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Stolpersteine stumbling stone memorials in Barcelona

The 'stumbling stone' memorial cobblestones that are placed outside residences of victims of the Nazi camps are also being placed in towns and cities in Spain:

https://theconversation.com/spains-new-memory-law-dredges-up-a-painful-chapter-of-spains-often-forgotten-ties-to-nazis-194138?

As many as 15,000 Spaniards were deported to Nazi concentration camps during World War II.

Their refugee stories are especially complicated, because many of them had initially escaped Franco's takeover during the civil war by fleeing to France - where they were involved, voluntarily or not, in the French resistance to German occupation early in WWII, and then were deported by Franco's forces in reprisal for fighting against the Nazis.

People in the forum here have posted about stumbling stones they've seen outside of Germany, but I don't recall anyone mentioning noticing them in Spain. Have you had them come across your radar?

"By recognizing non-Jewish political prisoners during World War II, Stolpersteine cements Spain’s partnership with the Nazis into the ground people walk on, demonstrating how a dark history can be brought into the light of day. The first memorials in Spain were placed in the small town of Navàs, about an hour north of Barcelona, in 2015.
The project has grown in the past seven years to commemorate more than 600 Spanish men and women in 96 cities and towns scattered across the country."

Posted by
9220 posts

Thanks for the update about Spain. Had no idea about their deportations due to the cruelty of Franco.
Right now there are about 90,000 Stolperstein in 25 countries and they are for anyone who was killed by the Nazis.

Posted by
33842 posts

parenthetically, I was watching a BBC Click show (their tech and new invention show which has a strong emphasis on robots and robotics) from a few weeks ago yesterday and they had an extremely interesting story on a project in New York City which helps name all the nameless faces in all those photos which exist from the time of the Holocaust.

They use Artificial Intelligence and facial recognition to take a face that is known, in a photo, and can then search all the other millions of images for that face... Then by speaking to (the ever shrinking number of) survivors they can identify by name other faces in a picture and search for all of them, and so on.

A particularly poignant statement was made by one of the leaders of the project, that it is not the story of 6 million people - it is the story of one person, 6 million times. And of course their families.

It is probably too late now, but one day I would have liked to have identified my cousin's wife's family who were all taken from Hungary to Birkenau and all were lost.

Posted by
4180 posts

Thank you for bringing this up. Unfortunately Spanish WWII history (both good and bad) as a whole is often overlooked due to its non-belligerent status.

For example, the first Allied unit to liberate Paris in 1944 was "La Nueve" made up of Spanish republican volunteers fighting under the Free French banner - https://www.euronews.com/2019/08/24/liberation-of-paris-75-years-on-the-forgotten-story-of-the-spaniards-who-freed-the-city

A number of Spanish diplomats across Europe made efforts to save the lives of thousands of Jews from deportation to concentration camps - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%81ngel_Sanz_Briz

And also not to forget Francesc Boix, a Spanish photographer who was imprisoned in the Mauthausen concentration camp and was instrumental in preserving photographs of the conditions at camp, which later played a vital role in the conviction of Nazi war criminals at Nuremberg. A movie was recently made about his story - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Photographer_of_Mauthausen

In total, nine Spaniards have been awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations by Israel.