For many years, our dear friend Johanna Neumann encouraged me to place what are called Stolpersteine or “stumbling stones” at the home where my family lived in The Hague, Netherlands. Johanna grew up in Hamburg, Germany, and she and her parents survived the Holocaust by fleeing to Albania. We first met Johanna when she led the Washington chapter of the American Technion Society. We remained in close touch after she took a position at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. She and her husband were deeply observant Orthodox Jews, but that did not keep them from developing a close bond with my partner Joel and me, or from inviting us to delicious traditional Friday evening and holiday dinners. No conversation was complete, however, without an admonition about Stolpersteine and the unique opportunity they represented to memorialize my family. Time and again I would nod and promise Johanna that I would heed her advice.
The Stolpersteine project was initiated in the 1990s by German artist Gunter Demnig and aims to commemorate victims of the Nazis precisely at their last place of residence. Gunter Demnig was inspired by what he reported as a quote from the Talmud: “A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.” The project had its roots in Germany, and in May 2023, they reached the milestone of 100,000 Stolpersteine placed in towns and cities throughout Europe.
Physically, a Stolperstein is a 20-centimeter concrete block bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name, year of birth, and key dates and places of Nazi persecution, deportation, and murder. While most Stolpersteine commemorate Jewish victims, they have also memorialized other victims of Nazi persecution. Many meanings have been ascribed to the word Stolperstein. My preference is for the metaphorical allusion—in both German and English—to stumbling on something and being unexpectedly and forcibly reminded of an event or a person.
Sadly, Johanna passed away in 2017 and did not see the promise I made come to fruition. It did at last on June 1, 2023, when Joel and I oversaw the installation of four Stolpersteine commemorating my parents, Simche and Gitla Münzer, and my sisters, Eva and Liane Münzer, at what had been our home in The Hague—until the Nazis intervened and the threat of deportation forced my family into hiding in September 1942. My parents were hidden in a psychiatric hospital, but were arrested by the SS and deported on December 31, 1942. My father survived long enough to be liberated in May 1945, but succumbed July 25, 1945, still in the Ebensee concentration camp in Austria. Fortunately, my mother survived Auschwitz and a long list of other concentration camps.
I was only nine months old when I was handed over to the Dutch-Indonesian Madna family and their Indonesian Muslim nanny, who sheltered me from the Nazis for three years. I was not quite four when I was reunited with my mother after she was liberated. My sisters, however, were hidden with a different family and betrayed to the Nazis. They were deported on February 8, 1944 and killed in Auschwitz on February 11. Eva was seven and Liane was five.
Joel and I also tended to the placement of a Stolperstein at the last known address of a sixth member of our family—my father’s youngest brother, my Uncle Elische (Emiel) Münzer. Through painstaking research in documents from the Westerbork camp archives, I discovered that—considering his young age and good health—he might have survived by doing forced labor for the Nazis, but very likely chose to be with my sisters when they were killed in Auschwitz.
The placement of the Stolpersteine was the climax of two emotionally charged weeks. They began when I rang the doorbell at Zoutmanstraat 100, the former address of my father’s store, now a private residence. I had stopped at the address countless times, always amazed and pleased that the large Art Deco poster—boldly advertising Siegfried Münzer Coupeur aus Wien (tailor from Vienna)—was still in the portico that served as both our home at Zoutmanstraat 98 and my father’s store at number 100.
I had corresponded with the building’s owner and was pleased that he enthusiastically supported the placement of the Stolpersteine in the pavement in front of his home. He even offered to host any visitors who might attend the event with coffee and cake. Still, I did not know how I would react when, at long last, I set foot in what had been my father’s place of business and walked where he had once walked.
The broad smile and warm handshake that greeted me made me feel as if I had indeed come home. It also helped that our host had the same taste in Breuer-style furniture that my mother told me she and my father had favored in decorating my father’s place of business. She had rescued some pieces from the store after the war. One chair found a place in my bedroom when I was six years old and became a cherished link to my father. The residence’s owner, Joel, and I toasted our nascent friendship with a glass of wine. The owner then escorted us on a tour of the bright, sunny apartment and backyard, and afterward took us down to a lower floor that had been my father’s workshop. For a country where so much lies below sea level, it had a surprisingly high ceiling. My mother had told me about her insistence on an elegant storefront, but now I knew where the Coupeur aus Wien had carried out his craft.
