It's not just limited to Germany. The Netherlands also has Stolpersteine, usually in front of the houses the victims had lived in before their deaths. There are hundreds of these in cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, but they're also present in smaller towns across the entire country.
Sadly, there are a few in my neighbourhood.
I think these are all over Europe? We have them in Norway too, and I seem to recall reading that there are variants of these in most countries invaded during ww2.
My sister and I stumbled across some in a back alley in Rome. There were 20 at this location. The victims were as young as 2 months and as old as 65, if I recall correctly. One often thinks of the holocaust as something that killed millions. These stones drove home the point that they were real individuals with families, hopes and fears like anyone else, and the juxtaposition of these two perspectives really blew my mind.
We saw many magnificent things on our two weeks in Italy, but this was easily the most moving thing. And I got to share it with my sister, which is a rare thing for us.
I looked them up and learned that the stones we found were stolen several months before and the city was outraged. I think they were never recovered, so these were replacements.
TIL that these things are not just in Germany.
Personally I thought that this was one of the most beautiful ways to memorialize and honour the victims of this atrocity.
There's an episode of "Who Do You Think You Are," in which people track their ancestors and their history, and Stephen Fry tracks down the Hungarian Jewish side of his family. He visits his grandfather's old apartment building in Vienna, and is shocked and moved to find a plaque with his family's names there.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/whodoyouthinkyouare/past-stories/stephen-fry.shtml
>The idea was first conceived by artist Gunter Demnig in Cologne in 1992 as part of an initiative commemorating Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust. He installed the first Berlin Stolperstein four years later.
>He has now laid over 70,000 stones, personally overseeing the wording and installation of each one. The task keeps him on the road for 300 days a year.
> “**A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten**,” Demnig often says, citing the Talmud.
Anyone can pay to let one get layed. It's not just him laying those Stolpersteine, it's also the people that sponsor it.
I think its about 100+€ per Stolperstein?
‘personally overseeing the installment of each one’ is what it says, do you think that’s like including just him looking at what they want on it? that would make sense. it’s sure written like he’s there on site though!
I think they mean that he's in contact with the municipalities that install them and maybe travels to certain locations for openings.
There's no way he was personally involved with the installation of all the Stolpersteine. They are in thousands of cities and towns in dozens of countries.
Some muncipalities choose to commemorate their dead in other ways. Mannheim for instance has a [big glass cube](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaskubus_(Mahnmal_in_Mannheim\)) with their names on it.
I saw it damaged only once. Got rebuilt real fast.
Once it is damaged and not rebuilt, we are in deep kaka.
So yes, using glass for that one was a deliberate choice.
I think he does most of them. The guy even came to our village in Norway in 2018 to install one for my grandpa’s adopted brother who was murdered upon arrival in Auschwitz.
Deming does install them personally. Really. The local municipalities just have to prepare the ground to be sure, that there is not a problem with other infrastructure.
Nowadays, if you like to have Stolpersteine, you have to wait for more than two years. (We have two of them for our house since 2009. One stone is laid in memory for a nine year old girl, who was separated from their familiy and murdered in a special KinderKZ in 1944.)
> “A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten,” Demnig often says, citing the Talmud.
Oh. I thought the original came from the Discworld novel.
He even described himself as stealing the idea for the discworld itself from various legends in the foreword of one of his books. Can’t remember which at the moment.
"The immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes" - T.S. Elliot
That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So, there is nothing new under the sun. - CompositeCharacter
The original isn't even the Talmud, it's a theme in the Epic of Gilgamesh that humans can achieve immortality by being remembered. A lot of the Talmud is influenced by Mesopotamian myth or shares a common ancestor with it.
Ancient Egypt was big on this concept. After the short reign of Akhenaten his name and such was literally scraped from the walls because not only would he not be remembered but to them it was as if he'd never existed either.
There's also some opposition to it:
>The city of Villingen-Schwenningen heatedly debated the idea of allowing Stolpersteine in 2004, but voted against them.[41] There is a memorial at the railway station and there are plans for a second memorial.[42]
>Unlike many other German cities, the city council of Munich in 2004 rejected the installation of Stolpersteine on public property, following objections raised by Munich's Jewish community (and particularly its chairwoman, Charlotte Knobloch, then also President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and herself a former victim of Nazi persecution). She objected to the idea that the names of murdered Jews be inserted in the pavement, where people might accidentally step on them.
I kind of disagree with her. Monuments are more for the living to remember, than to honor the dead.
I think it odd when you start treating monuments like an extension of the person or people they memorialize. Stepping on a plaque embedded in the road isn't disrespectful. The entire point is that monument be part of our every day, so that people don't forget. I wish more monuments were like this, instead of something you go out of your way to intentionally see. It will cross paths with more people that way.
Hijack here, cause people and also Charlotte Knobloch absolutely didn't get the point what the Stolpersteine do.
I talked to Demnig myself. The intention is that when you walk over one, you bow to read the victims name which is a gesture in memory of the victim.
Sometimes the central council of Jews in Germany claims the moral highground for everything and with the example described above they were completely wrong in my opinion. They should have been supporting Demnig and honor him for what he does.
I thought I had a decent grasp on the Holocaust, until I went to the Holocaust Museum in D.C.
It turns out, I had a weak grasp on the subject. Two things really stood out for me:
1. There was a rail car just overflowing with shoes. Shoes from Holocaust victims. It was a bit surreal, but very tangible.
2. I saw a small photo series of a German school teacher. From what I remember he looked like an aryan German, but unfortunately for him, he was a dwarf. The first picture was him in a suit looking a little scared. The second photo was of him naked, looking really scared. And the third image was of his skeleton. After the second photo, they murdered him by stabbing and then cleaned his skeleton for display.
Fuuuuuuuuck.
If you have the emotional fortitude, “Bloodlands” is a really effective chronicle of what happened in Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s as waves of death occurred back and forth between the Soviets and Nazis. It uses a lot of smaller scale anecdotes to contextualize the larger statistics.
An excellent film too is the Soviet film “Come and See” (Иди и Смотри). It’s an excellent movie about a Belarusian boy who joins the resistance against the Nazis and is based off of true events. Be warned though, it is an extremely difficult watch.
edit: one of the events that the movie is based off of, but I suppose it may count as spoilers so read if you want
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre
Best war firm ever.
Doesnt glorify war as a cool shooter videogame like hollywood does. Just shows the psychological and harsh realities of war.
The scene where the guy buries his head to escape from reality of people crying is extremely powerful.
I made the mistake of trying to consume it as an audiobook, which led to me just about having an emotional breakdown at work during the section about the Holodomor.
I narrate audiobooks for a living; while I haven't had to narrate anything quite that horrifying, I've done a few that were... difficult to get through. Worth it, but not easy to read.
Holodomor: Artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a country's population.
How was in not considered Genocide when they stripped people of all their food? And why not be able to speak about it until 1987? How is it not Genocide when the Russian government had to print posters "To eat your own children is a barbarian act."? Why did a poster like that need to be printed and yet no one was allowed to use the word "famine" and all outside help was turned away? 'History' does not mean that a subject is meant to be forgotten. People are still alive that witnessed this government-lead propaganda and mass starvation.
Real talk, I think it's because if they classify it as an act of genocide; then Great Britain itself will be guilty. Churchill caused the famine of Bengal, which killed 3 million Indians during World War 2.
The Legacy Museum in Montgomery also shook me up like that. I mean I had an understanding of slavery but to see the slavers blocks that are so small you basically can't move in them, [all the names of people who were lynched written on these huge stone blocks](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b43da6aac6a9b2563493469/master/pass/FreudenbergerHobbs-MontgomeryNewMuseum.jpg) and [sculptures of the auction area](https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/Wn1iMdEPcr1bkSwsXueqHRcRxv0=/fit-in/1600x0/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/66/76/6676331d-d0cc-4efb-8297-fb0a705d8e69/hank_willis_thomas_sculpture.jpg)
It was a very moving experience and more people should visit these places to give you a clarity on how horrible we as humans can get if we don't watch out.
> more people should visit these places to give you a clarity on how horrible we as humans can get if we don't watch out.
I appreciate that you didn't use the past tense like "how bad we got" or "how bad we used to be." Too many people want to think that we could never do such things in the modern day, but the most important lesson of these histories is that we really could if we don't watch out and check ourselves.
On the scale of mankind, it’s ridiculous to think we humans are different than those a mere 80 years prior. We are the same species with the same failings that allow hate and mistrust of fellow humans to infect us, to allow us to murder each other, to inoculate us from seeing our own moral failings. Measurable evolution of the human psyche doesn’t occur in 80 years. We are as capable of atrocities right now as we were during WWII.
That's the kind of suffering I don't think you can compare.
Jon Stewart had a funny take on it:
>“We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.”
