Since 1995, Gunter Demnig has placed more than 100,000 memorial plaques on pavement stones in more than 30 countries throughout Europe, each one at the last voluntary address of a victim of the Holocaust. This book tells the stories of 14 of these Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones,” through a combination of third-person history and imagined first-person vignettes from their lives. The majority of people profiled here were killed by the Nazis for being Jewish, but several were killed for being Roma, mentally disabled, or gay.
Carl Becker, an electrician in Krefeld, Germany, represents the last category, which I’m focusing on for the purpose of this website’s audience. Becker was married to a woman, and they had a son, but Becker met and had secret relationships with men at night, trying to avoid the government’s increasingly tight restrictions against “homosexuality,” the book explains. Eventually he was betrayed by a neighbor and deported to the Dachau concentration camp. He survived and reunited with his wife; they were together until her death in 1947, the book tells us. Becker himself died in 1953.
The book does not address why Becker went back to his wife once he escaped the Nazi regime; adult readers may understand that this was likely because of ongoing prejudices against “homosexuality” even in post-war Europe, but it might have been good to clarify this for young readers.
The book also oddly omits certain details about Demnig’s life, never stating his nationality, for example. (He was German.) His occupation (an artist) is only mentioned on the back cover. Readers may assume that he was Jewish because the book relates a quote from the Talmud that he once shared, but in fact, it seems that he was not. On the one hand, his project is as powerful either way; on the other, it takes on different (but equally valid) nuances depending upon whether it is primarily a work of allyship or of honoring one’s own people. (I say “primarily” because Demnig was clear that he wanted to honor those killed by the Nazis for any reason, not just the majority who were killed for being Jewish, so there would always be some element of allyship regardless.)
Still, the focus of the volume is on the people Demnig memorialized more than Demnig himself, and the Stumbling Stones offer a useful entry point to their stories. In an afterword, author Kathy Kacer also urges readers to honor the victims by continuing to learn about the history of the Holocaust, sharing the stories of those whom the Stumbling Stones honor, acting with compassion, and speaking against injustice. “Unless we understand history, unless we learn its lessons, we will repeat the same patterns,” she notes. That’s a message that makes this recommended title more important than ever.
Content warning: Mentions of genocide, gas chambers, deadly injections, and shootings by the Nazis.
