It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure. Joseph Campbell
There are 70,000 Stolpersteine or stumbling stones in more than 1, 200 towns and cities across Europe and Russia. Stumbling stones, bronze blocks memorializing Nazi victims, comprise the largest decentralized memorial in the world. Each block is placed at the victim’s last known home, the place which marks a Gestapo or SS raid and arrest, the beginning of the end. The inscription Here lies followed by each victim’s name, birth date, and fate: camp internment, exile, deportation, murder, or suicide.
In 1992, artist Gunter Demnig of Cologne, Germany conceived Stolpersteine. These stumbling stones commemorate all victims of the Nazi regime, which include Jewish, Sinti, Roma, disabled, dissident, and Afro-German and asocial citizens. Demnig personally oversees the creation and placement of each stone, a labor of love and duty that keeps him working and traveling 300 days a year. He often cites the Talmud when he reminds the world that A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.
A Berlinian craftsman, Friedrichs-Friedländer, spends at least 50 hours a week in his suburban garage engraving each stumbling stone by hand with a hammer and hand-held metal stamps. Working six days a week mostly in silence, he has inscribed more than 63,000 Stolpersteine.
Given the magnitude of the project, some have argued that the process of creating and inscribing the stones should be mechanized. Not so, says Friedrichs-Friedländer who explains:
To show respect for the victims, it must be done by hand. The Holocaust was so systematic. What they invented as means of mass slaughter, it was more or less automatized. We don’t want anything like that.
As with many good deeds and noble causes, stumbling stones are not without critics. Although it was controversial, Munich banned the stones in 2004, a decision that was upheld in 2015 in spite of a petition containing 100,000 names. Charlotte Noblach, head of the Jewish community in Munich and Bavaria and a Holocaust survivor, vehemently opposes the project and argues for preserving the dignity of the victims. She said, For me, stumbling over a piece of metal in the ground is anything but dignified. Friedrichs-Friedländer disagreed, claiming that If you want to read the stone, you must bow before the victim.
Bowing before victims seems like the kind of practice that could change the world. For the most part, we’re not a bowing people, preferring instead to keep our sights on higher, more potentially advantageous stuff. And as we look up and out, we miss so much of what has happened and continues to happen below our radars. Unthinkingly, we trample on the very folk who have already been crushed. In the end, it may not matter whether these are victims of genocide or individual acts of destruction. For in the wake of any type of destruction, we walk on without stumbling.
We should stumble more. We should catch our toes on all sorts of stones which send us flying face first to the ground. And lying there, we should be bloodied enough to take pause. When an expert in the law asked Jesus to define neighbor, Jesus responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan. Lest I think too highly of myself and my willingness to love my neighbor, how many times have I crossed to the other side of the road, leaving a neighbor in need along the road? How many times have I neglected to look down and see the life that was lying at my feet? How many times have I refused to stumble and then to bow before ones who deserve my attention and my mercy? I should stumble more.
On this day, the occasion of my 64th birthday, I vow to do just that. There may not be lovingly crafted bronze blocks in the streets and roads of my community, but as I walk, my heart will bow before the stones that should be there. And I will stumble before those who lie at my feet. I will refuse to cross the road. For as Joseph Campbell writes, Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.
