Ralph Stern

What do the stones represent to you?

How do you approach the murder of millions? There is a substantial discourse around the impossibility of representing the Holocaust. I find the Stolpersteine to be the most compelling, the most personal, the most moving memorials that one could imagine because it names the individuals, it cites the date of birth, it cites the date of deportation, it cites the date of death. It gives the precise location, you are essentially on the threshold of these events because the Stolpersteine are at the entrances to buildings, so that you are literally on the threshold of the personal lives that these people lead until they were, again literally, torn out of those lives and thrust into the abyss. I always pay attention to Stolpersteine, I always read them, they're always painful, they are always in many ways, so difficult because you read of an 85 year old woman who suddenly gets torn out of her home and is thrust into the abyss. You read of a three month old infant who, well, it's the same, thrust into the abyss. There is an incredibly personal connection and the incredible pervasiveness of the Stolpersteine. It's not as if one can say: ‘Oh, they were over there, they were in that part of the city’. You see the fine grain of integration. You see the fine grain of assimilation and you realize that all of a sudden, none of that mattered. I find them to be absolutely wonderful in achieving what it is that they set out to achieve…

It was unclear until I was made aware of the suicide note, which was much later … it was always said that he had committed suicide … then everything was very fuzzy. It was something that nobody really talked about. It's not the thing you talk about and certainly not something you talk about with a 12 year old or a 14 year old. And, after I was 16, the conversations weren't happening with me anymore. What is that actual history? What actually happened? I'd never heard that my grandfather had been deported. I had never heard that he had died in the Holocaust. I didn't know that there could even be a Stolperstein for somebody who committed suicide ... and the way the Stolperstein is formulated is quite moving. That he committed suicide before the deportation transport. I was completely unprepared for this and then all of a sudden it was there…