like a diary or a two hour feature film. Just a few words to say who lived in the house in front of me. It’s easy enough to imagine. What isn’t easy to imagine, what remains disturbing, is the fact that a 72 year old woman named Pauline would kill herself.

These “stumbling blocks,” as they are called, are the project of artist Gunter Demnig. He and his colleagues try to find the last known residence of the victims of National Socialism. He then covers a 4 inch cube of concrete with a brass sheet. On one side he adds the words “Here lived,” the name of the victim, their date birth and death, and their ultimate fate. He has laid over 9,000 stumbling blocks in Germany and Austria, and will begin in Hungary next month.