THE GREY FOLDER PROJECT

MEMORY. MEMORIALS. REMEMBERING. REMEMBRANCE. These words kept cropping up again and again every time I dug into another aspect of the Grey Folder project. But what did they really mean? How can we "remember" what we don't even know in the first place? That question has motivated me for years as I try to find the raw facts of what had actually happened to my family during the Holocaust. So many times,I'm sure that this research is coming to an end, or at least an impasse, only for something to compel me again to follow a sepia-tinted trail.

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I dropped my argument with the words "remember" and "memory" as I recognized my own desire for Stolpersteine memorials -- some of which have been thwarted and others realized.

 

These small brass tiles are meaningful to me because of their very specific acknowledgment:  This is what happened to one person who lived in this place. She or he might have been a Jew, a Sinti or Roma, a Jehovah's Witness, a political dissident, a homosexual. Who. What. Where. When.

 

WHY will never be answered fully, if at all.

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Here, then are some fragments of that recognition, some fragments from a past that is still present.