Reminder of Adolph Meyer: "Caution! Stumbling block!"
Photo: Simone Salden / DER SPIEGELI live with my family in one of those Hamburg districts that are full of life and beautiful white old buildings. A bourgeois quarter, just as it was a hundred years ago. On my way to the subway, I pass 13 stumbling blocks. There are 11 on the way to the playground.
Each stone commemorates a woman, a man, and a child who were victims of the National Socialists. To people who, had we been born a few decades earlier, could have been our neighbors or kindergarten friends. What would we have done if they had been driven out of these beautiful houses before our eyes?
The artist Gunter Demnig started the Stolperstein project in 1993. "A person is only forgotten when his name has been forgotten," it says in the Talmud. In the meantime, more than 75,000 brass panels have been laid in more than 1200 municipalities in Germany and in more than 20 European countries. Usually at the last self-chosen place of residence of the persecuted.
On walks through our neighborhood, I kept asking myself whether someone who was persecuted, deported and murdered in the "Third Reich" didn't also live in our house. And whether nobody has bothered to research it yet. On the other hand, that's exactly why I put off the request for the Hamburg Stolpersteine project: If I ask there, I thought, I'll start a historical research that could cost me a lot of time. I saw old phone books in the city archives and compared the membership directories of the Jewish community with deportation lists.
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