A German artist who is preparing to lay the 100,000th cobblestone commemorating a person who was deported and killed by the Nazis has no intention of giving up making the brass-capped blocks, saying demand is higher than ever.
By placing Stolpersteine (“stumble stones”) outside the victims’ last known address, 75-year-old Gunter Demnig aims to draw attention to the fate of individuals in the Holocaust.
The project started about three decades ago when Demnig laid the first stones in Berlin and Cologne.
Nearly 100,000 cobblestones later, they can be found in 30 countries across Europe, from Finland to Italy, Hungary, Russia and Ukraine.
“I never dreamed of this,” Demnig said, saying he had expected a few hundred or maybe 1,000 stones.
“I was naive enough to believe that it would have to decrease at some point…but it’s the other way around: interest is getting greater and greater.”
He expects to lay his 100,000th stone this year.
In his workshop, Demnig embosses the name and date of birth and circumstances of death by hand. He lays most of the stones, which can be requested by anyone, himself, with the costs paid by donations and sponsorship from private individuals as well as companies or institutions.
“People ask why I don’t have it done in a factory? I say Auschwitz was a murder factory. That’s why it’s important to me that the writing is hammered into the plaques by hand,” he said.
Read the article by Tilman Blasshofer in Sight Magazine.