Our host told us that my parents were the first occupants of the Moderne style house at Zoutmanstraat 98 and the adjoining store at number 100. What had been a spacious home on three floors above the store has since been subdivided into modest student apartments. The only knowledge I had of the interior of our home was from family photographs that my mother kept in two flip-to boxes from the cosmetics store she owned after the war.
Fortunately, the student couple who occupied the apartment that would have been my family’s living room on the second floor had been persuaded by their neighbor to allow Joel and me to come up for a visit. As we entered the apartment, I caught my breath as I realized we were standing in the very room where my bris or circumcision had taken place. I was looking at the stained-glass border of the window visible in the picture of me on a pillow, with the mohel on one side and a nurse on the other. It was one of two small photographs taken at that first milestone in a Jewish boy’s life. The second photo was of the dining room in the back of the living room. That was where my father, my sisters, my uncle Emiel, and many friends had gathered to celebrate this joyful occasion of welcoming a new Jewish life into the fold—even as the vise of the Nazi occupation was tightening.
My mother always grew tearful when she looked at those photos. Somehow she had kept them with her throughout her time in close to a dozen concentration camps. She said that they strengthened her will to live, but she also feared that if she ever lost the photos, it would mean that I had been discovered by the Nazis and killed.
As we went down the long, narrow, curved stairway after our visit, I sat down on one of the steps, overcome with emotion and close to tears. I explained that this was where my mother had spent what she described as the most terrifying night of her life. She had been left alone with me in the house after my father had gone into hiding in a psychiatric hospital, and my sisters had been placed with our devout Catholic neighbors, Jo and Ko van Leeuwen. My mother told me she was so afraid an SS officer might ring the doorbell that she had covered the clapper with a piece of cloth to muffle the sound, then spent the entire night sitting in the stairwell, watching it.
Since placing a Stolperstein requires making a hole in a sidewalk, the application process is managed at the local level. But the actual block is handcrafted by Gunther Demnig and his team. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a backlog of applications for Stolpersteine in The Hague. On January 11, I was notified that June 1 would be the date when Stolpersteine would be placed in the central part of The Hague, including both the quarter where my parents had lived and the one where my Uncle Emiel had lived. On April 7, I received a copy of the route the two-car convoy would take to bring all 38 Stolpersteine to their respective destinations. We were advised to pick the precise location for the stones ahead of time and to keep any remarks during their placement brief, since each location was only allowed 20 minutes.
Joel and I arrived at Zoutmanstraat 98 about one hour before the punctual arrival at 9:25 a.m. of the small convoy including two bricklayers, a photographer, and Jan Karel, the man who headed the local Stolperstein office. It felt good to be surrounded by about 30 friends who had come from near and far to honor the memory of my family. As I held each heavy stone in turn and looked at its inscription, I visualized the face of the person each one represented. I watched the workmen as they created an opening on the sidewalk for the four stones, Simche and Gitla Münzer’s on top, and Eva and Liane Münzer’s beneath theirs.
I thanked Gunter Demnig for conceiving the idea of the Stolpersteine and thanked Jan Karel and the local team that brought the day into reality for me. I then expressed the hope that those who might stumble on these stones would not only recall the names of my parents, sisters, and uncle, but also recommit to a world free of the prejudice, bigotry, and hate that had robbed them and so many others of their lives. I said that, sadly, the fires of Auschwitz and the other death camps still smolder, and it falls to us to extinguish them forever and create a world that celebrates our common humanity.
Photos: Al Mūnzer, Holocaust survivor and Museum volunteer, and Joel Wind participate in the placement of Stolpersteine memorial plaques in The Hague for Al’s family members—Simche, Gitla, Eva, Liane, and Emiel. Courtesy of Al Mūnzer
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