Stolpersteine by Gunter Deming

In the Jewish tradition, it is said that a person dies twice. The first time when his heart stops beating and the synapses in his brain go out like a city during a power cut. The second is when the deceased's surname is said for the last time, is thought of or read about fifty, one hundred, or four hundred years later. Only then, a man disappears and is erased from life on Earth. It was the latter type of death that inspired the German artist Gunter Deming, who came up with the idea of ​​smelting brass cobblestones, engraving on them the names of Jews killed by the Nazis during World War II, and placing them on the sidewalks in front of tenement houses where the victims' families lived. Deming calls these dice Stolpersteine ​​- stones over which we stumble. The work is supposed to be an attempt to postpone the second death because by decorating the pavements with the names of the dead, the artist made sure that passers-by over the next decades would lean over them and thus keep the dead alive; at the same time, memories of the worst chapters in the history of Europe are dimmed, etched like visible scars on the city's face. So far, sixty-seven thousand such stones have been placed in various parts of the continent.

Lexicon of Light and Darkness by Simon Stranger