Stolpersteine by Nemorino
"If one person dies, it's a tragedy. If a million people die, it's a statistic." This cynical statement was attributed to the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). It was quoted to me by a Russian orchestra conductor who spent his childhood in Moscow under Stalin's rule.Like many other German cities, Freiburg is trying translate the statistic of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis back into the tragedy of individual people dragged from their homes and put to death. They do this by setting little squares of metal into the street or sidewalk in front of the houses where the people used to live. The two in the photo are embedded in the street in front of my hotel in the Rathausgasse in Freiburg. The one on the left reads:
Here lived
Sofie Rosentahl
neé Bloch
Born 1889
Deported 1940
Gurs
Murdered in
Auschwitz
and the one on the right:
Here lived
Julian Rosenthal
Born 1878
Deported 1940
Gurs
Murdered 1942 in
Auschwitz
These little squares of metal are known as "stumbling blocks" (Stolpersteine), but you can stumble over them only in a figurative sense, meaning you are made aware that these two murdered people used to live right here, so they aren't just statistics, but real people.
The "stumbling blocks" are an initiative of the artist Gunter Demnig, born 1947 in Berlin.
http://www.stolpersteine.com/
