WORLD’S LARGEST DECENTRALIZED MEMORIAL

International Holocaust Remembrance Day, the day on which we pay tribute to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, is an annual event, always scheduled for January 27, which marks the anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau by Soviet troops in 1945. The horrific activities leading up to this event will also be in the minds of those participating in liberation day activities routinely observed across Europe throughout the month of May. These commemorations may be designed to highlight the Allied victory over the forces of evil, but many of us won’t be able to erase the memories of what took place during the Holocaust. Yet, the lessons the world should have garnered from the gruesome activity perpetrated by Hitler’s goons in pursuit of a “final solution” are increasingly lost on a growing segment of a younger generation. Antisemitism is on the upswing. In the U.S., incidents are at the highest level recorded since the 1970s. They nearly tripled during the past six years. This worrisome increase coincides with an alarming decrease of basic Holocaust knowledge, especially among adults under 40. According to a national survey, in the U.S., 63% of respondents did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered; 20% believed that the Jews caused the Holocaust, and 23% believed that the entire thing was a myth. In The Netherlands, home of Anne Frank, a country where out of 140,000 Jewish citizens prior to World War 2, 102,000 were killed; 23% believe that it is a myth and 12% have said that they never even heard the word. Sadly, slightly more than 78 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, two-thirds of the world’s population does not know the Holocaust happened, or they deny it. In 1990, German artist Gunter Demnig decided to counter the degenerating interest in keeping Holocaust memories alive. Born October 27, 1947, Demnig belongs to the generation questioning the role their parents played in Hitler’s Germany. Operating from the conviction that a person is not forgotten until his or her name is forgotten, Demnig set out to commemorate Holocaust victims at the last place of their residency before they became a casualty of Nazi terror, forced euthanasia, eugenics, or were deported to a concentration or extermination camp. His idea was to place a 10X10 centimeter (3.9”) concrete cube, bearing a brass plate inscribed with the victim’s name, date of birth, deportation date and the date they were murdered - if known, embedded flush in a sidewalk or street exactly in front of his or her last known residence.

Demnig named his memorial plaques “stolpersteine,” meaning “stumbling stones.” The name generated from an antisemitic saying in Nazi Germany. The Nazis destroyed Jewish cemeteries throughout Germany and frequently repurposed gravestones as sidewalk paving stones. So, when someone accidentally stumbled over a protruding stone on the sidewalk, one might often hear that: “a Jew must be buried here.” Placement of the stones is often inconspicuous. They are discovered by chance, in contrast to central memorial places that can easily be avoided or by-passed. The intention is to “trip up the passer-by” and draw attention to the memorial. The idea is to symbolically bring the victims back to their neighborhood. Aside from Jews, the memorials include all groups victimized by Nazi slaughter: Jews, Roma, Communists, Sinai, Yenish, members of the resistance, homosexuals, Jehova’s Witnesses, and the disabled. While the concept may have been simple, its execution was a massive undertaking. The project involved a significant investment in research and coordination across myriad locations. However, it caught fire. As of January 2022, more than 90,000 stones have already been placed in more than 30 countries and 2000 places in Europe. Demnig produces the plaques by hand, which slows down the process. He can create 440 of them each month. Every one features the language use in the intended location. And thus far the artist has personally installed 95% of them. While extremely successful, there was bound to be some opposition to the project. Some German locations are still refusing to allow placement of the stones. Although, cities like Frankfurt am Main, for instance, already installed 1000 of them. There is also the notion that placement on regular sidewalks is not respectful. However, the desecration of the memory of the dead was implicitly intended. Since people had to walk on the gravestones and tread on the inscriptions, the stones invoked antisemitic remarks of the past, while intending to provoke thoughts about a serious issue at the same time. And then there is the issue of context. In countries like Poland, the call is for clarification. The need to clarify that most of the perpetrators of the Holocaust were Germans, not Poles. Gunter Demnig seems overwhelmed by the scope of the Holocaust he attempts to confront when he suggested from the outset that “I can’t even imagine the six million murdered Jews and the whole inception of Auschwitz.” However, he unmistakably hit a chord and developed an antidote to creeping ignorance by installing the world’s largest decentralized memorial - still a work in progress. Cambridge historian Joseph Pearson sums up what he sees as significant about “stolpersteine”: “It is not what is written which intrigues, because the inscription is insufficient to conjure a person. It is the emptiness, void, lack of information, the maw of the forgotten, which gives the monuments their power and lifts them from the banality of a statistic.” Theo Wierdsma