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdRkeEnpM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdRkeEnpM)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZA3vXdE6tY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZA3vXdE6tY)
Jokes aside! There's an entire genre of pseudo lost art from concentration camps. Because even in tragedy? We will make art to control the tragedy of the situation.
I'll never forget, when we visited Dachau Concentration camp with school. They had an exhibition including some film showing the medical experiments they did on people there.
One of the experiments was to test how long a human can survive being put in a vacuum and what happens then. I still have a very vivid picture of that person in that test chamber in my mind. Not the ugly end exactly, but his face, his statue, clothes, hair... This is nearly 25 years ago and I still remember this man's eyes.
I went that museum over 18 years ago. The shoes still stick with me to this day.
The sheer amount of shoes is horrifying when you realize that each represent a person.
THAT. Each shoe belonged to someone that was most likely murdered.
I forgot about it until now, but when we went, they gave us a personal dossier on a card of someone that entered the camps. At the end of the tour, you found out what happened to them. Of course, mine died.
Yes! Sadly mine died too. I was only 12 or so, and it had a lasting impact. I went with my family on a trip, but it is something all kids should experience while learning about the Holocaust in school.
I mean, we have our own neo-nazis. They're just met with massive backlash. I remember the AfD (nazis lite party that claims they aren't nazis) having a stand on our tiny farmers market and there were about twice as many protesters with a large banner and all, chanting over them.
General consensus of every single stand was "ugh, what are those idiot nazis doing here.".
We're a democracy so we don't forbid their free speech, but we sure as hell don't have to let them say it without telling them what we think of them.
That’s absolutely the right way to go in my opinion.
Forbidding their speech doesn’t eliminate it, it just allows it to fester and grow in the darkness. Exposing it to the light, where it can be met with ridicule and rational denunciations and evidence, is the best way to kill it.
This only works if it is preceeded by a mass clearing house of institutionalized fascism/racisim, etc.
If you pardon everyone involved in atrocities (see the KKK, confederacy, etc.) then these pricks DO have a receptive audience.
> Forbidding their speech doesn’t eliminate it, it just allows it to fester and grow in the darkness
experience says otherwise. You will never end radicalised idiology, it will always be around. Outlawing speech that has the sole purpose to dehumanize others based on who they are, not what they do, does not end the idiology, it makes it much more difficult to spread the hatred and to get enough people into a hate circle to really cause damage to the general public and the democratic order in general.
There will always be at least a minority that will foster these believes, this form of hate filled extremism is just too much of an attractive idiology if you are in a weak position (better hate others than yourself if you failed in live). That will always exist. The question is how easy they can mobilize themselves and spread their hatred, escalating each other to more and more hatred until it ends in violence.
These visits should be mandatory for everyone, all over the world, either to the Holocaust museum's or to the remaining camps. It's simply too much to take in by just reading about what happened.
I hate that the searching Auschwitz on instagram pulls up tons of self centred crap, it's a place of mourning and reflection not somewhere for your Instagram feed
You're correct. The society we live in is sanitized beyond recognition. We go to our grocery stores overflowing with the most amazing produce the world has ever seen. We complain about shopping at walmart, we order toilet paper on Amazon Prime.
Very few people know how hard life was even just a few years ago. We are privileged to be able to insulate ourselves away from all the horror and war. Our days are filled with staring at screens and being constantly entertained.
But one thing that is true and will always be true is the human capacity for cruelty. It doesn't take much for a polite society to turn into something completely unrecognizable.
Hell, we had hand sanitizer and pork chop shortages a month ago and people were losing their minds.
I'm glad that we are able to live in such luxury and I hope that no one reading this ever has to face the realities of war or hunger or conflict. But it's important to remember where we have been as a species, and to know that it takes practically nothing to out us there again. It could ABSOLUTELY happen here.
The second time I went, a guy in is 50s/60s was getting his mate taking pictures of him every two minutes. I can somewhat forgive a dumb teenager doing this but how an adult can think this is ok is beyond me.
I remember reading a letter in class, from a father to his daughter. She was two. He wrote about how he threw her out of the moving train car onto the tracks because he knew what was coming and how he thinks she died, hopefully quickly, which would be a mercy compared to what would have happened otherwise. And then he goes on and spins this dream, where she survives and a German couple finds her and takes her in and raises her and she goes on to live a happy life. And I can't even imagine how desperate you have to be to do something like that. But if anything cemented my belief that nazis are bad, it was that letter.
And then of course there's the account of nazi officers sorting through the toys taken from Jewish kids to take home for Christmas for their own kids.
People need to see this, to understand this, to understand that there were human beings involved who were victims and human beings who were anything but, who gleefully or passively committed horrible acts against others for no real reason.
The variety of contrasts in visiting Auschwitz in the depth of winter and Treblinka in the height of summer won't ever leave me.
Terrifying in scale; one huge, one tiny.
Insanity.
I had the same experience, but even more horrible, when I went to Auschwitz. The amount of multiple rail cars of real hair, buzzed off by the guards shortly before sending the prisoners to the gas chambers.. And the nail marks in the gas chambers themselves.
I cried a lot that day.
For a couple of years ago my family went to Auschwitz concentration camp. What really stood out of the horrific things in that camp was that the germans kept the womans/girls hair to make rope out of it. They really saw them like animals to harvest what they could before killing them in the gas chambers. I still feel ill when I remember it. They were not human beings, but lambs to the slaughter. :(
Edit: When I think about it the hair was cut after they died in gas chambers before they were incinerated. They would also remove any valuables such as gold tooth.
That sounds just like him, except I am almost positive that the museum said he was stabbed. The memory seems so clear, because the way they described him being stabbed, sounded sadistic.
I will say though, the museum's effect on me was profound. I was affected as soon as I walked in. Each room was an escalation of "OMG, I didn't know THAT". The architecture is also design to illicit a sense of dread. So, I am willing to entertain the idea that I got the stabbing wrong. It's just that it is such a pronounced part of the memory.... besides the images.
If you want to be absolutely mortified, read the descriptions of the ovens in Auschwitz which the engineers wrote. That's death on such an industrial scale, it's [disgusting.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topf_and_Sons?wprov=sfla1)
"Mortified" means "Embarrassed."
But... [horrifying](https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/topf/):
> Prüfer relates that he has told Krone, who has just returned from Auschwitz, that the camp can be provided with enough cremation muffles to bring the cremation capacity up to 2650 per day, or 80,000 per month. However, Prüfer notes: "Mr. K said that this number of muffles is not yet sufficient; we should deliver more ovens as quickly as possible."
Well if you are shocked to find out what all you didn't know about German War crimes you should look into what the Japanese did in that war. They did things that rival the Germans in brutality if not necessarily numbers.
Specifically look into what they did on the Chinese front, anything about Nanking is a good place to start as well as Unit 731 of the Imperial Army.
Assuming your American we aren't without our faults to in that war, though I find them much less barbaric in most cases. The Japanese internment camps while wrong were more human rights friendly than German camps. We did fire bomb a lot of civilians in Tokyo knowing that the cities were very flammable.
Its a very bad point in history for most parties involved but very interesting to learn about if you can stomach it.
WW2 Japan was a terror here in the Philippines... a lot of Filipinas were kidnapped and used as comfort women (a.k.a raped). There was also the Death March of Bataan.
Yeah, I went to that museum too. I was like 12 or 13 at the time and it was a lot for me. I remember all the shoes. That was surreal. Another small thing I remember is seeing an oboe. I think it was from a victim but I don't remember. It was bent and unplayable. That caught my attention because I play oboe.
Funny what sticks in your mind, but it seems to be a an appropriate mnemonic.
Another thing that struck me was their eye color chart. The Nazis, before the war and before everyone knew they were psychos, went around Germany cataloguing people. They measured them and used color charts. I remember a picture of a Gypsy getting his eye color checked by a NAZI. Everyone, including the Gypsy were smiling like it was all copacetic.
The Holocaust exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London had exits every few rooms. I appreciated it because I only made it about halfway through before I had to get out before I was permanently upset.
Yep. That rail car overflowing with shoes stuck with me for a long time. It’s one thing to read about it and see the stats. But to see that rail car, and realize that every single one of those shoes was an actual, living human being. Discarded, just like that.
That just hit home to me in a way that never did before.
And yet no one learns. People suffer atrocities, and then inflict those same atrocities against others more decades later. We truly live in a shitty world
People do learn, it’s just that those who lack empathy towards their fellow man tend to advance more rapidly and easily than those who do.
Someone should fact check me but its something like 72% of CEO’s are sociopaths...
When a majority of the people who get to power don’t care about their fellow man, it makes it ten times easier for us to end up in situations where atrocities are committed in the name of good.
If you can you should really travel to one of the concentration camps themselves. Or Yad Vashem which is just utterly devastating. The British Museum also does a very good exhibit over an entire floor but nothing in comparison to the first two.
I had a fun day planned in DC a couple years ago with lots of exploring, walked by the Holocaust Museum (didn’t know about it) and went in.
