Legacy MattersArtist Gunter Demning has installed more than 10,000 stopersteine - stumble stones, into the sidewalks of 202 German cities and stones.
They are meant to trip memory.
Each is a brass plaque measuring about 4 by 4 inches and hand-engraved by artist Gunter Demnig with the name and a few terse details of someone lost to the Holocaust. Each stumble stone is set permanently into the sidewalk outside the place where the individual lived, laughed, and loved -- usually a house or apartment building and sometimes a shop or office.
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"Here lived
Berta Spiegel
Born "Scheuer"
[In the] Year 1879
Deported to Theresienstadt
Dead 16-2-1942"
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"Stumble stones are on streets where everyone walks. The names cry out from the sidewalks of everyday life."
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"This is my life's work. I will continue for as long as I'm able," Demnig said. "Giving names back to the dead is a way of keeping them alive."
In Germany, singular remembrances.
Well done! When I was visiting Berlin, I read the 'stone' on the footpath outside my daughter's residence there. It touched me deeply - that I live in the same world that such inhumanity happened and happens.