Stumbling Blocks — By Gail Tyson
artwork by Sonia Redfern
Tarnished, three plaques blend into paving stones outside my friend’s Berlin apartment building. Dagmar and I bend down, shrouding each four-by-four-inch square in brass cream. Thick as sorrow, it coats engravings of lives cut short.
Minutes later we begin to rub off ashen grime, revealing terse testaments that my mind translates from German:
Here lived
CHANNA BORNSTEIN
Born 1870
Deported August 25, 1942
Theresienstadt
Murdered February 2, 1943
Here lived
BERTHOLD JULIUSBURGER
Born 1868
Deported August 17, 1942
Theresienstadt
Murdered 1942 Treblinka
Here lived
MORITZ HOPP
Born 1864
Deported July 14, 1942
Theresienstadt
Murdered 1942 Treblinka
Channa, Berthold, and Moritz lived in a house on this site until Nazis dragged them away. After the bombing ceased, the rubble removed, the five-story apartment building rose, and five decades passed, Dagmar and a few neighbors paid to install memorials to these elders. More than 100,000 stolperstiene (“stumbling blocks”) are laid across Europe—some in sidewalks paved with crushed gravestones from Jewish cemeteries that the Nazis desecrated. The name also recalls a Nazi-era saying, if one accidently stumbled over a protruding stone, A Jew must be buried here. These lie flat, level with the path. Plaques to my eye, they are really ingots sunken into the earth. They halt passersby, insisting we remember the many persons seized, deported, murdered, who left no trace behind.
Fierce rubbing cannot erase the dread of these three seventy-somethings, waiting for the rap on the door, the prod of a rifle. We bend low like our ancestors, who washed the bodies of the deceased to prepare them for burial. Dusk hushes this street; my hands rub harder. Until the brass plates begin to glow as if lit from within. As if we are rubbing genie lamps, trying to conjure lives long gone. As if their spirits at last can come out of hiding.
In 2020 Shanti Arts published Gail Tyson’s chapbook, The Vermeer Tales. Upcoming and recent creative nonfiction appears in About Place, Allium, Catamaran Literary Journal, Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality, and Rathalla Review. A former resident of Berlin, she wrote this micro essay after a recent visit to that city. She now lives in Santa Cruz, California.