As we toured cities on the Rhine River, we came across little memorials embedded in the sidewalk. Our tour guide in Strasbourg, France, explained that they were stolpersteines or “stumbling stones,” placed there to commemorate the lives of Jews, Sinti and Roma, politically persecuted people, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and euthanasia victims of National Socialism
The little memorials were conceived by artist Gunter Demnig in the early 1990s. They are placed in front of homes where the Nazis captured persecuted persons and sent them to concentration camps. Each stolpersteine begins with the words “Here lived” and provides information about the person being memorialized. In the case of Alfred Toczek, below, he was deported in 1941 and sent to Mauthausen, a Nazi concentration camp in Austria.
As of August 2024, the project had placed over 107,000 stones in nearly 1,900 municipalities in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Hungary.
We came across a few stolpersteines in Strasbourg and Koblenz, but saw them more frequently in Amsterdam, where we spent several days.
Jurriaan Haak and Henriette Haak Van Eek were taken by the Nazis in 1943 when they were in the 50s. They were sent initially to the Vught concentration camp in the north of the Netherlands. Vught was a transit camp from which Dutch Jews were sent to extermination camps. Jurriaan was sent to Sachsenhausen; Henriette was sent to Reichenbach.
In some instances the Nazis moved quickly to kill the persons they arrested. Two members of the Messias family were captured in Amsterdam on November 4, 1943. Both were in their 70s and were murdered in Auschwitz fifteen days later, on November 19, 1943. At their age, the Nazis had little use for them. Mary Messias successfully avoided capture and survived.
This sidewalk in front of this house at 43 Jacob Obrechtstraat in Amsterdam has nine stolpersteines, including six memorializing members of the De Hoop family.
Members of the De Hoop family were captured in Amsterdam on February 6, 1943 and put to death in Aushwitz six days later.
In places where hundreds of stolpersteines would need to be placed. the project lays a stolperschwelle, or stumbling threshold, that memorializes the group. Fifty stolperschwellen have been placed, although we did not come upon any of them.
For more information about the Stolpersteine Project you can go to its website.
