I am on a roll commenting on the movies from the Pioneer Valley Jewish Film Festival. Last week (oh, there are so many movies!) we watched, in the beautiful new auditorium at the National Yiddish Bookcenter, a film called “Stumbling Stone.” A documentary about a German artist, Gunter Demnig, who began a project to create Holocaust remembrances for individual Jews, Gypsys, and others who were deported and killed. These are small brass plaques, set in a concrete block, that he installs in the sidewalk in front of the actual house where a normal person lived a normal life, before deportation. Before being murdered. Individuals died, not mass numbers. The plaque names the person, date of birth (I think) and the date they were deported.

He is a man with a mission. He now has a partner, who helps with the organization of this undertaking, but basically, it is only this one man who physically makes the blocks, hand engraving them, driving them around  Europe and then installing them. At the time the movie was made, I think 3 years ago, there were 8,500 blocks. According to a woman in the audience, who has been researching this, there are now 25,000 all over Europe. The idea is that you would “stumble” over one, look down, and remember, not the whole of the atrocity, but one person. One at a time.

Time has moved on. The world has moved on. As I have heard it, the survivors themselves rarely spoke of the camps. Their children, who are my generation, honored their privacy, leaving the tormented memories locked in a silence. It is the next generation, the grandchildren, who ask the questions. And want the stories recorded, held gently, made public, set in stone.

Here are the stones, thousands of them. Funny to have them just set in the pavement or sidewalks where they are just walked over, baby carriages pushed over them, bicycles ridden over them. But they are there. They are noticed. They catch the eye and remind us: don’t forget them. Don’t forget. Don’t ever forget.

One poignant scene: women who were daughters of SS officers, on their hands and knees, with cloth and polish, carefully shining the stones, one by one. A different scene from that of Jews being forced to scrub the streets. Atonement.

I know there is a biblical verse about stumbling stones. I poked around on the Internet to look for it. It didn’t mean anything to me, the readings I found. Not my thing. What matters are the stones, in their simplicity, in their multitude, there to be stumbled on.