Prague - Gunter Demnig kneels on Prague's poshest shopping
street, tapping a shining block into the cobblestone pavement beside
a luxury-watch store.
'Here lived Eva Abelesova, born 1930, deported to Lodz in 1941 and
murdered,' reads the inscription under the Neo-Renaissance
residential building at 10, Parizska Avenue.
In all, the German sculptor this week placed 10 such memorial
cubes, which he calls stumbling blocks (Stolpersteine) in German,
into the Prague streetscape, his first batch in the Czech Republic.
He brought them in his red van from Germany, equipped for the task
with buckets of cobbling necessities: rubber-padded hammer, cement
and sand.
'Eighty per cent of owners do not want to have a plate on their
house,' Demnig said. 'This belongs to the city. I think it is
better.'
Demnig, who was born two years after World War II, began honouring
victims of Nazi purges with 10-by-10-centimetre concrete blocks
affixed with an inscribed brass plate in 1993.
He had no particular personal reason. He said there were neither
victims nor culprits in his family.
Since then, he has placed over 16,000 of them, sponsored by
surviving relatives or institutional donors, mostly across Germany as
well as dozens in Austria and Hungary.
This week's Central European tour also includes the Czech town of
Kolin, and the Polish city of Wroclaw. And his project is
spreading to France, Norway and Ukraine, he explained.
'I have to keep going because there is so much interest,' said
Demnig, wearing a blue-jeans shirt and Australian-bush-style
leather hat. His schedule is packed until mid 2009.
The stumbling blocks, popping up like golden teeth from sea of
grey sidewalks, have caught the eye of 23-year-old Bianca Lipanska,
born to Czech exiles in Hamburg.
She told fellow members of the Czech Union of Jewish Youth about
the project, and the group set out to bring it to Prague, which was
home to one of the Europe's oldest and largest Jewish communities
before the Holocaust.
The city's Jewish population, some 40,000 before the war is under
1,600 today.
But the stumbling blocks, many of which were dedicated to other
persecuted minorities, have also met with resistance.
The city councils of Munich in Germany, and Poland's Bydgosz have
turned them down. While such cities usually cite technical problems,
the project's supporters suspect them of hushing up the painful past.
Critics have bashed Demnig for degrading the victims by placing
the memorials on the ground. His answer is simple - and humbling:
'You have to bow when you want to have a look at a block.'
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