Stolpersteine Project

Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer hand-engraves individual Holocaust fates onto small plaques called Stolpersteine, which constitute the world’s largest decentralised memorial. “I’d ask you not to mention the precise location,” he said. “The neighbours all know what I do, but I don’t want any outside trouble.” For the last 14 years, Friedrichs-Friedländer has hand-engraved individual Holocaust fates onto small commemorative plaques called Stolpersteine , or ‘stumbling stones’. Each plaque is a 10cm brass square affixed on top of a cuboid concrete block that’s installed into the pavement directly before a Holocaust victim’s last known, voluntary residence. There are now more than 70,000 of these stones around the world, spanning 20 different languages. They can be found in 2,000-plus towns and cities across 24 countries, including Argentina, Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Slovenia and Ukraine. Together, they constitute the world’s largest decentralised memorial. For all this international reach, the Stolpersteine are highly individual in form. The project’s motto is ‘one victim, one stone’, referencing a teaching in the Talmud, the book of Jewish law, that ‘a person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten’. Each plaque’s inscription begins ‘HERE LIVED’ in the local language, followed by the individual’s name, date of birth and fate. For some, this is exile to another country. For others, it is suicide. For a few, it is liberation from a concentration camp. But for the vast majority, it is deportation and murder. The project began in 1992, when Cologne-based artist Gunter Demnig first laid plaques in this format for Sinti and Roma victims of the Holocaust, who during that time were commonly referred to as ‘Gypsies’. He called the plaques ‘stumbling stones’ as a metaphor. “You won’t fall,” he recently told CNN . “But if you stumble and look, you must bow down with your head and your heart.” By 2005, the Stolpersteine project had expanded so much that Demnig could no longer both make and install each plaque. That’s when he asked Friedrichs-Friedländer to take on the production. “I knew within five minutes we could work together,” Friedrichs-Friedländer said. “For me it is the strongest form of Holocaust memorial you can have. You bring the names back.” Friedrichs-Friedländer engraves each plaque by hand – stamp by stamp, letter by letter, fate after fate. Although there’s now a minimum nine-month waiting list for a Stolpersteine, he vehemently rejects mechanising the process. To date, Friedrichs-Friedländer has engraved more than 63,000 Stolpersteine in more than 20 languages. The work is regularly traumatic. His eyes water as he describes a set of 34 stones for a former Jewish orphanage in Hamburg. The children were all between one and six years old. As much as the plaques serve to commemorate individual lives, the Stolpersteine also trace the malign mechanics of deportation. Multiple stones in front of the same building show how the Gestapo returned to the same house again and again, splintering neighbours and family members along the routes to Treblinka, Theresienstadt, the Riga ghetto and Kaiserwald, and Auschwitz. “I’ve done stones for families of 20 members,” said Friedrichs-Friedländer, “all sent in different directions, deported on different days.” But when the Stolpersteine are laid before a building, “families are reunited,” he explained, brought back together in front of the home they once shared. Dietmar Schewe, a retired school principal in Berlin, recently coordinated a set of stumbling stones with his neighbours. “It was really the first time our apartment building felt like a community” he said. “It was very harmonious, as well as very emotional,” he said. “We were able to show our visitors exactly which apartment their family members had lived in. It felt like a small but important encounter with the lived environment of their relatives.” Friedrichs-Fr