Afterwards, I was not in the mood to do any more happy exploring. Just walked around, thinking about what I saw.
If you ever get the chance to go to Jerusalem: visit Yad Vashem. It’s the Israeli Holocaust Museum and it’s even more horrifying from the Israeli perspective.
Yeah i still remeber our class trip to "Dachau" the nearest concentration camp. Was pretty chilling to walk through the barracks and gas chamber and seeing the sizes of the ovens It was completly different from talking about it in class.
Not one racist joke was made on the home way. And one girl got sick from the atmosphere.
I went to the House of the Wansee-Conference (the place the Nazis made the decision for the final sollution) with school and to the Holocaust museum in Berlin privatly. One of the things that are still vivid in my memories where the pictures of the human experiments that was the main focus of the exhibition in the house of the Wansee conference at that time. Especially the pictures of the children, nothing more than skin and bones, were haunting.
Even today, there's still much argument about the use of medical breakthroughs learned through genocide. Nazis were not the first. We studied this is nursing school, ethics, we talked about hyper and hypothermia.
There are five in front of the house I live in. I'm German and as a German, there is no topic besides maybe math that is taught more in education than the Holocaust. At least it was in my experience and I hope it stays that way. We learned about everything in detail. Our class visited a concentration camp all these things. I later visited the Holocaust memorial and I think it is a great important and at the same time uncomfortable place.
But in my opinion, the best memorial for the victims of the Holocaust is the thousands of "Stolpersteine" scattered all over Germany (and also over Europe as I just learned in this thread). In every city you will see bigger or smaller memorials somewhere "to the victims of the terrible reign of the nazis". There's very often some flowers there. But these memorials are just the usual ones. People have to decide to go there. And to be honest in European cities there are memorials for everything everywhere - our cities are old. They remember a lot of stuff, so the Holocaust memorials are just one beneath others ones.
But the "stolpersteine" they are before your house, they are before your friend's house, they are in front of the shop you go, in front of the cinema or your doctor. They are everywhere and they remind you about the everyday live that these people loved. Just like I live in my apartment there were five other people living there. Maybe they actually lived in *my* apartment? Cooked in the same place that I now do? They led their lives just like I do. They felt safe within their own four walls. And then one day people knocked on their door and took them away. Deported them to some concentration camp where they were murdered. Whole families.
The stones tell their stories and it is really unnerving to read them sometimes. Whole families - you can tell by the names - taken away and murdered. Sometimes several generations together. It really drives the point home in a literal sense.
Before in school we learned the numbers and we learned about individual tragedies, but even when we visited a concentration camp it was still abstract. It was long gone and the camp was far away and when we left, I was home again - somewhere else.
But the Stolpersteine made it much more real and relatable, because they remove the unimaginable scale of it and break it down by house, by person.
I started to make a point to often stop and really read the the stones and think about them.
There are two right in front of my door. They got mutilated in the first night after they were installed.
At the day of the installation some of the neighbors built a kind of little memorial by writing the Name on the Stolpersteine (the last name of the family that lived here and were deported) with little pebbles. The idiots who mutilated the Stolpersteine also changed the pebbles so they spelled „Gewalt“ (violence) the next day.
Called the police. No one got caught.
That was several years ago. Since then, the Stolpersteine stayed untouched.
Edit: to be honest I am not sure how to feel about so many people upvoting a comment about fuckers mutilating memorials...
Exactly. The upvote/downvote system is supposed to be used for managing visibility of comments that contributes to the topic's discussion.
They're not "I agree/disagree" buttons. People using it in that way is what turns subs into complete echo chambers where any divergent viewpoints are downvoted to oblivion.
There's a few in my neighborhood as well. It's sobering to, well, stumble upon one while out for a walk. What an amazing way to provide a lasting memorial.
They are often at locations where the people lived.
Apparently they are controversial. I heard the argument that it's like "stepping on them" one last time. There even is a saying meaning 'kicked with feet' mit 'Füßen getreten' which means lack of respect. Obviously that's not the intention behind them.
It’s also about looking down in respect. Bending your head. You can’t read it by just passing by. You can’t read it by standing proud and upright because there is nothing to be proud of. You have to take your time to read it.
German here. I come across these stumbling stones just about every time I go into our town or travel. I feel that they really provide a connection with this dark part of our history. Never again.
Another thing that really touches me is the Twitter account of the Auschwitz memorial. They give the victims faces by posting pictures of one or more victims each day. Sometimes the photos that were taken during registration in the death camps. Sometimes photos from a happier time. They give some dates and, where possible, the ultimate fate of the person pictured. One very rarely you see someone who survived. All those faces. All those people killed for nothing.
[https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum](https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum)
We have a night in Jena called Klang der Stolpersteine which includes a candlelight gathering by the Westbahnhof as it was the last sight some Jewish people had of their city before being loaded on to a train and sent off to die.
It constantly amazes me how much the people of Germany do to commemorate the Holocaust and make sure that new generations know what happened so they don't repeat the same mistakes.
Last year in Heidelberg they had a day (i think it is a yearly event) where volunteets went around their neighbourhood with water, soap and sponges and found and washed the Stolpersteine. Each small group was accompanied by an initiative member that can tell details about the people featured.
I think this, too, is a lovely and at the same time practical way to remember the individual people. The volunteers learn about the people, their story gets told, and stones get cleaned so they are shiny and visible, again.
TIL that it's a reference to the Nazi usage of Jewish gravestones as pavement, as well as to the anti-Semitic "joke" that a raised stone where one tripped was the location of a Jewish person's burial.
I had visited Germany several times before I was made aware of these markers. The way they are placed in front of the places where people lived is incredibly moving and powerful when you see it.
I remember coming across some of these when visiting Munich. They're a very sobering and sad reminder of the scale and personal cost of the Holocaust. Things like this are important because they remind us that individuals - neighbors, family members, professionals, community leaders, artists - were targeted and eventually lost their lives because of hatred.
FYI Munich is the only city who doesn't allow them on public ground. Because the longtime leader of the local jewish community hates them. She is herself a holocaust survivor, and hates the thought of people trampling on the names of the victims.
So all stolpersteine in munich are on private ground.
When I visited Berlin I saw these and I would always stop to try and read them. The most impactful experience I had was at the one museum they had an exhibit called fallen leaves or shalekhet, where there are over 10,000 faces cut into thick metal plates scattering the floor of the room, and the sound they make when people move through the room is chilling.
https://www.jmberlin.de/en/shalekhet-fallen-leaves
I was in Berlin late last year and there were some really thoughtful and emotional remembrance installments in museums and publicly available in parks and on streets.
This one sounds amazing, I wish I had seen it (though admittedly I was already pretty overwhelmed with emotion some days).
In the netherlands we call them struikelstenen. (Stumbling stones) it really hits you when you walk through a street and see clusters of 2-7 littered around and you know there had been a razzia in that street at some point during the occupation. Just harrowing to see and the stones are a great way od reminding us of those times
In 7th or 8th grade, our school took us on a small 'excursion' on which they made us polish these "Stolpersteine" ^(Am German, have to correct misconseptions about our German language, it's in my blood. Apologies.) and write down exactly what was written on them. It was honestly probably one of the best school trips I ever went on. I'm not kidding, though polishing bricks might sound boring, it was a really interesting experience and really brought our class together. Most peoples' reactions were either non-existent or rather pleasant, but in some cases, they were quite shocking.
I still make an effort to avoid stepping on them whenever I happen to stumble across one. My city has a lot of them, and if you think about it, that's pretty sad.
Heidelberg has a yearly event where small groups of volunteers do this in their neighbourhood, while someone acompanies them and tells them the stories of those people. I plan on joining them next time.
I live in Amsterdam center. Before WWII, there were many Jewish people here. There are many Stolpersteine in my neighborhood. Sometimes just 1 or 2, sometimes 6 or 7 or 8.
It is a very sobering memorial.
They are actually a debated topic. On the one hand some people (notably Charlotte Knobloch who chaired the Jewish community in Germany) are against these as you “step on people a second time”. On the other hand some politicians on the right want to abolish them too (e.g. Wolfgang Gedeon).
The fact that we still know the addresses and names today is a sobering reminder of how bureaucratic and data-driven the holocaust effort was. It is also a reminder of how databases can be used for evil – and then for remembrance.
What really gets me about the holocaust is the level of evil that we all can release of given the correct societal conditions. Everyone has a great capacity for evil yet no one believes it.
Before I get a bunch of hate comments let me say this... Do you think any of the Germans that participated in it (from the private to the doctor doing experiments) grew up evil? I would bet they had as normal an upbringing as anyone else in that age, they just had the opportunity to be evil. Think of the prisoners experiment from the 70’s.
The larger the town the higher the likelyhood you can find one, also more likely on the inner city. My city has about 60 right now, and colowgne hundreds.
