He received a call from ‘the neighbors’, Kees Weltevrede from the Stolpersteine Dordrecht foundation. But he doesn’t really know what to say. “I am surprised. Since we started our foundation in 2004, we have laid 201 stumbling stones in Dordrecht, but they have never been removed. I did not expect this.”
Stolpersteine, also called stumbling stones, commemorate Jewish residents of Dordrecht who were deported by the German occupiers during the Second World War and murdered in concentration camps elsewhere in Europe. There are now around 70,000 of them in various Dutch and foreign cities, which keep the deportation and systematic extermination of Jews by the Nazis visible, even though it has been almost eighty years ago.
The stumbling blocks that remind us of the Cohen de Heer family were placed in 2021. Neighbors adopted the three copies and are shocked. “We laid flowers there on May 4, but they were gone the next day,” said a neighbor. “And now the stones themselves, it’s brutal,”
It must have been quite a job to remove the stones from the sidewalk. “They are stuck in cement, so it must have been done with force,” Weltevrede explains. He can only speculate about why and he prefers not to do that. “It’s not because of the metal, because those few cents for a thin layer of brass don’t seem like a reason to do this.”
The municipality has now repaired the sidewalk with regular stones.
Tags: happened
