This evening as we walked the streets of Frankfurt, I noticed these 2 brass cobblestones. I knelt down to read the stones:
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. It suddenly became very real for me. This husband and wife lived right here and I was standing in front of the place of their home. They were taken away 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:
Our Frankfurt Germany Mission 
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