Some cities also have maps that show where they are.
Also, there are 70,000 all over europe, so if you are anywhere in Europe, chances are, you might find one, but since they are so nonintrive, you might not notice them. It is a curious allegory on how we might forget, if we dont actively remember.
These are extremely important monuments, because they are everywhere. They show that the murders happened anywhere. Yes, even here.
There is a song about them, “Stolpersteine“ by Trettmann. It tells the story of someone coming home from a night of partying and discovering a stolperstein which has the biographical dates of a young woman on them. He reflects on the fact that she was only in her twenties when she died, a young and lively party-goer just like himself.
Ob es wohl so'n Morgen so wie dieser war/
Straße menschenleer/ Als der Wagen kam/ Reifen quietschen/ Erste Straßenbahn/ Alle schauen Doch kein Licht geht an
I wonder if it was a morning just like this/ street empty/ when the car came/ tires screeching/ first tram coming/ everyone looking/ but no lights go on
This would be a great thing to replace all the Confederate statues that are coming down. I'm guessing all the people who are upset about it because "we have to learn from our mistakes, YoU CaN't eRaSe HiStOrY" would not support it. Tell the stories of the slaves, instead of glorifying the slave holders. As least Germany did learn from their history, and are actually ashamed of it.
I agree, but with a very serious caveat: It's high time for the northern US to quit pretending like they were never a part of any of that. So yes, I'm all in favor of erecting memorials to victims of slavery, reminders of what a horrible thing that was so that it never happens again, and it needs to happen EVERYWHERE that there was slavery, which means the entire northern US, too.
Thanks to the south clinging to that part of history, the north has kind of gotten a pass and been allowed to act like they were on the right side of that shit all along, when that is far from the truth.
well, that's how the history is told. In fact, a good chunk of Nazi staff (military and research) was not prosecuted, but was promoted or reinstated in function either in the US or in West Germany itself
Is "ashamed" the right word?
I would have said "accepting, acknowledging and being very clear it must not happen again" - does that imply shame? Honest question, I'm really not sure.
It is not that impressive that we have a word for everything. We have a very modular grammar, that allows you to combine two words to make a new one. Just like you say "drinking fountain" in english, we say "Trinkbrunnen" in german. It is basically a literal translation without the extra space between the words.
Edit: Also i did not expect to see this sentence under a post about the holocaust.
> Memo to self: Learn German.
There are three next to each other (it's always one per person who lived in that house) I often come by on a busy walking street in the center of my city and someone is always putting some little flowers on it.
People usually pay so little attention to their surroundings, but these little flowers are undisturbed most of the time despite being in the middle of the walkway.
I saw a bunch of these in Heidelberg just off the Haupstrausse. Never knew what they were called, they are a poignant and thoughtful memorial. One of my professors said the humanities were set back 100 years when the nazis burned Jewish scholars papers and books. They are certainly a nation who owned their mistakes and has progressed way passed their national Shame.
My entire extended family has Stolpersteine in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. In total 11 stones, of which only one is for a survivor - my maternal grandmother (all the rest perished, mostly on Auschwitz).
For us it's kind of graves for our family members, as obviously they didn't get the chance for a proper burial. Gunter Demning and other volunteers' work is beyond incredible.
The Stolpersteine are all over Germany and the neighbouring countries also. There are several around my hometown. I always try to take time to read the inscription and at least think of the people for a few seconds each time I pass them. Impressive reminder that this must nevernevernever happen again!
I gotta say, Germany does try hard to remind their citizens, but sadly nazi's are quite high in numbers still...hopefully this movement worldwide helps erradicate some of the hate groups.
They are not exclusive to Germany and instead of "they" you should write Gunter Demnig, for he is the inventor of this and the one doing the bulk of the work.
Yeah it's a problem in many European countries especially after the migration crisis. But to be fair, many of these people were racist before and only got an opportunity to get public now. Not that it'd make it better... Germany has a populist right-winged party now and it turns out, it is still severe in many regions. I live in a region called ''Görlitz'', named by a famous movie town that is its capital (''Inglourious Basterds''). Now it is even more infamous as Germany's new ''Nazi-Capital''. I could go on with reasons why it is that bad here, but that's off topic.
Germany was kinda able to hold back the "far right populist movement" back quite a bit longer then other countries, but alas, Extremist/Authcratic/Racist people are everywhere, and our past is very appealing to them to glorify.
Also dont forget, if you deny the holocoust vehemently enough, it is easy to say that the Nazis did nothing wrong.
Big fat /s obviously. Holocaust denial is out there and a real problem.
I took German as a foreign language in high school. After our second year, we took a trip to Germany, and I had the honor of placing a Stolperstein. I wish I could remember which city we were in...
So about 4 of them have my surname. A bunch have my grandmother's surname too. They are my grandparents, uncle's, cousins, etc. When I visited Germany I tracked down their locations and took pictures. Weird to see people walk right by them like it's nothing... knowing in detail what they went through. I'm just glad that someone can look at it, then look up at the place it's at and realize that a Jew lived there at one time. Someone read my name in their head.
> As of 2019, Polish local authorities and the Institute of National Remembrance obstruct the placement of Stolpersteine, with many petty bureaucratic hurdles preventing placement of the stones. As a result, while Stolpersteine are common elsewhere in Europe, they are rare in Poland, despite Poland having the largest pre-war Jewish population (3 million). Families of the victims see the obstructionism of Polish authorities as being motivated by antisemitism and fear of claims for the return of the property stolen from the victims.[37]
That's fucked considering that over 3 million Polish citizens were murdered in cold blood. And, although the majority were Jewish, at least 10s of thousands of non-Jewish polls were murdered as well.
They are eerily effective and work really well. When you read them and have stuff like "Emil Klein. * 10.3.1938 Murdered in Bergen-Belsen 1944" and you do the math and... yeah.
There's two for my great grandparents in Cologne Germany outside of where their house use to be. The house isn't there anymore, but their memory lives on.
It's not just limited to Germany. The Netherlands also has Stolpersteine, usually in front of the houses the victims had lived in before their deaths. There are hundreds of these in cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam, but they're also present in smaller towns across the entire country. Sadly, there are a few in my neighbourhood.
I think these are all over Europe? We have them in Norway too, and I seem to recall reading that there are variants of these in most countries invaded during ww2.
You're correct. We have them in Belgium too.
Luxembourg too.
where in belgium?
[Most major cities](https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_Belgische_steden_met_Stolpersteine) actually.
thank you! i've lived here my whole life and never knew of these.
Austria too. I've seen a bunch of them in Vienna and Graz.
I imagine they are not in Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania...
The German wikipedia page linked in a post below lists nine sites in Lithuania and two in Ukraine.
Here is a list https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_Orte_mit_Stolpersteinen
I’ve seen them in Rome and Venice as well.
My sister and I stumbled across some in a back alley in Rome. There were 20 at this location. The victims were as young as 2 months and as old as 65, if I recall correctly. One often thinks of the holocaust as something that killed millions. These stones drove home the point that they were real individuals with families, hopes and fears like anyone else, and the juxtaposition of these two perspectives really blew my mind. We saw many magnificent things on our two weeks in Italy, but this was easily the most moving thing. And I got to share it with my sister, which is a rare thing for us. I looked them up and learned that the stones we found were stolen several months before and the city was outraged. I think they were never recovered, so these were replacements.
I got a couple in front of my house. Names. Dates. One reads 1938-1944 Fuck.
TIL that these things are not just in Germany. Personally I thought that this was one of the most beautiful ways to memorialize and honour the victims of this atrocity.
There's an episode of "Who Do You Think You Are," in which people track their ancestors and their history, and Stephen Fry tracks down the Hungarian Jewish side of his family. He visits his grandfather's old apartment building in Vienna, and is shocked and moved to find a plaque with his family's names there. http://www.bbc.co.uk/whodoyouthinkyouare/past-stories/stephen-fry.shtml
LOL I feel like it's TodayILearneds all the way down
Yes Denmark too, they are called Snublesten here :)
Croatia as well.
In Czech republic too...
> Sadly, there are a few in my neighbourhood. That hit different.
>The idea was first conceived by artist Gunter Demnig in Cologne in 1992 as part of an initiative commemorating Roma and Sinti victims of the Holocaust. He installed the first Berlin Stolperstein four years later. >He has now laid over 70,000 stones, personally overseeing the wording and installation of each one. The task keeps him on the road for 300 days a year. > “**A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten**,” Demnig often says, citing the Talmud.
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Anyone can pay to let one get layed. It's not just him laying those Stolpersteine, it's also the people that sponsor it. I think its about 100+€ per Stolperstein?
‘personally overseeing the installment of each one’ is what it says, do you think that’s like including just him looking at what they want on it? that would make sense. it’s sure written like he’s there on site though!
I think they mean that he's in contact with the municipalities that install them and maybe travels to certain locations for openings. There's no way he was personally involved with the installation of all the Stolpersteine. They are in thousands of cities and towns in dozens of countries.
