In front of several doors in the Rome ghetto, embedded in the sidewalk, there are small brass plaques the size of a cobblestone. Each one has a name, a date of birth, the date the person was arrested, the date they were deported and the place where they died. They are stumbling stones, and the name is not a force of expression: they are low to the ground, so that anyone passing by has to lower their eyes and read.
The Stolpersteine project, by Gunter Demnig
The stumbling stones were born from a project by German artist Gunter Demnig, who installed the first ones in Cologne in 1995. In Germany the project is called Stolpersteine; in Italy, pietre d'inciampo. The logic is always the same: one plaque per person, placed not in a remote memorial, but on the door of the house, on the street where they walked every day before being taken. The project grew from city to city, country to country, and today has more than fifty thousand plaques across Europe that experienced Nazi occupation, the largest decentralized monument in the world.
In Rome, the first thirty stones were installed by Demnig on January 28, 2010, on the International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust, distributed across six districts of the city. The ghetto, the oldest neighborhood with a continuous Jewish presence in Europe, concentrates a large part of them, because it was there that the community had lived for centuries when the deportation arrived. Since then, the city has received new waves of plaques in annual editions of "Memories of Stumbling in Rome", which continue to locate families and addresses through archival research, and gradually expand a map that was never complete.
Each installation follows the same simple protocol: document research to confirm name, dates and address; contact, when possible, with descendants; and the placement of the sign by a local craftsman, close to the cobblestone, at the level of the feet of those passing by. There is no grand ceremony or statue. The declared intention of the project is the opposite of a monument: a discreet mark, almost invisible to those who are not looking, which only fulfills its function when someone, unintentionally, lowers their eyes.
The raid of October 16, 1943
In the early hours of October 16, 1943, German occupation forces surrounded the Rome ghetto and arrested 1,259 people: 689 women, 363 men, 207 children. After the release of some of the detainees, including people from mixed families and some foreigners, 1,023 were deported directly to Auschwitz. Sixteen survived: fifteen men and one woman, Settimia Spizzichino, who died in 2000. No children survived.
It was the first mass deportation of Jews in Italy, and it paved the way for the ones that followed, in other cities across the country. Until that morning, part of the Italian Jewish community had even belonged to the fascist party itself; the systematic separation by ethnicity intensified under German pressure throughout the war, in a process that historiography continues to reconstruct case by case, without easy generalizations about who knew what, and when.
What the plaque says that the monument doesn't say
A traditional monument speaks of everyone, together, and therefore, often, speaks of no one in particular. The stumbling stone does the opposite: it forces the memory to pass through a name, a date, a specific door. Anyone who walks through the ghetto of Rome today finds, between one shop window and another, this type of interruption: six signs together in front of the same building, because an entire family was taken away in a single morning. The gesture of lowering your eyes to read is also the gesture that the project asks for: that memory does not remain standing, distant, but leans down.
There is no adjective that the sign needs to borrow from the visitor. The name, date of birth, date of arrest, date of deportation and place of death alone make up the most direct sentence there is about what happened there. It is this functional silence, without rhetoric, that separates the stumbling stone from a recited memorial: it does not ask for commotion, it presents a fact, and leaves the reader to complete, on their own, the distance between a common door in a common neighborhood and what passed by it on an October morning.
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See recommended readingsFrequently asked questions
What are stumbling stones (Stolpersteine)?
Small brass plaques embedded in the sidewalk, in front of the last door where a person lived free, with their name, date of birth, date of arrest, date of deportation and place of death.
Who created the stumbling stones project?
German artist Gunter Demnig, who installed the first ones in Cologne in 1995. The project is called Stolpersteine in Germany and pietre d'inciampo in Italy, and today there are more than fifty thousand plaques in cities across Europe that experienced Nazi occupation.
When did the stumbling stones reach Rome?
On January 28, 2010, International Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Holocaust, when Gunter Demnig installed the first thirty plaques in six districts of the city.
What happened in the Rome ghetto raid of October 16, 1943?
In the early hours of October 16, 1943, German forces arrested 1,259 people in the ghetto, of whom 1,023 were deported directly to Auschwitz. Sixteen survived.
About the same neighborhood: Jews in Rome, the oldest community · Why a plaque on the ground weighs more than a monument · Jewish ghetto in Rome, what to see · Truth as coherence
Source class (YouTube): A História contada através do Bairro Hebraico em Roma (NousCast)