German Artist Installs Over 126000 Holocaust Memorial Stones Across Europe

Artist Gunter Demnig carefully placed small brass plaques into the sidewalk on a busy street corner in Berlin. The plaques list the names and fates of individuals who lived at that address before being deported and murdered during the Holocaust. After cleaning the stones, relatives placed white roses and recited the Jewish prayer for the dead while traffic passed on a rainy spring day.

Demnig installed the first plaque in Berlin three decades ago. More than 11000 of the memorial stones, known as Stolpersteine or stumbling blocks, are now located across the city. The artist and his teams have placed a total of 126000 stones in Germany and 31 other countries across Europe.

The first stone was installed in 1992 in the western German city of Cologne. The brass squares embedded in pavement prompt passersby to stop and read the inscriptions. Small children often examine the stones and ask their parents for explanations. "My basic idea behind this was that wherever in Europe the German Wehrmacht, the SS, the Gestapo, and their local collaborators committed murders or carried out deportations, symbolic stones should be placed there," the 78-year-old German artist said in an interview with The Associated Press on Wednesday.

Jewish family members frequently travel from other countries to attend the stone-laying ceremonies. For many families the plaques serve as the closest substitute for a grave since victims were often killed in concentration camps. "The Stolpersteine are some kind of substitute for the missing gravestones," a relative said after a recent ceremony.

The relative added that the project brings family history to a certain conclusion or at least a provisional one.