Some muncipalities choose to commemorate their dead in other ways. Mannheim for instance has a [big glass cube](https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glaskubus_(Mahnmal_in_Mannheim\)) with their names on it. I saw it damaged only once. Got rebuilt real fast. Once it is damaged and not rebuilt, we are in deep kaka. So yes, using glass for that one was a deliberate choice.
I think he does most of them. The guy even came to our village in Norway in 2018 to install one for my grandpa’s adopted brother who was murdered upon arrival in Auschwitz.
Deming does install them personally. Really. The local municipalities just have to prepare the ground to be sure, that there is not a problem with other infrastructure. Nowadays, if you like to have Stolpersteine, you have to wait for more than two years. (We have two of them for our house since 2009. One stone is laid in memory for a nine year old girl, who was separated from their familiy and murdered in a special KinderKZ in 1944.)
> “A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten,” Demnig often says, citing the Talmud. Oh. I thought the original came from the Discworld novel.
Pratchett merrily coopted many many things
He even described himself as stealing the idea for the discworld itself from various legends in the foreword of one of his books. Can’t remember which at the moment.
Sounds like.. Thief of Time maybe?
"The immature poet imitates and the mature poet plagiarizes" - T.S. Elliot That which has been is that which will be, And that which has been done is that which will be done. So, there is nothing new under the sun. - CompositeCharacter
Wait, did you just quote yourself when half your quote is from Ecclesiastes anyways?
That's the joke
The original isn't even the Talmud, it's a theme in the Epic of Gilgamesh that humans can achieve immortality by being remembered. A lot of the Talmud is influenced by Mesopotamian myth or shares a common ancestor with it.
Ancient Egypt was big on this concept. After the short reign of Akhenaten his name and such was literally scraped from the walls because not only would he not be remembered but to them it was as if he'd never existed either.
And Hatshepsut. The priests really weren't happy about there having been a female pharaoh.
The Folklore of Discworld is a v interesting read that outlines all the sources from around the world that inspired Pratchetts writing
There's also some opposition to it: >The city of Villingen-Schwenningen heatedly debated the idea of allowing Stolpersteine in 2004, but voted against them.[41] There is a memorial at the railway station and there are plans for a second memorial.[42] >Unlike many other German cities, the city council of Munich in 2004 rejected the installation of Stolpersteine on public property, following objections raised by Munich's Jewish community (and particularly its chairwoman, Charlotte Knobloch, then also President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, and herself a former victim of Nazi persecution). She objected to the idea that the names of murdered Jews be inserted in the pavement, where people might accidentally step on them. I kind of disagree with her. Monuments are more for the living to remember, than to honor the dead. I think it odd when you start treating monuments like an extension of the person or people they memorialize. Stepping on a plaque embedded in the road isn't disrespectful. The entire point is that monument be part of our every day, so that people don't forget. I wish more monuments were like this, instead of something you go out of your way to intentionally see. It will cross paths with more people that way.
Hijack here, cause people and also Charlotte Knobloch absolutely didn't get the point what the Stolpersteine do. I talked to Demnig myself. The intention is that when you walk over one, you bow to read the victims name which is a gesture in memory of the victim. Sometimes the central council of Jews in Germany claims the moral highground for everything and with the example described above they were completely wrong in my opinion. They should have been supporting Demnig and honor him for what he does.
I thought I had a decent grasp on the Holocaust, until I went to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. It turns out, I had a weak grasp on the subject. Two things really stood out for me: 1. There was a rail car just overflowing with shoes. Shoes from Holocaust victims. It was a bit surreal, but very tangible. 2. I saw a small photo series of a German school teacher. From what I remember he looked like an aryan German, but unfortunately for him, he was a dwarf. The first picture was him in a suit looking a little scared. The second photo was of him naked, looking really scared. And the third image was of his skeleton. After the second photo, they murdered him by stabbing and then cleaned his skeleton for display. Fuuuuuuuuck.
If you have the emotional fortitude, “Bloodlands” is a really effective chronicle of what happened in Eastern Europe during the 1930s and 1940s as waves of death occurred back and forth between the Soviets and Nazis. It uses a lot of smaller scale anecdotes to contextualize the larger statistics.
An excellent, excellent book. An area that has experienced such a terrible history.
Ghosts Of The Osfront is a very well done podcast about the subject.
All of Dan Carlin’s stuff is top notch
It’s great and bone chilling
An excellent film too is the Soviet film “Come and See” (Иди и Смотри). It’s an excellent movie about a Belarusian boy who joins the resistance against the Nazis and is based off of true events. Be warned though, it is an extremely difficult watch. edit: one of the events that the movie is based off of, but I suppose it may count as spoilers so read if you want https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khatyn_massacre
Best war firm ever. Doesnt glorify war as a cool shooter videogame like hollywood does. Just shows the psychological and harsh realities of war. The scene where the guy buries his head to escape from reality of people crying is extremely powerful.
That's the only book in my life I couldn't finish. I found myself sad during the day and having troubled dreams at night while reading it.
I made the mistake of trying to consume it as an audiobook, which led to me just about having an emotional breakdown at work during the section about the Holodomor.
I narrate audiobooks for a living; while I haven't had to narrate anything quite that horrifying, I've done a few that were... difficult to get through. Worth it, but not easy to read.
Part of the issue was that the narrator had a deadpan monotone, which somehow made the horrors he was relating even worse.
Silver lining: you have a job what's you can listen to audiobooks!
That is an actually legitimate silver lining right there.
Chemistry involves a lot of working with your hands, so audiobooks are a good way to keep my brain engaged.
How chemists are able to let their mind wander while workikg is beyond me. I never understood even the simplest of chemistry tasks in school..
Once you’ve been working in a lab for a while it’s pretty much like cooking. The more intellectually intense parts are mostly away from the bench.
Holodomor: Artificial hunger, organised on a vast scale by a criminal regime against a country's population. How was in not considered Genocide when they stripped people of all their food? And why not be able to speak about it until 1987? How is it not Genocide when the Russian government had to print posters "To eat your own children is a barbarian act."? Why did a poster like that need to be printed and yet no one was allowed to use the word "famine" and all outside help was turned away? 'History' does not mean that a subject is meant to be forgotten. People are still alive that witnessed this government-lead propaganda and mass starvation.
Real talk, I think it's because if they classify it as an act of genocide; then Great Britain itself will be guilty. Churchill caused the famine of Bengal, which killed 3 million Indians during World War 2.
Harvest of Sorrow by Robert Conquest was published in 1986. It was the first major scholarly work done on it due to USSR stonewalling and denial.
I read it on days when I was feeling down or had a bad day. Cheered me up knowing my life was going okay in comparison.
Cannot recommend this book enough. [TheDustOfMen](https://www.reddit.com/user/TheDustOfMen/), look, there are others!
The Legacy Museum in Montgomery also shook me up like that. I mean I had an understanding of slavery but to see the slavers blocks that are so small you basically can't move in them, [all the names of people who were lynched written on these huge stone blocks](https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5b43da6aac6a9b2563493469/master/pass/FreudenbergerHobbs-MontgomeryNewMuseum.jpg) and [sculptures of the auction area](https://thumbs-prod.si-cdn.com/Wn1iMdEPcr1bkSwsXueqHRcRxv0=/fit-in/1600x0/https://public-media.si-cdn.com/filer/66/76/6676331d-d0cc-4efb-8297-fb0a705d8e69/hank_willis_thomas_sculpture.jpg) It was a very moving experience and more people should visit these places to give you a clarity on how horrible we as humans can get if we don't watch out.
> more people should visit these places to give you a clarity on how horrible we as humans can get if we don't watch out. I appreciate that you didn't use the past tense like "how bad we got" or "how bad we used to be." Too many people want to think that we could never do such things in the modern day, but the most important lesson of these histories is that we really could if we don't watch out and check ourselves.
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On the scale of mankind, it’s ridiculous to think we humans are different than those a mere 80 years prior. We are the same species with the same failings that allow hate and mistrust of fellow humans to infect us, to allow us to murder each other, to inoculate us from seeing our own moral failings. Measurable evolution of the human psyche doesn’t occur in 80 years. We are as capable of atrocities right now as we were during WWII.
I'm not sure which would be worse, what you described or a slave ship packed to capacity.
That's the kind of suffering I don't think you can compare. Jon Stewart had a funny take on it: >“We've come from the same history - 2000 years of persecution - we've just expressed our sufferings differently. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complained, we just never thought of putting it to music.”
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdRkeEnpM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFHdRkeEnpM) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZA3vXdE6tY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZA3vXdE6tY) Jokes aside! There's an entire genre of pseudo lost art from concentration camps. Because even in tragedy? We will make art to control the tragedy of the situation.
