I am excited to be joined by so many relatives and friends and moved by the effort people have made to come over from near and far to be with our family, the Stibbes and the van Adelsbergs, in this event.
Nominally, we are here to insert four commemorative brass paving stones in front of the house where for many years my maternal grandparents, Solomon and Gertrude van Adelsberg, lived with their two children, Elma and Martin. In September 1943, nearly 80 years ago, after having been forced to move several times to different places in Amsterdam, the children went into hiding and the parents were deported. I never knew my grandparents: to me they are two leaves on the family tree and a few smiling faces looking at me from time-worn photographs.
They are also a very personal connection, a stepping stone, to a crucial chapter in the history of Europe. We are here because I, and hopefully all of us gathered here, have been given the opportunity through commemoration to turn this shapeless and tenuous link to the past into something more tangible: to turn an abstract stepping stone to an actual stumbling stone, a brass plaque that forces you to stop and to reflect. As I see it, we are here so that the personal story of four people and their descendants can partake in the history of a continent and from there to reckon with the times we live in.
We begin with the brass paving stones, the stolpersteine, themselves. The idea was conceived by the German painter Gunter Demnig in 1992. He calls it ‘an art project’ whose purpose is to commemorate the murder of all the victims of National Socialism: Jews, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, political and religious dissidents, the mentally ill and other victims of forced euthanasia. It is interesting to reflect on the fact that Demnig is German and that this project, that has been running continuously for thirty years, is presented as ‘art’. It says something about Germany – that the descendants of the perpetrators of great historical crimes can find a way to engage with their past, and it says a lot about art, that art is not just about making pretty things; that by it’s unique ability to speak outside of regular and mundane dialogue it can meaningfully criticise and, even influence, society.
To date, nearly 80,000 paving stones have been placed throughout the whole of Europe making it the world’s largest decentralized memorial. Centralized memorials command our attention and tend to be large and are prone to the bombastic and the heroic. They work because they impress, and they impress by humbling the spectator, making him or her small, at times even inconsequential. Not surprisingly Fascist and dictatorial regimes like heroic memorials. Stolpersteine, by comparison, work differently. They blend into the scenery, they are understated and patiently await our discovery. Theirs is a feather touch: by all means ignore them if you choose to do so, but you’ll stumble upon another one a few streets down, or in the next neighbourhood or the next city or the next country. In German, a Stolperstein can also mean a ‘potential problem’. And indeed, as every stone stands in for a single individual, you could say that every single victim is a ‘problem’. Unlike central memorials that collectivize and can easily be avoided or bypassed, the Stolpersteine are apprehended with downcast eyes and act as a persistent intrusion of memory into our everyday life. I once saw in Berlin a mother pushing a stroller and her elder child pulling her back to ask what that shiny thing in the pavement was. I didn’t hear the conversation but many times I’ve played in my mind different versions of the ensuing dialogue in which a young German mother tries to explain to her child the inscription ‘murdered in Auschwitz’.
On the more personal level the problem that confounded me when over four years ago we began the process of commissioning a Stolperstein or Struikelsteen in Dutch, was how to relate my ancestral history to what l see around me today. To put it bluntly, what does it mean that I never met my grandparents? and how do I make sense of their deportation and murder? Laying a Stolperstein is an act of participation, since the project stipulates that the information inscribed on the stone be verified and that living descendants must be informed and engaged where possible. Greatly assisted by the municipality of Amsterdam, I began to investigate circumstances of my grandparents last few months. I found out that the van Adelsbergs were one of the last families to be called up for deportation; I have no reason to doubt, they were well aware of what was happening. My mother Elma told me that her father Solomon wanted his wife Gertrude to go into hiding, but she did not want to be parted. On the 29th of September, 1943 they were both arrested and taken to Westerbork and from there sent to Auschwitz on the so called ‘regular Tuesday train’. A few days prior to their arrest, their children Elma and Martin went into hiding separately and never met each other during the war.
The investigation into these details triggered my imagination. I began to envisage their life and could not help but project myself into it. I asked myself trivial, almost silly, questions, such as did they clean the house before they left, did they double-lock the door? More difficult questions also began percolating in my mind: would I part from family members and children in order to save myself? Would I choose death? Would I fight back? and what would be the purpose of that? Immersed in these hypothetical queries I re-stumbled on the simple truth that, historically speaking, until now, I am immensely privileged and even though the period that we are commemorating today brought about intolerable conditions that are hard to imagine, the underlying evil has not been eradicated. Everywhere I look, near and far, I see the foreboding signs. You don’t need to wait for the death camps: hatred and intolerance of the other creeps in stealthily and takes root very quickly. Let us not forget that the infamous Equalisation Act that dissolved all independent public life in Germany and forced the state to be modelled on the Nazi model was enacted in April 1933, only three months after Hitler took power. Only yesterday, the UK High Court ruled that government’s plan to send asylum seekers to Rwanda – in effect treating people who are in search of safety like human cargo – is lawful. I am reminded of a contemporary British timely artist’s warning; he said that ‘the greatest crimes in the world are not committed by people breaking the rules but by people following the rules.’
For today’s commemoration to be meaningful I feel that it is not enough to pay homage to the past, it is necessary to stumble upon it and let it permeate the present – lest we fall again.
Num Stibbe (22 December 2022)