In Kyiv, the international art project Stolpersteine has resumed after a pause caused by the full-scale war. At the ceremony, the organizer reminds attendees that if an air raid alert is announced, the event must stop immediately and everyone must move to the nearest shelter by the Politekhnichnyi Instytut metro station. This procedure has already become part of everyday life in the city.
The project was founded in 1992 in Cologne by German artist Gunter Demnig. A Stolperstein is a small concrete cube with a brass plate, embedded in pavement or asphalt on a pedestrian street near the homes where people who later became victims of Nazism and the Holocaust once lived.
The plate usually contains several engraved lines: the person’s first and last name, date of birth, date of arrest or deportation, and place of death, if known. The idea is to make passersby stop for a moment and read the inscription, restoring that person to historical memory.
Demnig’s initiative is regarded as the world’s largest decentralized memorial. Stolpersteine are installed not only in Germany, but also in Austria, Argentina, Belgium, Greece, Israel, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Poland, the United States, the Czech Republic, and France. Their number has already exceeded 100,000, although far more victims still remain to be restored to public memory.
In Ukraine, the first such stones appeared in 2011 in Pereiaslav and later in 2018 in Rivne. One of the Rivne stones commemorates Mariia Babych, who worked as a domestic helper for the Jewish Osipov family. After the Nazis arrived, the Ukrainian woman saved the family’s one-year-old daughter.