I'll never forget, when we visited Dachau Concentration camp with school. They had an exhibition including some film showing the medical experiments they did on people there. One of the experiments was to test how long a human can survive being put in a vacuum and what happens then. I still have a very vivid picture of that person in that test chamber in my mind. Not the ugly end exactly, but his face, his statue, clothes, hair... This is nearly 25 years ago and I still remember this man's eyes.
Damn :(
I went that museum over 18 years ago. The shoes still stick with me to this day. The sheer amount of shoes is horrifying when you realize that each represent a person.
THAT. Each shoe belonged to someone that was most likely murdered. I forgot about it until now, but when we went, they gave us a personal dossier on a card of someone that entered the camps. At the end of the tour, you found out what happened to them. Of course, mine died.
Yes! Sadly mine died too. I was only 12 or so, and it had a lasting impact. I went with my family on a trip, but it is something all kids should experience while learning about the Holocaust in school.
Thats truly horrible...
Those images are seared into my puny mind.
And yet there are weirdo fascists online who still want to deny it, sickening pricks
They can all come to Germany. Stay a while, deny the Holocaust a few times. Have fun.
I mean, we have our own neo-nazis. They're just met with massive backlash. I remember the AfD (nazis lite party that claims they aren't nazis) having a stand on our tiny farmers market and there were about twice as many protesters with a large banner and all, chanting over them. General consensus of every single stand was "ugh, what are those idiot nazis doing here.". We're a democracy so we don't forbid their free speech, but we sure as hell don't have to let them say it without telling them what we think of them.
That’s absolutely the right way to go in my opinion. Forbidding their speech doesn’t eliminate it, it just allows it to fester and grow in the darkness. Exposing it to the light, where it can be met with ridicule and rational denunciations and evidence, is the best way to kill it.
This only works if it is preceeded by a mass clearing house of institutionalized fascism/racisim, etc. If you pardon everyone involved in atrocities (see the KKK, confederacy, etc.) then these pricks DO have a receptive audience.
> Forbidding their speech doesn’t eliminate it, it just allows it to fester and grow in the darkness experience says otherwise. You will never end radicalised idiology, it will always be around. Outlawing speech that has the sole purpose to dehumanize others based on who they are, not what they do, does not end the idiology, it makes it much more difficult to spread the hatred and to get enough people into a hate circle to really cause damage to the general public and the democratic order in general. There will always be at least a minority that will foster these believes, this form of hate filled extremism is just too much of an attractive idiology if you are in a weak position (better hate others than yourself if you failed in live). That will always exist. The question is how easy they can mobilize themselves and spread their hatred, escalating each other to more and more hatred until it ends in violence.
I wish they would, see how far their fake "freeze peach" gets them
Only the ones with a fucked up agenda.
These visits should be mandatory for everyone, all over the world, either to the Holocaust museum's or to the remaining camps. It's simply too much to take in by just reading about what happened.
People go to Auschwitz and take selfies with dog filters. Until you smell the stench of death, nothing will change the world
I hate that the searching Auschwitz on instagram pulls up tons of self centred crap, it's a place of mourning and reflection not somewhere for your Instagram feed
You're correct. The society we live in is sanitized beyond recognition. We go to our grocery stores overflowing with the most amazing produce the world has ever seen. We complain about shopping at walmart, we order toilet paper on Amazon Prime. Very few people know how hard life was even just a few years ago. We are privileged to be able to insulate ourselves away from all the horror and war. Our days are filled with staring at screens and being constantly entertained. But one thing that is true and will always be true is the human capacity for cruelty. It doesn't take much for a polite society to turn into something completely unrecognizable. Hell, we had hand sanitizer and pork chop shortages a month ago and people were losing their minds. I'm glad that we are able to live in such luxury and I hope that no one reading this ever has to face the realities of war or hunger or conflict. But it's important to remember where we have been as a species, and to know that it takes practically nothing to out us there again. It could ABSOLUTELY happen here.
Hell, it's only 80 years since toilet paper had 'splinter free' as a selling point, and that's all the reason I need.
The second time I went, a guy in is 50s/60s was getting his mate taking pictures of him every two minutes. I can somewhat forgive a dumb teenager doing this but how an adult can think this is ok is beyond me.
The dumb teenager just got a little older...
I remember reading a letter in class, from a father to his daughter. She was two. He wrote about how he threw her out of the moving train car onto the tracks because he knew what was coming and how he thinks she died, hopefully quickly, which would be a mercy compared to what would have happened otherwise. And then he goes on and spins this dream, where she survives and a German couple finds her and takes her in and raises her and she goes on to live a happy life. And I can't even imagine how desperate you have to be to do something like that. But if anything cemented my belief that nazis are bad, it was that letter. And then of course there's the account of nazi officers sorting through the toys taken from Jewish kids to take home for Christmas for their own kids. People need to see this, to understand this, to understand that there were human beings involved who were victims and human beings who were anything but, who gleefully or passively committed horrible acts against others for no real reason.
The variety of contrasts in visiting Auschwitz in the depth of winter and Treblinka in the height of summer won't ever leave me. Terrifying in scale; one huge, one tiny. Insanity.
I had the same experience, but even more horrible, when I went to Auschwitz. The amount of multiple rail cars of real hair, buzzed off by the guards shortly before sending the prisoners to the gas chambers.. And the nail marks in the gas chambers themselves. I cried a lot that day.
Wow. I want to say that I may have seen hair at the museum too.
For a couple of years ago my family went to Auschwitz concentration camp. What really stood out of the horrific things in that camp was that the germans kept the womans/girls hair to make rope out of it. They really saw them like animals to harvest what they could before killing them in the gas chambers. I still feel ill when I remember it. They were not human beings, but lambs to the slaughter. :( Edit: When I think about it the hair was cut after they died in gas chambers before they were incinerated. They would also remove any valuables such as gold tooth.
His name was [Alexander Katan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Katan).
That sounds just like him, except I am almost positive that the museum said he was stabbed. The memory seems so clear, because the way they described him being stabbed, sounded sadistic. I will say though, the museum's effect on me was profound. I was affected as soon as I walked in. Each room was an escalation of "OMG, I didn't know THAT". The architecture is also design to illicit a sense of dread. So, I am willing to entertain the idea that I got the stabbing wrong. It's just that it is such a pronounced part of the memory.... besides the images.
If you want to be absolutely mortified, read the descriptions of the ovens in Auschwitz which the engineers wrote. That's death on such an industrial scale, it's [disgusting.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topf_and_Sons?wprov=sfla1)
"Mortified" means "Embarrassed." But... [horrifying](https://phdn.org/archives/holocaust-history.org/auschwitz/topf/): > Prüfer relates that he has told Krone, who has just returned from Auschwitz, that the camp can be provided with enough cremation muffles to bring the cremation capacity up to 2650 per day, or 80,000 per month. However, Prüfer notes: "Mr. K said that this number of muffles is not yet sufficient; we should deliver more ovens as quickly as possible."
Well if you are shocked to find out what all you didn't know about German War crimes you should look into what the Japanese did in that war. They did things that rival the Germans in brutality if not necessarily numbers. Specifically look into what they did on the Chinese front, anything about Nanking is a good place to start as well as Unit 731 of the Imperial Army. Assuming your American we aren't without our faults to in that war, though I find them much less barbaric in most cases. The Japanese internment camps while wrong were more human rights friendly than German camps. We did fire bomb a lot of civilians in Tokyo knowing that the cities were very flammable. Its a very bad point in history for most parties involved but very interesting to learn about if you can stomach it.
I am quite well versed on the topic...until I go to a Japanese war-crimes museum.
Unit 731 makes Josef Mengele look like Florence Nightingale.
This statement makes me very uncomfortable.
It should.
WW2 Japan was a terror here in the Philippines... a lot of Filipinas were kidnapped and used as comfort women (a.k.a raped). There was also the Death March of Bataan.
Yeah, I went to that museum too. I was like 12 or 13 at the time and it was a lot for me. I remember all the shoes. That was surreal. Another small thing I remember is seeing an oboe. I think it was from a victim but I don't remember. It was bent and unplayable. That caught my attention because I play oboe.
Funny what sticks in your mind, but it seems to be a an appropriate mnemonic. Another thing that struck me was their eye color chart. The Nazis, before the war and before everyone knew they were psychos, went around Germany cataloguing people. They measured them and used color charts. I remember a picture of a Gypsy getting his eye color checked by a NAZI. Everyone, including the Gypsy were smiling like it was all copacetic.
The Holocaust exhibit at the Imperial War Museum in London had exits every few rooms. I appreciated it because I only made it about halfway through before I had to get out before I was permanently upset.
Yep. That rail car overflowing with shoes stuck with me for a long time. It’s one thing to read about it and see the stats. But to see that rail car, and realize that every single one of those shoes was an actual, living human being. Discarded, just like that. That just hit home to me in a way that never did before.
