Memoir | Set in Stone, Stumbling Home

Not in my wildest dreams—or nightmares—did I see myself returning to Germany, where some of my relatives were persecuted and others sent to die by the Nazis.

I had been to Germany twice, on business trips. Both times, I eyed people in the street wondering whether they were old enough to have been Nazis during the Holocaust.

But in June 2024, I arrived in Frankfurt to be part of a project embedding what are known as Stolpersteine—German for “stumbling stones”—into the earth to memorialize members of my kin and twenty other families over a two-day period.

Gunter Demnig presents four Stolpersteine of Jane M. Friedman’s relatives to her. (Credit: Jackie Schwarz).

The Stolpersteine project is the brainchild of Gunter Demnig, a German Christian born after the war’s end. He planted his first stones in the mid-1990s. Since then, he and his co-creators have embedded more than 100,000 of the cement, cobblestone-shaped blocks. They have brass tops etched with information that describes individual Jews, Roma, homosexuals, disabled persons, political dissidents and others who were persecuted or murdered by the Third Reich. The Stolpersteine are placed in the ground outside victims’ last residences before they were deported to the camps or forced into hiding.

The collection of over 100,000 Stolpersteine is being called the world’s largest decentralized monument to the Holocaust. It has nothing to do with overall numbers, the six million, for example. It personalizes the outcomes of people caught in the claws of Nazism. The stones are everywhere. People stumble on them (not over them; they’re level with the ground) in Berlin, in Amsterdam, all over Europe, and read about the individuals.

Gunter Demnig is a man of few words. But the Germans who work with him, such as Alexander Stukenberg, are clear about the mission. “We cannot fix the past,” says Stukenberg, who handles the Stolpersteine for the Benelux countries (Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg). “But we have to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” The stones, reminding people every day about the fates of ordinary folk, are a means to that end.

So many second-generation survivors, like me, have applied for Stolpersteine for their relatives that I had to wait two years for my turn. But on June 19, Demnig, wearing his signature fedora (I call him Indiana Jones of the stumbling stones), arrived at my relatives’ last freely chosen address, holding the four stones and presenting them to me as if for my approval. Their brass tops announced “HERE LIVED” in German. The unique words, translated into English below, were hammered by hand, creating summaries of the lives—and, in two cases, murders—of my German Jewish relatives.

The four Stolpersteine of Jane M. Friedman’s relatives (Credit: Jane M. Friedman).

For me, Manfred’s fate felt the cruelest. He was 15 when he wandered from the hiding place he shared in the Belgian Ardennes with Rosa and Dina and was picked up by the Gestapo. That was the end of his short life. I carried Manfred’s photo with me to Germany and held it close.  The photo shows his striking resemblance to my father and my dad’s younger brother Marcel. They were among the lucky ones; they fled Europe in the summer of 1940 after the Germans invaded Belgium. But like so many survivors, they repressed traumatic memories and never told me what happened to those who’d been left behind. Research revealed it to me years later.   

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A hush fell over the assembled crowd as Demnig leaned on one padded knee and began carving out the space for the stones in front of 141 Furstenburgerstrasse, where my relatives last lived. The only sound: a violinist softly playing Bach as a light rain fell.

A group of local high school students huddled to watch. Their history teacher had brought them to the ceremony as part of her required unit on the Holocaust. The students were mesmerized by the proceedings. Filip, one of the students, read a poem he wrote for the occasion:  

“Naught but ash and dust
Present and future stolen.

Swept up in the gust
Forever of the earth.

But one floats free,
Never to be caged.
Never to be killed,
Never to age.

Memory lives
In those who sought,
So let us set in stone
This golden thought.”

I was stunned. I can’t imagine American high school students being so engaged. But this is the culture, carefully constructed decades ago, of German repentance and remembrance.

German officials have often reminded the population that “there is no German identity without Auschwitz.” Angela Merkel, when she was chancellor, described her country’s mission as protecting Israel. She said this was part of Germany’s Staatsräson, the state’s raison d’etre.

Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza has not changed this. The German government has for the most part stood with the Jewish state. Pro-Palestinian demonstrations in Germany have been broken up by police. Activists and artists who have publicly criticized Israel have found their events and exhibits canceled or their government funding pulled.

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Gunter Demnig’s stumbling stones are almost universally lauded.

Demnig was born in a small town near Berlin. He said his father had been a “normal soldier.” Demnig told a documentary filmmaker that he “struggles with that” because his father was “on the other side.”

Demnig briefly planned to be an airline pilot. But he concluded that it would be boring, like being a bus driver. So, he scrapped that idea and chose to study art, which infuriated his parents. His father, according to his mother, would have a heart attack if he chose to be an artist.

In the 1990s, he told a friend that he wanted to hang plaques on the facades of buildings to memorialize people killed in the Holocaust. The friend said it would not be accepted. So Demnig came up with the idea for the stumbling stones. The first ones, in Cologne, were for Roma and Sinti people murdered by the Reich.

Then, suddenly the idea took off. Now Demnig can’t handle the large numbers of requests for stumbling stones. He no longer embosses all the stones. But all are still stamped by hand—by his team of seven “sculptors.” And that’s a conscious choice; because the Nazis ran an assembly line of murder, the project opposes mass production.

Today, the stones are paid for by non-Jewish sponsors. In Frankfurt, there’s a waiting list for people who want to sponsor future stumbling stones.

The Stolpersteine of two people who were deported to Theresienstadt in 1942 are embedded in front of a hotel in Frankfurt, Germany (Credit: Jane M. Friedman).

At a reception for victims’ families and sponsors, I sat with Silke Burmeister and her partner Matthias Benz, Germans barely 30 years old.

“I wanted to do something good,” Burmeister explained about her decision to be a sponsor. “Growing up and learning about the past,” she said, “I believed this could never happen again. Now I’m not so sure.”

Benz, her partner, grew up in Nuremberg, an hour’s drive from the grave of the infamous Nazi commandant Rudolf Hoess. Benz says neo-Nazis used to visit the grave to pay tribute. Finally, in 2011, to stop the tributes local officials had the body exhumed, and his descendants had Hoess cremated and the ashes cast to sea.

Burmeister and Benz are mostly concerned about the Alternative for Germany (AfD), Germany’s hard right, anti-immigrant party that won 16 percent of the vote in recent European Union parliamentary elections. Political analysts attribute this result to a backlash against the more than one million migrants—most from Syria and Afghanistan—who swept into Germany in 2015. They worry that the hard right will gain even more. After a recent knife attack at a German festival, the party is calling again for new restrictions on immigration.

“NO!” Demnig responded emphatically when I asked him if anything like the Third Reich could happen again in Germany. The stumbling stones, he says, are about memory.   

And that was my goal in asking for the Stolpersteine for my kin. I wanted those whose stories my parents had snuffed out to be remembered. Manfred and Joseph Kamm had been unknown to me. Through the stones, I feel they have come back to life, reunited at their last residence before the Holocaust ripped them all apart. People who stumble over the stones will now read about them.  

As Gunter Demnig says, citing the Talmud, “A person is only forgotten when his name is forgotten.”

Top image: A collection of Stolpersteine in Frankfurt, Germany (Credit: Jane M. Friedman).