35 Stolpersteine in Munich on Reichspogromnacht 2023
Historic date. Historic place. Historic deed. Visionary genius. Visionary project.
Historic date and place: November 9, 1938. Munich.
November 9, 1938: Reichspogromnacht. “Kristallnacht”. Unleashed by Hitler in Munich, mobs torched 1,400 synagogues and tens of thousands of Jewish-owned stores. Hundreds of Jews were killed, thousands were dragged to concentration camps.
Historic deed by a visionary genius.
On November 9th, Gunter Demnig will place 35 Stolpersteine in Munich – the greatest single-day total in the city’s history. Gunter Demnig launched the Stolpersteine movement. Over the last 26 years, he and his family of commemoration have placed more than 110,000 of these sidewalk-level plaques in 1,800 cities in 31 countries. The Stolpersteine are the world’s project of Holocaust commemoration.
Visionary project
The placement of the Stolpersteine in Munich will be preceded by the preparation of the biographies of the 35 persons being commemorated. This will be undertaken by the interns staffing the Stolpersteine organization in Munich. Several of these interns are juniors at the Montessori high school. The interns will then read the biographies during the placements – and will create the videos chronicling them.
The interns’ participation is being financed by the Ruth Güttner Educational Fund. Ruth was a budding poet. Along with her mother and 996 other Jews, she was murdered in Kaunas, Lithuania on November 25, 1941. Ruth was 14 years old.
The Fund’s work recently received a great boost – a donation from Alan Zekelman, the Michigan-based philanthropist and founder of the Zelekman Holocaust Center. https://www.holocaustcenter.org.
“Bringing them back. That’s what we are trying to do: to bring the victims of the Holocaust back, by bringing them to our eyes, minds, hearts and souls. The Stolpersteine give us a way of doing that. That’s why we love interning at the Stolpersteine. We say “danke schön” to the people making our participation possible,” states Paulus Drummer, Stolpersteine intern.
