Paper short abstract:

this paper is about commemorating sites where victims of the Holocaust lived and the construction and maintenance of memory at the micro-level of locality and street. Issues of memory keeping, liminality and "communitas" across social and geographic boundaries will also be discussed.

Paper long abstract:

Kugelmass (1992) describes organised tours undertaken by American Jews to Europe to view former camp sites as "rites of the tribe", secular pilgrimages. By contrast, this paper is about commemorating sites where Holocaust victims lived, and the construction and maintenance of memory at the micro-level of locality and street.

The paper is based largely on written accounts by children of survivors and refugees and either written up for their magazine, Second Generation Voices, or else written up for a volume on the emotional impact of such journeys, which I am currently co-editing.

The paper focuses on the residential homes of Holocaust victims immediately prior to their deportations, and especially the placing of "Stolpersteine", or stumbling blocks, in the pavement just outside such premises, with the names of the victims (see Mandel and Lehr, 2018). By December 2019 as many as 75,000 such Stolpersteine had been laid in over 24 European countries. Elsewhere, local community groups and residents' associations erected plaques on, or near, the exterior walls of such premises, bearing the names of previous residents deported by the Nazi regime.

Such initiatives involve a bringing together of individuals and groups who might otherwise not come into contact with each other, such as descendants of victims and their families, local residents and representatives of local authorities. At the unveiling of Stolpersteine or plaques, ceremonies and speeches are made, seeking to bridge the gap between the past and the present, thereby "site-sacralising" (McCannell, 1976) these liminal spaces and offering, at least fleetingly, a sense of "communitas" (Turner, 1969 and Graburn, 1989).