Honouring the vanished Jews of Berlin
Brass markers commemorate those removed and murdered in the Holocaust
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It’s lunchtime in Berlin and the streets and cafés are filling up. I’m hur
Honouring the vanished Jews of Berlin
Brass markers commemorate those removed and murdered in the Holocaust
|Report an Error|
Share via Email
It’s lunchtime in Berlin and the streets and cafés are filling up. I’m hurrying to get some errands done in readiness for our flight home to Toronto.
My gaze catches something golden at my feet. Embedded in the cobbled sidewalk at the threshold to yet another grimy/lovely altbau (old apartment building) are three brass cobbles among the stone ones. They are inscribed with some bare facts.
I don’t speak German but I can pick up the broadest strokes: Here lived a family of three. He born just a year before her in the late 19th century. Their son born to them in their late 20s. Dead before they. The couple lived on but then vanished, on the same day, and were murdered sometime thereafter.
Then come the questions that the dates won’t answer: When did they marry? How many more moments — hours? days? — did they get to stay together before they were separated? Did they die on the same day? What is the date of their murder?
I take a photograph, and ask my partner to translate the parts I can’t understand.
The stones say:
Here lived Simon Adler, born 1885, deported 3.5.1944, murdered at Auschwitz.
Here lived Rachel Adler, nee Kronthal, born 1886, deported 3.5.1944, murdered at Auschwitz.
Here lived Heinrich Adler, born 1914, committed to the Buch Sanatorium 19.10.1939, “transferred” 10.7.1940 to the provincial care centre, Brandenburg. Murdered 10.7.1940 under Operation T4.
Translating the stones yields a bit more depth but it would be stupid to call it a “biography” of a family. Lives aren’t fully told in any number of words, let alone in so few characters and spaces.
But compressed in these strange sidewalk texts is remarkably much:
Simon and Rachel lived with their boy, Heinrich. Heinrich was mentally or physically ill. He went, or was brought to, some sort of hospital at the age of 25 or 26. Nine months later he was “transferred” (the stone’s speech marks are eloquent in their economy) to somewhere offering so-called care, where he was immediately killed as part of some kind of program. Simon and Rachel continued their life together, now bereaved of their only child. They had almost four more years and then they too were gone.
Most of the stolpersteine (stumbling stones), as these brass memorials are called, bear the heading “here lived.” They mark where people slept, ate, worked, relaxed, mourned, celebrated, loved and fought. The door I’m standing next to is old, solid and scuffed: definitely the same door Simon, Rachel and Heinrich would have opened with their key every day (loaded down with bicycles and groceries?).
Allowing the facts to give way to a narrative, standing as I am right there and looking at their door, feels less history “lesson” than history-shock: a bolt so pure, it’s a mercy it’s transitory. I remember as a kid, truly “seeing” an airplane far overhead. I suddenly clearly perceived it full-size but far above, instead of as tiny and not-quite-real. It was a one-off glimmer of accurate spatial perspective. Seeing the stone felt the same way.
People who visit the sites of death camps in Poland, Germany, Cambodia and elsewhere say the same thing: that thinking about the past while it’s beside you, breathing with you, is the opposite of “desensitizing.” I just don’t think many of us can sustain those moments of true response and still function through our daily lives.
It’s easy to question the oblivious laughter of those wandering past, not seeing (or, having seen so many times, these stones are now just part of the street). Or to feel annoyed at the café owners who don’t mind the wooden legs of their deck chairs grazing the stones on their turf. But that’s far too trite. These texts are part of the city; more permanent than any of us.
This resilience of hard facts, on hard brass, on a hard stone sidewalk, forms part of what writer Marianne Hirsch calls “postmemory”: relationship to trauma borne by the generations that come after. She says: “As I see it, the connection to the past that I define as postmemory, is mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection and creation.” The stones — scratched, patinated and walked-on — are a portal we can walk through if we want to do this work.
Experienced in a perhaps simpler way, they instruct: City life goes on and things change a little every day, but what happened, happened. Sure, most of the time you or I are too busy to look, and if we look, too busy to think much about what we see. But those names and dates are ready and waiting to be seen, on the day we’re ready to see.
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