Appeal for UK’s first ‘stolperstein’
AN APPEAL has been launched to raise £3,000 for Britain’s first “stolperstein”— a small brass plaque fixed to a pavement stone — to commemorate the death of a woman who left London to search for missing relatives and was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943.
The JustGiving page tells the story of Ada Van Dantzig, a Dutch painting conservator who worked with Helmut Ruhemann, a consultant restorer at the National Gallery, at his studio in Golden Square, Soho in the 1930s before the Second World War.
After war broke out, she travelled to France, despite pleas it was not safe, to locate her missing family. In 1943, she was arrested and transported to Auschwitz where, on February 11, she was murdered.
Her parents were murdered on the same day. Her sister, Jenny, had been taken to Auschwitz two weeks earlier and was killed, and her brother, Paul was murdered in April that year.
The idea to install memorial stolpersteine — literally “stumbling stones” — originated in Cologne. The small plaques bear the names of victims and are placed in the groud near where they lived and worked. None have yet been laid in the UK.
The JustGiving page says Westminster Council charges more than £1,000 for the licence and supervision of the laying of the stone.
The funder is also to cover the costs for artist Gunter Demnig, who came up with the stolperstein, to travel to London to lay the stone.
https://www.justgiving.com/crowdfunding/morwenna-blewett-1