Stolperstein

Jeanne's mom told me about these.

You'll find them along the main streets, embedded in the sidewalks in front of the apartment buildings and homes in all of Germany's major cities. 

They're little brass plaques that list the name of a Jewish person or other "undesirable" that died in a Nazi concentration camp. And they're usually placed in front of the last home they lived in before they were taken away.

These brass plaques called Stolpersteine, which is German for "stumbling blocks", and they're reminders that even a nation with as great a history as Germany can sometimes make horrible mistakes.

The Stolpersteine project was started by a German artist named Gunter Demnig in 1992. And, since then, he's placed over 30,000 of them in Germany, Hungary, Croatia, Italy, the Netherlands and Russia.

They're so subtle you can walk by them every day and not even notice them -- yet, once you do notice them, they seem to be everywhere.

A simple but very powerful tribute.