Stumbling stones

It's not usually a good idea to look down at the sidewalk while you stroll down the street. You miss all the action around you, get lost, trip, and in some places you make yourself a good target for something bad to happen. But in the case of the stumbling stones, being aware of your surroundings does involve watching the ground beneath your feet.

They are small, brass bricks. Each says "here lived..." then a name and birth date. There's a line below stating what happened to this person and their date of death. Each block is for a victim of the Holocaust, and is laid in front of the home where he or she once lived.

I saw these stones in Hamburg. The victims died at Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp not far from Hannover

The stones are in front of the doorway to this house

The stumbling stones are a project of Berlin-born artist Guenther Demnig. He relies on local residents, schools and community groups to research the victims, find out who they were and what happened to them. Then he writes the information into bronze blocks and installs them in front of where the victims once lived.

These ones are in the Steintor neighborhood of Hannover

 

They are in front of this building, near the discos and casinos

There have been some complaints about the stones - that they are unsightly, or that it's disrespectful for passersby to walk on the names of the dead. A few have been defaced with swastikas.

The whole project makes me wonder about how you memorialize something shameful. It's much easier to build a monument to what you are proud of. In Washington D.C. we have huge war memorials, and in many places I've seen memorials to those killed in battle. But what does it look like to commemorate a genocide?  The Holocaust memorial in Berlin is striking, powerful, oddly beautiful in how you can walk around it and feel lost inside. And many if not all of the concentration camps are now museums, but they commemorate how victims died. These stumbling stones are, for me, much more real and personal.  The stones remember how they lived and where their suffering began.

Brian saw these stones and the ones below in Prague

Demnig has created and laid more than 30,000 bricks so far. They are laid into the very sidewalks where the victims would have strolled every day, looking straight ahead.