I gew up close to Nuremberg and like to take a walk to visit the dead whenever I'm there, as well as check out various Nazi grounds which ...are just part of ou

I gew up close to Nuremberg and like to take a walk to visit the dead whenever I'm there, as well as check out various Nazi grounds which ...are just part of our history. My family is also of polish origin (I was born and raised in Germany) and I've spent time in Cracow and Munich,so I make points of visiting the memorials whenever I visit friends there. My perspective is: this isn't only for the dead, it's also for the living. This can happen again if we do not make a culture of remembering, and of not shying away from the uneasiness. It should make us feel uneasy that our neighbours, our family, ourselves might have participated in the holocaust, or fallen victim to them - that everyone involved was normal people. Having some parts of the land of the living dedicated to this when not even a century has passed is a small price to pay. And as far as prices to pay go, Stolpersteine are literally the least possible intrusion. There would be a similar stone in the same place, the Stolperstein is simply made of a different material and burns the reminder into the city so that holocaust deniers and their ilk have a harder time. And like the name implies, the point is to not have a sanitized, dead, tucked away safely memorial "respectfully" shoved into some corner of a park - where it can be safely ignored. "Never again" is not an empty slogan, or something that will happen automatically (as we can see with genocides and ethnic cleansings around the world continuing since then) it's something that we all have to work towards. The Stolpersteine are part of the Erinnerungskultur and in my opinion, some of the best parts.