“I have found that it is the small everyday deed of ordinary folks that keep the darkness at bay. Small acts of kindness and love.” 

-J. R. R. Tolkien

Amidst the grandeur of the monuments in Berlin and Washington DC that gently remember all those who perished under the Nazi rule, the most numerous of them are also the easiest to miss. For the first time when I visited the continental Europe, I came across these bunch of small brass plaques, each measuring less than 10 sq. cm, in the most innocuous of places. They are installed on the everyday corners like, at the doorsteps, near a buzzing café, or on the sidewalks, and each telling a chilling story of a person once lived peacefully and how their lives were irrevocably changed under the Nazi occupation.

This project is a brainchild of Gunter Demnig, who wanted to commemorate the Auschwitz-Erlass, the decree ordering the deportation of the Sinti and Roma people to extermination camps. The first of these plaques was installed near the Cologne’s city hall in 1992, and 40 more around Berlin, albeit without any official permission. The city, however, was quick to grant permission to such an innovative and profound way of honouring the holocaust victims.

The principal difference in the philosophy of the Stolperstein is that they remember each of the victims in a next-door setting. While the individual victims are often forgotten in the grand monuments, these plaques continue to remember them, and spell out the warning to the today’s generation that the persecution started at their doorsteps. Currently there are 70000 of them throughout Europe. Together, the Stolpersteins make the largest decentralised monument in the world.

The word “Stolperstein” literally means “stumbling stone”. This memorial is one of a kind that makes us to stumble on the fact that how easily people can be deceived to hate others who are different. It reminds us that the hate is brewed in our ordinary life, and the evil feeds on it. Only the small acts of kindness of love can keep it at bay.