They are Stolpersteine, “stumbling stones”: concrete cubes ten centimetres across with a brass plate on top, set into the pavement in front of the last home of someone the Nazis deported, murdered or drove out. The German artist Gunter Demnig began the project in 1992. In 2024 there were more than 2,500 of them in Amsterdam.
A name at your feet
In front of some house doors in Amsterdam a small square of brass is set into the pavement. It is the top of a concrete cube ten centimetres across. On the brass are a person’s name and the dates of their birth, their deportation and their death, where these are known. Most plates begin with the words “here lived”.
Each stone lies at the last place where that person chose freely to live, work or study, before they were deported or murdered, or fled, or were driven to suicide.
One artist, and then a hundred thousand stones
The stones are the work of the German artist Gunter Demnig, who was born in Berlin in 1947. He began the project in 1992 and laid the first stones in Cologne on 4 January 1995, at that time without permission from the authorities. On 26 May 2023 the hundred thousandth was laid, in Nuremberg. Together they are the largest decentralised memorial in the world, and each one is still made by hand.
Most of them remember Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Others have been laid for Sinti and Roma, for homosexuals, for Jehovah’s Witnesses, for people with disabilities and for members of the resistance.
In the Netherlands and in Amsterdam
The first stones in the Netherlands were laid in the town of Borne on 29 November 2007: sixteen of them, at six addresses. Today there are well over ten thousand in the country.
In Amsterdam so many stones were asked for that a long waiting list grew. Since 2021 stones have therefore also been made in the city itself, in a workshop in the garden of the Goethe-Institut on the Herengracht. By November 2024 more than 3,000 had been made there. In 2024 more than 2,500 stones lay in Amsterdam’s streets.
Why “stumbling”
Nobody trips over them: they lie level with the paving. Demnig likes to quote a schoolchild who said that you do not fall over a Stolperstein, “you stumble with your head and your heart”. The stones are not put where everyone must see them. You come across one by chance, and only when you are close.
Not everyone agrees with them. Munich does not allow them on public ground, after the head of its Jewish community called them an unworthy way to remember.
Where to look
Look down as you walk. There is also a longer stone, a “stumbling threshold” of 100 by 10 centimetres, for a whole group of people. One lies at the tram stop Artis/Nationaal Holocaustmuseum, in memory of the tens of thousands of Jews who were deported from that stop.
The museum stands opposite the Hollandsche Schouwburg, in the heart of the old Jewish quarter: the theatre the occupiers used from August 1942 as the place where Jews were gathered for deportation. When you find a stone, stop for a moment and read the name.
Where to see it
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