They call them stumbling stones – little brass plaques in the pavement marking addresses where Holocaust victims once lived.
As the Netherlands marks 80 years of liberation, a row has sprung up about placing Stolpersteine for 45 Dutch political prisoners – Jewish activists, communists, critical Christians – who were “experimentally” gassed by the Nazis at the Bernburg psychiatric clinic in Germany in 1942.
While around 102,000 Jewish people, Roma and Sinti from the Netherlands were deported and murdered, there is increasing attention on the collusion of the Dutch state in turning over lists of political “undesirables”.
For the past year, Jan Boxem and Steven Brandsma, related through their partners, have been campaigning for stumbling stones across the Netherlands to mark the stories of the 45 Bernburg men. But they say they have hit their own stumbling block of cash, bureaucracy and conflicting ideas.
“Last year Jan and I went to Germany to pay our debts to history,” said Brandsma. “Jan’s uncle was gassed there, something he only found out when he started to research him. Although his uncle was in Neuengamme camp and his cause of death was reported as serious illness, he was actually gassed in Bernburg … burned in an oven and his ashes dumped in a river in east Germany.”
The uncle, Hendrik Visscher, a communist from the city of Enschede, was one of several thousand whose dossiers were passed by Dutch police to the Gestapo. “This is hardly recognised,” said Brandsma. “It is a huge scandal.”
But he said their requests have encountered bureaucratic and financial resistance, particularly in Haarlem, where the volunteer-run Struikelstenen Haarlem foundation only has a municipal mandate to place stones for 733 Jewish, Sinti and Roma Holocaust victims – a 10-year process.
“In Haarlem, a decision has been made to place stumbling stones specifically for Jewish people who were deported in the second world war,” said Marieke Geerts, spokesperson for mayor Jos Wienen. “That’s what the foundation is busy doing. So if someone wants a stumbling stone but [the victim] does not fall into this group, then we look at whether there is another way to remember or bring attention to them. This was offered to the applicants in this case – but they want a struikelsteen [Dutch for stumbling stone] or nothing.”
Others view things differently. In Maastricht, there is a stumbling stone for resistance fighter Lambert Kraft, and the Bèr Kraftstraat road is named after him. In Utrecht, a request to place stones for two victims was agreed – and funded – in an afternoon.
Meanwhile in The Hague, leader of local VVD party Lotte van Basten Batenburg fundraised for seven stones with Christian Union-SGP party colleagues in an afternoon. “The Jewish victims are very important to commemorate, but these political victims have a special place as the government was prosecuting them for a longer period of time,” she said. “We should not ever allow that to happen again.”
Dr Samuël Kruizinga, historian of 19th and 20th century war and violence at Amsterdam University, said the sticky question appears to be whether the bill is the state’s responsibility. “One thing that definitely happened is that Dutch security services kept lists of suspect populations – radical trade unionists, communists – and the lists were supposedly burned when the Germans invaded in May 1940,” he said.
“But copies were sent to local police stations, and the German security service in the occupied Netherlands put together the pieces of the puzzle. The Dutch security services had particular hang-ups about leftists, whom they considered a more acute and imminent danger to Dutch democracy and society. A lot of these people were horrifically tortured for information and then sent to die. This history is complicated by the perhaps overzealous activities of the Dutch security services and the active assistance of Dutch police.”
These stumbling stones – proliferating across Dutch streets – are both metaphors and memories. Van Basten Batenburg added: “Whenever my niece, who just turned four, sees one, she gets on her knees and wipes it free of dirt or leaves. They are a bit of light in the sidewalk which catches the soul of the people who are commemorated.”
