Monday, August 31
In my few remaining days in Berlin before I return to Spain for the Camino, I wanted to visit sites commemorating the Holocaust. As a Jew with ancestral roots in Eastern Europe, huge swaths of my extended family were murdered by the Nazis in World War II. Now I was in Germany. Paying homage to the relatives I never got to meet felt like a crucial part of my visit.
I discussed possible options with Michaela. She suggested a visit to the Jewish Museum of Berlin, something I definitely plan to do. But when I checked the museum’s hours, they were closed on Mondays, so that visit would have to wait for another day.
In the meantime, Michaela told me about Stolpersteine, or stumbling stones, an ongoing art project designed to commemorate the lives of victims of the Holocaust. The brainchild of the artist Gunter Demnig, Stolpersteine memorializes people persecuted by the Nazis between 1933 and 1945. The first stumbling stones were laid in Berlin in 1996.
Stolpersteine are small 10×10-cm brass-topped concrete blocks set into sidewalks in front of the last voluntary places of residence of these Nazi victims. Stumbling stones are laid for Jews, Sinti and Roma, people from the politically or religiously motivated resistance, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, victims of the “euthanasia” murders and for people who were persecuted as supposedly “asocial.”
Their names and fates are engraved into a brass plate on top of each Stolpersteine. Each stone begins with “Hier wohnte” (Here lived) followed by the person’s name, birth year, and details of persecution, camp internment, or death. This decentralized memorial brings these individuals back to the neighborhoods where victims lived before deportation or murder.
On the Stolpersteine website, I learned that thousands of stumbling stones exist across Berlin. More than 100,000 exist across Europe.
More are being added all the time—millions died. Each stone is sponsored by a local group or relatives, who research the personal histories and fund and care for the individual stones. Biographies of each person are included on the Stolersteine website.
Once I learned about them, I wanted to see the stones myself. I went to the Stopersteine website and there was a map to locate the stones, but not knowing the neighborhoods of Berlin, the map didn’t make sense to me. But I knew I was staying in the Tiergarten neighborhood.
I went to Google and typed in: “I’d like to find stumbling stones in walking distance of the Tiergarten neighborhood in Berlin.”
The immediate response: “There are roughly 91 stumbling stones (Stolpersteine) directly within the Tiergarten locality, primarily clustered in the residential quarters just south and north of the main Großer Tiergarten park landscape. Because the park itself takes up most of the neighborhood, the stones are embedded along the sidewalks of the surrounding streets where the apartment buildings stand.”
And there was a map, right underneath.
I had my project for the day. I chose a link to follow, one family’s memorial to pursue.
The stones I was directed to weren’t walkable. They were further away. When I checked Google maps for public transit routes to get there, none of the suggested options were subway only, the only routes I’d been taking. To get to where I wanted to go, I could spend an hour and a half walking one way or I could take my first bus.
It was time to learn to ride the bus in Berlin.
I made it to the bus stop without incident, but the bus wouldn’t come for fifteen minutes. Then it was delayed by another twenty minutes. It didn’t matter. I was in no hurry. I had nothing but time.
Once on the bus, I had to figure out how to signal the driver for a stop. There were no pull cords like we have in the States. I carefully observed the other passengers until I finally saw someone push a big yellow button on the side exit door.
I got off the bus at my stop, then followed walking directions to the stones. I kept my eyes down, scanning the pavement. And suddenly, there they were, three of them, embedded in the sidewalk in front of Klingelhöferstraße 18.
I sat down on the sidewalk in front of the three markers with my back to the street. As I searched the Stolpersteine website to find out who these people were, the sounds of daily life continued unabated behind me. Bicycles whizzed by, buses ground their gears, cars zoomed on the busy street. Life continued.
It was August 31, 2026 in Berlin, and 84 years ago, these three people had been snatched out their lives, rounded up, and murdered in an intentional genocide. They’d been brought to a man-made hellhole of a concentration camp, and they died.
And they were just three of the 17 million people murdered by the Nazi regime and their collaborators. (Figure from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)
Here’s what I learned about the people who had once lived at this address and dreamed their dreams here:
Gertrud and Rudolf were siblings—she a widow, he a chemist with several patents to his name—who shared that apartment together from 1923 on, after their mother died. Both were deported in the “28th Altertransport” to Theresientadt in July 1942; Rudolf was murdered there on January 19, 1943, and Gertrud, at 79, died there just weeks later on February 7.
Here’s what a full biographical listing looks like on the Stolpersteine website.
Johanna Lowenthal doesn’t have her own separate page—her story is folded into the two pages above. She was the siblings’ longtime live-in housekeeper, deported alongside them on the same transport (listed right after them: entries 91, 92, 93). Her stone honors someone whose fate was bound to the family she’d served for years, even though she wasn’t related to them by blood.
I wondered how the people who live here feel, knowing the history of this house and the people it was stolen from. I wondered if any of the relatives I lost to the Holocaust had standing stones of their own. I grieved the genocide in Gaza, perpetrated by the very country created after World War II to shelter Jewish victims of the Holocaust. I reflected on my own country and all the people being snatched out of their vibrant, beautiful lives every single day.
Just yesterday, my friend Nancy told me about a little girl living in an attic in the US right now, writing in her diary about how she’s hiding from ICE. The new Anne Frank.
I thought about the realities and risks we face and the resistance that is essential.
I sat there for a long time on the sidewalk in front of these memorial stones, grateful for this place of sacred remembrance.