Unveiling a Stolpersteine
Reflections on Memorializing One Genocide During Another
Memorializing genocide is a devastating gift.
Last week, I traveled to Warsaw, Poland with nearly the entire extended maternal side of my family - all 17 of us. We gathered to memorialize my great-great grandparents and other ancestors who were killed in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Holocaust. We unveiled a Stolpersteine, translated to ‘stumbling stone,’ directly in front of the homes where my ancestors last chose to live before displacement or murder. Stolpersteine are remarkable for their subtlety. Unlike other prominent memorials featuring statues of heroes, Stolpersteine are discovered by chance. You quite literally stumble over them as you’re walking down the street, inviting deeper reflection into the everyday life of Holocaust victims. Stolpersteine close the distance between the atrocities of the Holocaust and the world today.
They are also notable for their simplicity. Stolpersteine read: “Here lived (name), born (date), suspected death (date), killed in the Warsaw Ghetto.” Instead of narrowly focusing on the savagery of nazi Germany, Stolpersteine incite larger questions: Could forces other than nazism have been complicit in the Holocaust? (hint: yes). Could the dehumanization at the root of this genocide still fester today?” (hint: yes).
This intentional lack of directness has led to much controversy within the Polish Institute of National Remembrance, who have objected to requests for Stolpersteine by Jewish descendants of Holocaust victims. They prefer memorials honing in on nazis and end the story there. My ancestors’ Stolpersteine is only the 4th in all of Warsaw, a city where nearly 400,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust. This was no coincidence: my grandmother has devoted her life to studying and telling stories from the Holocaust, and fought with persistence for 10 years - along with a Jewish friend from Warsaw - to memorialize her grandparents. During the unveiling, many community members from Warsaw showed up to honor my ancestors, including the descendants of other Jewish-Polish Holocaust victims.
I have many, many reflections from my trip to Warsaw. In a country where 3 million Jews once lived, there are now only 20,000. In their stead are countless memorials. The day after the Stolpersteine ceremony, I wandered around Warsaw visiting some of these memorials and a story began to take shape. This story came to me in the form of a warning from a city full of ghosts whose modern infrastructure is built on the rubble of my ancestors’ homes and the bones of my ancestors’ bodies. I started to realize that the unsettling feeling in my stomach was not just a reaction to the historical atrocities of the Holocaust, but one rooted in the present. Through my wanderings, I was irked by a pattern that slowly unraveled: a pattern that can only be characterized by the familiar marks of genocide. And then it hit me: the city of Warsaw is a warning of the trajectory of genocide in Gaza and why we must do everything in our power to change its course.
I promise to share this story with you all. I have already begun synthesizing my reflections and feel inspired to tell it in the depth and detail that it deserves. Until then, I share the speech that I gave standing in front of the newly unveiled Stolpersteine of my great-great grandparents. I appreciate the support you have all shown for this project and I have never felt more motivated to write.
I want to start by saying how thankful and honored I am to have grown up with the stories of Lola, Yitzak, Chaim, and Brandil Glazer, the stories of Wolf and Sala Frydman. These people - only one of whom I met - have been a North Star, guiding me (and all of us) through a world where truth is often obscured. Today, their names and their history are forever engraved in the place they last chose to reside before being displaced - or murdered- by genocide. This enshrinement is an honor beyond words and I thank everybody who made it possible.
One of these people - of course - is my grandmother, Ellen. She is the most tenacious person I know, a quality I like to think she passed down to me.
This Stolpersteine unveiling is largely a product of her tenacity - her unwavering commitment to leaning into the lessons - rather than avoiding the trauma of the Holocaust.
She has also given me (and all of us) a great gift in her pursuit of telling the stories of these people we honor today.
Her book, The Seven: A Family Holocaust Story, offers a point of connection, a portal through time and space which we can all explore.
During my most recent exploration on my flight to Warsaw yesterday, a sentence of her words caught my attention.
She writes:
“Even though we may be the puppets of someone else’s history, we become puppeteers as we push it forward into the future, as we rewrite this history on our own terms.”1
Today, I ask you all: as the memories of Wolf and Sala, Yitzak and Lola are memorialized in this place, what lessons are we pushing into the future?
What did we learn from the stories, the lives, the beauty, the devastation of my ancestors?
Being able to ask this question is a privilege that I do not take for granted.
This question shapes my life and I feel a called to ask it in this moment of memorializing genocide.
Does Never Again mean just for us? Do we turn away from people in the Congo facing ongoing violence rooted in plunder of their land, or Haitians who have been collectively punished for a successful slave revolt hundreds of years ago. Do we turn away from people in Sudan starved between two warring factions, or Indigenous People in my Minneapolis neighborhood whose land was stolen and who are denied a roof over their head. And yes, I must ask: do we turn away from Palestinians facing an ethnic cleansing?
From the lessons of the Nazi Holocaust, from the dehumanization of Jewish people that devastated the lives of Wolf and Sala: I know my answer. I know it in the fiber of my being.
What is your answer?
This idea of being a puppeteer of history was adopted by historian and writer Lori Hope Lefkovitz
People are very disconnected from the past and their ancestry, by design. Practices like this are so deep, even uncomfortably so. It takes a strong and courageous person to talk about genocide and I know your ancestors living and dead are super proud Joseph. This is what the world needs more of.
Thank you for this, it resonates greatly. Many of my Jewish ancestors lived in what became the main street of the Warsaw ghetto, and all were murdered apart from the few who immigrated to Australia in the 1930s. I also have German perpetrator heritage, and have lived within a tangled knot of holocaust family trauma. I was taught that Never Again was for all people everywhere, and witnessing the horrors playing out in Palestine are devastating. I do not believe my ancestors want to see their murders used to justify more death and trauma.