This Man Is Cleaning All 388 Holocaust Plaques in His City

Gerhard Geier honours the memory of hundreds of Holocaust victims by cleaning the 388 cobblestone memorials which are placed where the victim used to live or work in his hometown in Austria.

Writers at JTA tell us more:

A video by BBC News explains that Geier has set out to clean and restore the 388 “stolpersteine,” or cobblestone memorials to victims of the Nazis, in the city of Salzburg, Austria. The goal is to spruce up their weathered appearance, so that people “will notice them better.”

“Very often, particularly when there are stones dedicated to little children — two or three years old — I ask myself: ‘What would have become of you?’” he says in the video.

Salzburg’s stolpersteine are part of a much larger project by German artist Gunter Demnig, which he started in 1992. There are currently over 67,000 of the cobblestone memorials in over 22 countries, and while they mostly commemorate Jewish people killed in the Holocaust, some pay tribute to Roma, Jehovah’s witnesses, disabled people and other victims killed by the Nazis. It is the largest decentralized memorial of its kind in the world.

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