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The Holocaust Victims Who Lived in Our Building
On the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz we MUST NOT forget
Here are some disturbing facts.
- The Shoah (Holocaust) happened — a vast ethnic cleansing and genocide.
- These acts were instigated by the Nazi right-wing German military dictatorship that murdered up to 16 million civilians,* the majority of them Jewish people.
- The Nazis were assisted in these acts by many collaborators in occupied countries.
- Many people today are ignorant about these acts, and some people today think those acts were a good idea.
Two victims of the Shoah murdered by the Nazis lived where we live today.
One day we returned from a long trip to find two brass plaques installed in front of our building in Prague, Czech Republic. The freshness of the roses indicated the installation was recent — no more than a day earlier.
For those who don’t know, those two brass plaques are Stolpersteine, German for “stumbling stones,” also known as “the stones of the disappeared.” The Stolpersteine project, initiated by German Gunter Demnig in 1992. The project remembers people who were were abducted by the Nazis, sent to concentration camps, and usually murdered, commemorating these people by installing plaques in front of the buildings where they lived or worked.
We have seen quite a few of the Stolpersteine in our travels around Europe. They are distressingly common, over 75,000 in over 1,200 cities so far. There are 791 so far in Prague, which was under Nazi occupation for years. Two were installed a block away before we moved here. Now, two had been installed in front of our home.
The plaques read: “Here lived Arnošt Brunner and Irena Brunnerová (née Reinischová), born 1895 and 1911, respectively. Deported to Terezín [concentration camp] in 1942, then to Riga, where they were murdered.”
I found some information about Irena Brunnerová and Arnošt Brunner, including his photo.
