One cold December night I was walking through Berlin with a poet when he stopped and pointed at the ground. “Do you know what this is?” I knelt to examine a gold plaque embedded in the pavement with a name and two dates.
I first heard of Dominik from our mutual friend who told me they once played a pink guitar on a bridge in Bosnia singing together. Two girls on the other side of the bridge crossed to join until the call to prayer rang out from the minarets in the town and they stopped to listen and watch the moon. He said Dominik moved to Berlin to become a poet.
Dominik knelt beside me and read the name and the dates on the plaque. “There’s this German artist,” he explained, “who has dedicated himself to finding every home owned by Jews who were murdered during the Holocaust. He puts a marker in front of these homes with the name of the owner and their date of birth and death. He calls them ‘stumbling stones,’ ‘stolpersteine,” because when you see them, you stop.”
Our breath clouding the cold air, Dominik told me he stopped crying at a pivotal moment in his childhood and never shed tears again until as an adult, he visited Auschwitz and what was locked inside poured out again in grief. Every time we have spoken since, he directs my gaze to some essential he has gleaned from the welter of experience that alters what I see next, some revelation that trips me up, makes me stop.
