A Victim of the Holocaust Lived Here

I AM TERRIFIED of tripping. Thanks to a couple memorable tumbles over the years—the most recent of which involved a face-plant while on a run—I always double-knot my shoelaces and look down at my feet when I walk. Remaining steady and stable is always in the back of my mind.

But on a trip to Berlin in 2017, I found myself repeatedly tripping over something in the ground. The source of my stumbling, I soon learned, were Stolpersteine, which translates literally to “stumbling stones,” or more metaphorically, “stumbling blocks.” Stolpersteine are cobblestone-sized bronze plaques embedded in streets and sidewalks throughout Europe, each slightly raised above ground level and engraved with the name and life dates of a Holocaust victim, including murdered Jews, members of the LGBTQ+ community, Sinti and Roma people, people with physical or intellectual disabilities, and other ethnic and political minorities.

These commemorative stones are part of an ongoing art project, installed at the last place each person lived or worked before falling victim to Nazi crimes. Above each engraved name are the words “hier wohnte,” or “here lived,” serving as a reminder that this person did not build their life just anywhere, but right here. Each day they walked on this ground.

Each is unique

THE IDEA FOR Stolpersteine began in 1991, when artist Gunter Demnig painted a white line through the streets of Cologne to trace the deportation of 1,000 Sinti and Roma who were forced out of the city just 50 years prior. “An old lady stopped by and scolded my work, insisting there had never been any Gypsies in Cologne,” said Demnig. Her denial prompted Demnig to find a way to more permanently preserve the memory of those killed in the Holocaust.

After he installed 200 plaques in Cologne, Demnig’s project—initially intended as a one-off piece—quickly became the biggest of his career. Today, more than 75,000 Stolpersteine are found in nearly 2,000 European cities and towns. While the memorial continues to grow, Demnig refuses to mass produce Stolpersteine, crafting each one by hand with a small team of artists. This is in “direct opposition to the Nazis’ mass extermination policies,” explains the project’s website. Each Stolperstein is individually sculpted, inscribed, and installed. Each is unique.

Unlike Berlin’s iconic Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, which features 2,711 large concrete slabs on a nearly five-acre site in Berlin’s city center, Stolpersteine was not something I had planned to visit. Created as “decentralized” memorials, they are encountered unexpectedly. While some find the possibility of accidentally trampling on the names of Holocaust victims blasphemous, Demnig said “it goes beyond our comprehension to understand the killing of 6 million Jews, but if you read the name of one person, calculate his age, look at his old home, and wonder behind which window he used to live, then the horror has a face to it.”

One morning while walking along a row of picturesque homes in the Kreuzberg neighborhood, I noticed a small grouping of four Stolpersteine. I stopped and looked closer: the Rosenberg family. A mother, father, and their two sons, I surmised from the inscriptions. While names and dates could not convey the fullness of who the Rosenbergs were, their unexpected intrusion into my stroll stopped me from reducing them to broad, sanitized statistics, or from remembering the Holocaust solely for its inconceivable enormity. Instead, these Stolpersteine—and the dozens of others I stumbled upon—reminded me that the Holocaust was a murder of particular people in particular places.

My double-knots were useless when it came to walking steadily in Berlin. Stolpersteine made it so that I could not casually pass history by—I was interrupted, forced to question the levelness of the ground on which I stood, made to stumble upon what would be far easier if avoided, forgotten, or transcended.

Dangerous quietism

FAITH, I HAD always believed, meant having firm footing, stability, security, a solid foundation. Faith meant building my house on the rock (Matthew 7:24-27), walking with double-knotted shoelaces in a world full of bumps and cracks.

But as I walked through Berlin, I could not help but stumble over the horrifying history of the Holocaust. Even more destabilizing was the fact that many of my fellow Lutherans were shamefully complicit with a regime that murdered millions of people. During my time in Berlin, I learned that many Lutherans vocally endorsed the Nazi regime, such as German Lutheran pastor Siegfried Leffler, who wrote in 1935, “In the person of the Führer we see the one God has sent, who sets Germany before the Lord of history, who calls us from the worship of words, from the cult of the Pharisees and the Levites, to the holy service of the Samaritan.” Other Lutherans simply stood by in silence.

