BERLIN (AP) — Artist Gunter Demnig carefully placed a palm-sized Holocaust memorial brass plaque into the sidewalk on a busy street corner of Berlin. It said: “Johanna Berger, born in 1893, lived here; deported on Nov. 17, 1941, murdered on Nov. 25, 1941.”
After Demnig had swiped the sand off Berger’s memorial stone and those for her husband and two sons, a dozen relatives drew closer around the four plaques, which are called Stolpersteine, or “stumbling blocks,” in German. They put down white roses and recited the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, while traffic roared by on a rainy spring day.
Demnig installed the first plaque in the German capital three decades ago. By now, one can find more than 11,000 of his memorial stones all over the city. But Demnig’s decentralized Holocaust memorial goes much further than that — the artist and his teams of supporters have laid 126,000 stones in Germany and 31 other countries across Europe. The first stone was installed in 1992 in the western German city of Cologne.
In a unique way, the shiny brass squares that are embedded in the pavement make passersby stop and interrupt their daily lives for a moment as they bend down to read the names of those who perished. Small children can often be seen as they examine the Stolpersteine closely and demand answers from their parents.
“My basic idea behind this was that wherever in Europe the German Wehrmacht, the SS, …