IBBA-CNR, not to forget. The stumbling stones: memory in a cobblestone

27 January 2021

Brass bricks placed in front of the last home as free individuals, victims of the Nazis and their fascist allies. Each of those stones shows the name and surname, the date of birth, the date and place of deportation and the date of death. Thanks to the stumbling stones, as they are called, the memory of the victims of the Shoah becomes widespread. The thought to the deported starts from the streets, from the town squares that we walk on every day, composing a map of memory not relegated to a single monument or a single day. It is the way in which those stones, with discretion, starting from below, ‘stumbling’ almost by chance, manage to put us in relation with the past.

“The peculiarity of the stumbling stones, is that you do not have to go there to see them on purpose, the memory is everywhere and becomes an integral part of everyday life,” explains Aldo Luperini of the Institute of Agricultural Biology and Biotechnology of the National Research Council (CNR-Ibba) in Milan. They are, in fact, over 70 thousand, throughout Europe. A “small and and discreet” monument, underlines the researcher.

The clip was published on the occasion of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, the international recurrence that commemorates the victims of the Holocaust every January 27.

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