I learned that the story I like to tell of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor who was murdered for his resistance to the Nazi regime, was an astonishing exception to the church’s quietist status quo. I read the text that Martin Luther wrote titled On the Jews and Their Lies, which recommended “set[ting] fire to synagogues [and Jewish] schools.” I learned that it was on the eve of Luther’s birthday when, in 1938, Nazis began their most public and devastating act of terror yet, 48 hours of burning and looting synagogues across Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in what became known as Kristallnacht, or “The Night of Broken Glass.”

I suspect my Lutheran ancestors who lived during the Holocaust thought of themselves as devout people of faith. They went to church, read the Bible, cared for their families, and would help their neighbors in times of need—provided that first their own house was in order. But as chaos unfolded around them, they turned inward, enclosing themselves within a facade of security. At best, they practiced a dangerous quietism that allowed them to do nothing as their neighbors were forcibly removed from their homes, separated from their families, or deported to concentration camps. At worst, they preemptively got rid of any “outsiders” perceived to be a threat and joined in horrific national projects promising a return to long-lost greatness.

A mighty fortress?

AS I STUMBLED over Stolpersteine, I reflected on my own double-knotted faith. It was a faith that resembles that of the “Good Germans,” Lutherans who, like me, clung to a sense of security and searched for solid ground but wound up building a mighty fortress—and calling it God’s house.

Stolpersteine exposed the dangers of the safe and comfortable faith I had long held dear. They helped me see that while I profess neighborly love, my faith is more focused on my own well-being than that of my neighbors. While it’s easier to blame the injustice around me on the president or those in power I disagree with, I too am complicit. I attend meetings with city leaders to lament and discuss the recent housing crisis in my community in which hundreds of families were displaced from a public housing complex due to unsafe living conditions, while pretending that gets me off the hook for doing the much more costly work of listening to and being in relationship with those affected. I get into the pulpit and denounce the injustice of kids in cages in ICE detention facilities while saying little about the adults in cages at the prison across town. I’d rather donate to the local food drive than do the more inconvenient work of sitting down to break bread with my hungry neighbors. I write this article critiquing a risk-averse faith that makes a god out of safety to justify not taking actual risks for my neighbors in need.

To be clear, safety itself is not the problem. Some sense of safety and security is critical, particularly for those who have endured trauma. Rather, safety becomes dangerous when it is made into a god, taking precedence over all else—something far too prevalent within a religion of whiteness.

Stolpersteine unsettle my belief in this false faith. They force me to reflect on the grave consequences of building a “solid” foundation and calling it holy ground.

While I’d prefer to think of faith as something steady and safe, tripping over Stolpersteine taught me that real faith necessarily entails stumbling. It involves risk. It entails being off-balance, falling down, skinning my knees, even breaking my bones. From my vantage point there on the ground, I’ll begin to see more clearly the suffering my double-knotted walk in the world has perpetuated. It’s only once I’m on the ground too that I can truly see the neighbors I’ve cast to the edges of my well-manicured paths.

Look around

WHAT DOES IT mean to walk faithfully through the world? For me, it means paying attention to Stolpersteine or other public art that trips me up. Walking faithfully means falling to my knees to confess and repent of my sin of believing that my own security is more urgent than my neighbor’s needs. It means more forcefully denouncing the president’s hateful anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, anti-black rhetoric from the pulpit, a stance that was woefully absent in most sermons of my clergy forebears in Nazi Germany.

For me as a Lutheran, it also means crafting a service of repentance for Reformation Sunday, confessing the sins (of both omission and commission) of Lutherans past and present. It means examining the particular ground on which I stand. The Grabe wo du stehst (“dig where you stand”) movement, rooted in labor history, reached a high point in the 1980s when Germans began to uncover their own local and familial connections to the Holocaust. Since returning from Germany, I’ve begun to recognize that the ground on which my home and church dwell is also blood-soaked land, stolen from the Catawba and Shakori tribes of what is now called North Carolina. Stories of violence and genocide exist here, too. We just don’t have Stolpersteine to mark them.

Or maybe faith simply means to stop looking down and start looking around as I walk through the world. To risk actually seeing those around me whose suffering I’d rather ignore. To risk getting on the ground with them.

When we walk through the world with our eyes on our neighbors rather than our own feet, we will surely stumble. But stumbling isn’t unfaithful. God became incarnate to stumble along this bumpy road with us and gave us something far greater than the false sense of security Christians have so often sought: radical grace and love. This frees us to loosen our laces. It frees us to walk this uneven ground together, to run to our neighbors in need, to dance with one another in the crumbling streets.