In every town we visit, as we walk the streets and wander through towns and villages, we look for Stolpersteine, or these small polished brass cobblestones. Each one is significant and causes me to bend, read and remember.
Here are 2 we found in downtown Frankfurt. The stones are engraved with these words:
HERE LIVED
HERMANN GEIS/FRANZISKA GEIS GEB LEVI
BORN 1887/1902.
DEPORTED IN 1842
MURDERED IN OCCUPIED POLAND
They were placed in front of a shop with an apartment over it. These stones make tragic history very real to me. This husband and wife lived right here where I stood as I looked up at the place that was their home. They were taken away from this place and they never came back.
I learned these markers are called “Stolpersteine” or “stumbling stones.” My colleague said, “It’s not intended that your feet stumble over them, but your mind and heart.” Each stone represents a person who was killed during the Holocaust. These Stolpersteine are placed in front of the last place of residency, or sometimes, work, which was freely chosen by that person before they became victims of Nazi terror.
The idea for these memorials was first conceived by artist Gunter Demnig in Cologne in 1992 as part of an initiative commemorating victims of the Holocaust. Four years later he installed the first Berlin Stolperstein. He now works with Michael Friedrichs-Friedländer, the craftsman who makes each marker. Friedrichs-Friedländer has inscribed every single Stolperstein since 2005, when the project grew too large for Demnig to both make and install the stones.“I can’t think of a better form of remembrance,” he says. “If you want to read the stone, you must bow before the victim.”
Joseph Pearson, a Cambridge historian, said that “It is not what is written [on the Stolpersteine] which intrigues, because the inscription is insufficient to conjure a person. It is the emptiness, void, lack of information, the maw of the forgotten, which gives the monuments their power and lifts them from the banality of a statistic.”
On 26 May 2023, the 100,000th Stolperstein was installed in Nuremberg for Johann Wild, a firefighter. The Stolpersteine project is the world’s largest decentralized memorial.
You can read more about these historical remembrances here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein
From the Frankfurt Historischer Museum:
Here, for example, is the story of a tragedy:
A Family Tragedy from Bielefeld’s Textile Factory
We visited the Museum/former textile factory in the town of Bielefeld. The Museum Wäschefabrik (linen wear factory museum) is one of the relatively few places at which the heritage of the manufacture of clothing (as distinct from the production of fabrics) is commemorated. It is also a testimony to the fate of Jewish industrialists during the Third Reich.
The factory was established in 1913 by Hugo Juhl (d. 1939) and his wife Clara (b. 1887) for the manufacture of table linen, bed linen, women’s underclothes and men’s shirts. In 1938 they were forced to sell the business to the Winkel brothers who ran it until the 1980s after which a voluntary body, the Föderverein Projekt Wäschefabrik, was established to ensure the preservation of the factory. A museum (the one we just visited) was opened in the building in 1997. Visitors can see how clothing was made in the mid-twentieth century in rooms filled with ranks of sewing machines, rolls of fabric and reels of thread. They can also learn of the fate of Hugo Juhl’s family.
In 1933, fearing the onset of persecution of the Jews, Juhl’s daughter Hanna (b. 1913) who was married to Fritz Bender, fled to the Netherlands. Hugo Juhl died from natural causes soon after the enforced sale of the factory after which his wife and his other daughter Mathilde (b. 1910) went to the Netherlands. After the Nazi invasion the three women took their own lives rather than face deportation to an extermination camp, although Fritz Bender escaped. There are Stolpersteine (commemorative stones in the pavement) for the three women outside the museum in Bielefeld.
Kein Fluchtweg mehr offen
Hanna had just graduated from high school when she got engaged in 1932. Her bridegroom Fritz Bender moved to Bielefeld and joined her father’s company. Hugo Juhl owned an underwear factory with 70 employees in Viktoriastrasse. But after Adolf Hitler’s “seizure of power,” the Jewish couple no longer believed in a future in Germany.
Hanna and Fritz took a thoughtful approach to emigrating to the Netherlands. In order to bring as much of their wealth across the border as possible, they left separately. They invited all their relatives to their wedding in the seaside resort of Scheveningen. Each guest brought them 200 Reichsmarks, which were then reimbursed by the fathers of the bride and groom. The young couple set up a new life in Amsterdam. Fritz found a pharmaceutical factory. Their daughter Anneken was born.
When the Second World War began and the German Wehrmacht invaded Holland, the family tried to flee to England by boat. The first attempt failed because of the harbor barriers. Hanna then urged her husband to try it alone. Fritz actually managed the dangerous journey across the North Sea in a rowing boat. When Hanna realized that there was no escape route left for her and her five-year-old daughter, she opened the gas tap and put an end to both of their lives.
