Public streets and the buildings that line them have often been used to mark the sites where famous people used to live. I’m including a photo below of a marker in the wall of the building facing our hotel room in Strasbourg, honoring French composer Émile Waldteufel, best known for “The Skater’s Waltz.” Born Charles Émile Levy, he was part of a family of Jewish Alsatian musicians.

A more recent, and quite powerful, example of memorial remembrance markers has been the use in Europe (but especially in Germany and parts of France) of stone markers called Stolpersteine, usually translated as “stumbling stones” or sometimes “stumbling blocks.” Our Road Scholar guide, Amandine Prückner, pointed out two as we were walking in the Petite France section of Strasbourg [on May 12th].

Each “stone” [a brass plate] is placed in the sidewalk in front of the last voluntary residence where a victim of Nazism [aka National Socialism] lived. The Stolpersteine gives the person’s name, and often their dates of birth, deportation, and death.

It is important to note that the Stolpersteine project commemorates many victim groups: Jews, Roma and Sinti, political dissidents, resistance members, disabled victims of “euthanasia” killings, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexual victims, and others persecuted by National Socialism.

But the brass plaques themselves don’t mention the individual’s religion, or the reason they were deported.

Certainly, there are family or first names that are typically Jewish, as well as deportation sites, such as Treblinka, Sobibor, and Belzec that were specifically designed by Nazi leaders for the extermination of Jews as a people, and Auschwitz where some 90% of the more than one million individuals murdered there were Jews.

In contrast the Struthof camp (which I’ll return to when I talk about our visit there) included Jewish victims, but primarily served as a brutal forced labor camp and detention center that targeted resistance fighters (especially French) and political opponents of National Socialism.

By coincidence, we had dinner one night in Strasbourg with our Alliance Française friends Steve and Deborah, and my brother Rob and his wife Pat at L’Oignon, an excellent Alsatian restaurant.

The building in which L’Oignon is located, at 4 rue des Moulins, had been the home of the Daniels family: Chaïm (father); Perle (mother); and their children Arnold, Erna, and Régine (who were respectively 14, 13, and 7 years old when killed at Auschwitz in 1943).

The five Daniels family members are now memorialized by Stolpersteine markers in front of L’Oignon. It is unsettling to think we had such an enjoyable meal where the Daniels family had once lived.

Stolpersteine markers have become especially common in German cities and towns, as well as in parts of France and more than thirty other countries. As of August 2024, the Stolpersteine project has placed over 107,000 stones in almost 1,900 municipalities, including 92 stones (as of today) in Strasbourg.

The Stolpersteine serve as reminders of evil occurring amid everyday life. But we would also encounter more evidence of evil a couple of days later when we visited the Struthof Concentration Camp set in the beautiful Vosges Mountains — which I’ll discuss later.

To learn more about the remarkable Stolpersteine project and its creator Gunter Demnig, go to their website — you’ll find a wealth of information there: https://www.stolpersteine.eu/en

See a list with of each of the Strasbourg victims now memorialized by Stolpersteine (as of today — May 31, 2026 — 92 stones at 42 addresses): https://de.wikipedia.org/…/Liste_der_Stolpersteine_in…

For photos of each of the Daniels family members: https://www.stolpersteine.lautre.net/…/famille-daniel…/

Volunteer members of the organization Stolpersteine 67 polish and help maintain the stone markers: https://www.stolpersteine.lautre.net/wp/actualites/