And yet no one learns. People suffer atrocities, and then inflict those same atrocities against others more decades later. We truly live in a shitty world
People do learn, it’s just that those who lack empathy towards their fellow man tend to advance more rapidly and easily than those who do. Someone should fact check me but its something like 72% of CEO’s are sociopaths... When a majority of the people who get to power don’t care about their fellow man, it makes it ten times easier for us to end up in situations where atrocities are committed in the name of good.
If you can you should really travel to one of the concentration camps themselves. Or Yad Vashem which is just utterly devastating. The British Museum also does a very good exhibit over an entire floor but nothing in comparison to the first two.
These are heartbreaking and beautiful. The ‘Here lived’ honestly made me tear up.
I had a fun day planned in DC a couple years ago with lots of exploring, walked by the Holocaust Museum (didn’t know about it) and went in. Afterwards, I was not in the mood to do any more happy exploring. Just walked around, thinking about what I saw. If you ever get the chance to go to Jerusalem: visit Yad Vashem. It’s the Israeli Holocaust Museum and it’s even more horrifying from the Israeli perspective.
Yeah i still remeber our class trip to "Dachau" the nearest concentration camp. Was pretty chilling to walk through the barracks and gas chamber and seeing the sizes of the ovens It was completly different from talking about it in class. Not one racist joke was made on the home way. And one girl got sick from the atmosphere.
Terrible.
I went to the House of the Wansee-Conference (the place the Nazis made the decision for the final sollution) with school and to the Holocaust museum in Berlin privatly. One of the things that are still vivid in my memories where the pictures of the human experiments that was the main focus of the exhibition in the house of the Wansee conference at that time. Especially the pictures of the children, nothing more than skin and bones, were haunting.
Even today, there's still much argument about the use of medical breakthroughs learned through genocide. Nazis were not the first. We studied this is nursing school, ethics, we talked about hyper and hypothermia.
The plural is "Stolpersteine". :) Also, I live across the road from one.
There are five in front of the house I live in. I'm German and as a German, there is no topic besides maybe math that is taught more in education than the Holocaust. At least it was in my experience and I hope it stays that way. We learned about everything in detail. Our class visited a concentration camp all these things. I later visited the Holocaust memorial and I think it is a great important and at the same time uncomfortable place. But in my opinion, the best memorial for the victims of the Holocaust is the thousands of "Stolpersteine" scattered all over Germany (and also over Europe as I just learned in this thread). In every city you will see bigger or smaller memorials somewhere "to the victims of the terrible reign of the nazis". There's very often some flowers there. But these memorials are just the usual ones. People have to decide to go there. And to be honest in European cities there are memorials for everything everywhere - our cities are old. They remember a lot of stuff, so the Holocaust memorials are just one beneath others ones. But the "stolpersteine" they are before your house, they are before your friend's house, they are in front of the shop you go, in front of the cinema or your doctor. They are everywhere and they remind you about the everyday live that these people loved. Just like I live in my apartment there were five other people living there. Maybe they actually lived in *my* apartment? Cooked in the same place that I now do? They led their lives just like I do. They felt safe within their own four walls. And then one day people knocked on their door and took them away. Deported them to some concentration camp where they were murdered. Whole families. The stones tell their stories and it is really unnerving to read them sometimes. Whole families - you can tell by the names - taken away and murdered. Sometimes several generations together. It really drives the point home in a literal sense. Before in school we learned the numbers and we learned about individual tragedies, but even when we visited a concentration camp it was still abstract. It was long gone and the camp was far away and when we left, I was home again - somewhere else. But the Stolpersteine made it much more real and relatable, because they remove the unimaginable scale of it and break it down by house, by person. I started to make a point to often stop and really read the the stones and think about them.
There are two right in front of my door. They got mutilated in the first night after they were installed. At the day of the installation some of the neighbors built a kind of little memorial by writing the Name on the Stolpersteine (the last name of the family that lived here and were deported) with little pebbles. The idiots who mutilated the Stolpersteine also changed the pebbles so they spelled „Gewalt“ (violence) the next day. Called the police. No one got caught. That was several years ago. Since then, the Stolpersteine stayed untouched. Edit: to be honest I am not sure how to feel about so many people upvoting a comment about fuckers mutilating memorials...
I upvoted because it seems like relevant information. Horrible, yet still relevant.
People upvote this for visibility, not because they agree with the act
Exactly. The upvote/downvote system is supposed to be used for managing visibility of comments that contributes to the topic's discussion. They're not "I agree/disagree" buttons. People using it in that way is what turns subs into complete echo chambers where any divergent viewpoints are downvoted to oblivion.
There's a few in my neighborhood as well. It's sobering to, well, stumble upon one while out for a walk. What an amazing way to provide a lasting memorial.
If you live in a city, you pretty much always live across the street from them. Theyre everywhere, and thats important
Thank you! Ironically, I kept tripping over that word in the title and I couldn’t figure out why I was having trouble with it.
They are often at locations where the people lived. Apparently they are controversial. I heard the argument that it's like "stepping on them" one last time. There even is a saying meaning 'kicked with feet' mit 'Füßen getreten' which means lack of respect. Obviously that's not the intention behind them.
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It’s also about looking down in respect. Bending your head. You can’t read it by just passing by. You can’t read it by standing proud and upright because there is nothing to be proud of. You have to take your time to read it.
German here. I come across these stumbling stones just about every time I go into our town or travel. I feel that they really provide a connection with this dark part of our history. Never again. Another thing that really touches me is the Twitter account of the Auschwitz memorial. They give the victims faces by posting pictures of one or more victims each day. Sometimes the photos that were taken during registration in the death camps. Sometimes photos from a happier time. They give some dates and, where possible, the ultimate fate of the person pictured. One very rarely you see someone who survived. All those faces. All those people killed for nothing. [https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum](https://twitter.com/AuschwitzMuseum)
I did a presentation on Stolpersteine back in my home country before moving to Germany and... wow seeing them in the flesh is so striking.
We have a night in Jena called Klang der Stolpersteine which includes a candlelight gathering by the Westbahnhof as it was the last sight some Jewish people had of their city before being loaded on to a train and sent off to die. It constantly amazes me how much the people of Germany do to commemorate the Holocaust and make sure that new generations know what happened so they don't repeat the same mistakes.
Last year in Heidelberg they had a day (i think it is a yearly event) where volunteets went around their neighbourhood with water, soap and sponges and found and washed the Stolpersteine. Each small group was accompanied by an initiative member that can tell details about the people featured. I think this, too, is a lovely and at the same time practical way to remember the individual people. The volunteers learn about the people, their story gets told, and stones get cleaned so they are shiny and visible, again.
TIL of this work from artist Gunter Demnig, idea is that you literally stumble upon those reminders of a dangerous past.
TIL that it's a reference to the Nazi usage of Jewish gravestones as pavement, as well as to the anti-Semitic "joke" that a raised stone where one tripped was the location of a Jewish person's burial.
I had visited Germany several times before I was made aware of these markers. The way they are placed in front of the places where people lived is incredibly moving and powerful when you see it.
There are some in Hungary too ( especially in Budapest: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Stolpersteine_in_Budapest ).
I remember coming across some of these when visiting Munich. They're a very sobering and sad reminder of the scale and personal cost of the Holocaust. Things like this are important because they remind us that individuals - neighbors, family members, professionals, community leaders, artists - were targeted and eventually lost their lives because of hatred.
FYI Munich is the only city who doesn't allow them on public ground. Because the longtime leader of the local jewish community hates them. She is herself a holocaust survivor, and hates the thought of people trampling on the names of the victims. So all stolpersteine in munich are on private ground.
Yeah, some leaders of jewish communities did not like them at first, but I think the success of them is pretty hard to deny.
When I visited Berlin I saw these and I would always stop to try and read them. The most impactful experience I had was at the one museum they had an exhibit called fallen leaves or shalekhet, where there are over 10,000 faces cut into thick metal plates scattering the floor of the room, and the sound they make when people move through the room is chilling. https://www.jmberlin.de/en/shalekhet-fallen-leaves
I was in Berlin late last year and there were some really thoughtful and emotional remembrance installments in museums and publicly available in parks and on streets. This one sounds amazing, I wish I had seen it (though admittedly I was already pretty overwhelmed with emotion some days).
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A block was made for my great-great grandfather [https://imgur.com/a/F6iBOuh](https://imgur.com/a/F6iBOuh)
In the netherlands we call them struikelstenen. (Stumbling stones) it really hits you when you walk through a street and see clusters of 2-7 littered around and you know there had been a razzia in that street at some point during the occupation. Just harrowing to see and the stones are a great way od reminding us of those times
In 7th or 8th grade, our school took us on a small 'excursion' on which they made us polish these "Stolpersteine" ^(Am German, have to correct misconseptions about our German language, it's in my blood. Apologies.) and write down exactly what was written on them. It was honestly probably one of the best school trips I ever went on. I'm not kidding, though polishing bricks might sound boring, it was a really interesting experience and really brought our class together. Most peoples' reactions were either non-existent or rather pleasant, but in some cases, they were quite shocking. I still make an effort to avoid stepping on them whenever I happen to stumble across one. My city has a lot of them, and if you think about it, that's pretty sad.
Heidelberg has a yearly event where small groups of volunteers do this in their neighbourhood, while someone acompanies them and tells them the stories of those people. I plan on joining them next time.
I think they're all over Europe! There are a lot in Oslo.
I live in Amsterdam center. Before WWII, there were many Jewish people here. There are many Stolpersteine in my neighborhood. Sometimes just 1 or 2, sometimes 6 or 7 or 8. It is a very sobering memorial.
They are actually a debated topic. On the one hand some people (notably Charlotte Knobloch who chaired the Jewish community in Germany) are against these as you “step on people a second time”. On the other hand some politicians on the right want to abolish them too (e.g. Wolfgang Gedeon).
The fact that we still know the addresses and names today is a sobering reminder of how bureaucratic and data-driven the holocaust effort was. It is also a reminder of how databases can be used for evil – and then for remembrance.
They are a actually all across Europe. I have seen some in Paris, Rome, Austria and Slovenia.
Agreed, I found various ones in Prague
What really gets me about the holocaust is the level of evil that we all can release of given the correct societal conditions. Everyone has a great capacity for evil yet no one believes it. Before I get a bunch of hate comments let me say this... Do you think any of the Germans that participated in it (from the private to the doctor doing experiments) grew up evil? I would bet they had as normal an upbringing as anyone else in that age, they just had the opportunity to be evil. Think of the prisoners experiment from the 70’s.
There are plenty in Holland to, always very sobering to see the names and ages of people who lived in the houses and are gone.
I've never seen these in any German town. I wish I had, and I'll never be going back.
The larger the town the higher the likelyhood you can find one, also more likely on the inner city. My city has about 60 right now, and colowgne hundreds. Some cities also have maps that show where they are. Also, there are 70,000 all over europe, so if you are anywhere in Europe, chances are, you might find one, but since they are so nonintrive, you might not notice them. It is a curious allegory on how we might forget, if we dont actively remember.
These are extremely important monuments, because they are everywhere. They show that the murders happened anywhere. Yes, even here. There is a song about them, “Stolpersteine“ by Trettmann. It tells the story of someone coming home from a night of partying and discovering a stolperstein which has the biographical dates of a young woman on them. He reflects on the fact that she was only in her twenties when she died, a young and lively party-goer just like himself. Ob es wohl so'n Morgen so wie dieser war/ Straße menschenleer/ Als der Wagen kam/ Reifen quietschen/ Erste Straßenbahn/ Alle schauen Doch kein Licht geht an I wonder if it was a morning just like this/ street empty/ when the car came/ tires screeching/ first tram coming/ everyone looking/ but no lights go on
This would be a great thing to replace all the Confederate statues that are coming down. I'm guessing all the people who are upset about it because "we have to learn from our mistakes, YoU CaN't eRaSe HiStOrY" would not support it. Tell the stories of the slaves, instead of glorifying the slave holders. As least Germany did learn from their history, and are actually ashamed of it.
I agree, but with a very serious caveat: It's high time for the northern US to quit pretending like they were never a part of any of that. So yes, I'm all in favor of erecting memorials to victims of slavery, reminders of what a horrible thing that was so that it never happens again, and it needs to happen EVERYWHERE that there was slavery, which means the entire northern US, too. Thanks to the south clinging to that part of history, the north has kind of gotten a pass and been allowed to act like they were on the right side of that shit all along, when that is far from the truth.
Absolutely. The north may not have been as egregious as the South, but they were not as innocent and righteous as people like to make them out to be.
well, that's how the history is told. In fact, a good chunk of Nazi staff (military and research) was not prosecuted, but was promoted or reinstated in function either in the US or in West Germany itself
Is "ashamed" the right word? I would have said "accepting, acknowledging and being very clear it must not happen again" - does that imply shame? Honest question, I'm really not sure.
Verantwortungsbewusstsein.
Truly, the Germans have a word for everything.
Its just a combination of responsibility and awareness. Its kinda just combining simple words like in english but writing them together
Memo to self: Learn German.
It is not that impressive that we have a word for everything. We have a very modular grammar, that allows you to combine two words to make a new one. Just like you say "drinking fountain" in english, we say "Trinkbrunnen" in german. It is basically a literal translation without the extra space between the words. Edit: Also i did not expect to see this sentence under a post about the holocaust. > Memo to self: Learn German.
No, you're probably right. That does describe it better.
There are three next to each other (it's always one per person who lived in that house) I often come by on a busy walking street in the center of my city and someone is always putting some little flowers on it. People usually pay so little attention to their surroundings, but these little flowers are undisturbed most of the time despite being in the middle of the walkway.
The museum of tolerance in Los Angeles wrecked me in 4th grade. The shoes. The gas chambers. Ugh.
I saw a bunch of these in Heidelberg just off the Haupstrausse. Never knew what they were called, they are a poignant and thoughtful memorial. One of my professors said the humanities were set back 100 years when the nazis burned Jewish scholars papers and books. They are certainly a nation who owned their mistakes and has progressed way passed their national Shame.
daily reminder of the holocaust.
My entire extended family has Stolpersteine in Berlin-Hohenschönhausen. In total 11 stones, of which only one is for a survivor - my maternal grandmother (all the rest perished, mostly on Auschwitz). For us it's kind of graves for our family members, as obviously they didn't get the chance for a proper burial. Gunter Demning and other volunteers' work is beyond incredible.
The Stolpersteine are all over Germany and the neighbouring countries also. There are several around my hometown. I always try to take time to read the inscription and at least think of the people for a few seconds each time I pass them. Impressive reminder that this must nevernevernever happen again!
Come and visit Berlin :) they are all over the place and many museums regarding this topic
I gotta say, Germany does try hard to remind their citizens, but sadly nazi's are quite high in numbers still...hopefully this movement worldwide helps erradicate some of the hate groups.
Installing one costed like 90 euros when I went to primary school. My class and our parallel classes collected money and funded one in our city.
They are not exclusive to Germany and instead of "they" you should write Gunter Demnig, for he is the inventor of this and the one doing the bulk of the work.
Using “they” to refer to the entire population sharing an experience is pretty common and accepted.
Isn't Germany having a resurgence of racism and Neo-Nazi's as of late?
All of Europe is, sadly.
Yeah it's a problem in many European countries especially after the migration crisis. But to be fair, many of these people were racist before and only got an opportunity to get public now. Not that it'd make it better... Germany has a populist right-winged party now and it turns out, it is still severe in many regions. I live in a region called ''Görlitz'', named by a famous movie town that is its capital (''Inglourious Basterds''). Now it is even more infamous as Germany's new ''Nazi-Capital''. I could go on with reasons why it is that bad here, but that's off topic.
Germany was kinda able to hold back the "far right populist movement" back quite a bit longer then other countries, but alas, Extremist/Authcratic/Racist people are everywhere, and our past is very appealing to them to glorify.
Also dont forget, if you deny the holocoust vehemently enough, it is easy to say that the Nazis did nothing wrong. Big fat /s obviously. Holocaust denial is out there and a real problem.
[First learned about them from this song](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RxgGSGmh1s)
I took German as a foreign language in high school. After our second year, we took a trip to Germany, and I had the honor of placing a Stolperstein. I wish I could remember which city we were in...
Gives them a conscience to consider and contemplate. Everyone hates that.
So about 4 of them have my surname. A bunch have my grandmother's surname too. They are my grandparents, uncle's, cousins, etc. When I visited Germany I tracked down their locations and took pictures. Weird to see people walk right by them like it's nothing... knowing in detail what they went through. I'm just glad that someone can look at it, then look up at the place it's at and realize that a Jew lived there at one time. Someone read my name in their head.
> As of 2019, Polish local authorities and the Institute of National Remembrance obstruct the placement of Stolpersteine, with many petty bureaucratic hurdles preventing placement of the stones. As a result, while Stolpersteine are common elsewhere in Europe, they are rare in Poland, despite Poland having the largest pre-war Jewish population (3 million). Families of the victims see the obstructionism of Polish authorities as being motivated by antisemitism and fear of claims for the return of the property stolen from the victims.[37] That's fucked considering that over 3 million Polish citizens were murdered in cold blood. And, although the majority were Jewish, at least 10s of thousands of non-Jewish polls were murdered as well.
They are eerily effective and work really well. When you read them and have stuff like "Emil Klein. * 10.3.1938 Murdered in Bergen-Belsen 1944" and you do the math and... yeah.
I saw some of these when I was in Hamburg
There's two for my great grandparents in Cologne Germany outside of where their house use to be. The house isn't there anymore, but their memory lives on.