Stumbling stones

It may seem that I have decided to dedicate my blog to war memorials (and it does begin to seem that way), but I promise I will be broadening the scope and lightening the atmosphere very soon.  But not quite yet, because the other morning I joined a large group of people who came to witness the installation of a so-called “stumbling stone” (Stolperstein, in German; pietra d’inciampo in Italian).  At the risk of appearing frivolous, let me mention that plenty of Venice’s masegni, or paving stones, are fully capable of tripping people up all by themselves.  It happens every day.  But these are different.

These “stones” are concrete cubes 10 cm (3.9 inches) on each side which bear a brass plate inscribed with the names of persons who were deported to the Nazi death camps; they are placed in the pavement in front of the house from which that person was taken (usually their home).

The majority of the victims were Jews, but you also risked deportation if you belonged to any of the following categories of non-ideal humans: Romani people, homosexuals, the mentally and physically disabled, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons, blacks, members of the Communist or Social Democratic parties or the anti-Nazi Resistance, the Christian opposition (Catholic and Protestant), Freemasons, military deserters, International Brigades soldiers from the Spanish Civil War, escape helpers, conscientious objectors, capitulators, “habitual criminals,” looters, persons charged with treason, military disobedience or undermining the Nazi military, as well as Allied soldiers.

German artist Gunter Demnig began this project in 1992 — he hand-makes each “stone” — and as of October 23, 2018 there were 70,000 in more than 1,200 towns and cities across Europe. The first 12 in Venice were put in place in 2014; the city now counts 78 (including the Lido and San Servolo). For anyone wishing to see any (or all) of the stones in Venice, here is a map.

But why set the memorial into the street?  One would expect to see it discreetly placed on a wall, perhaps, but the setting deliberately recalls an anti-Semitic saying in Nazi Germany when someone tripped on a paving stone: “A Jew must be buried there.”  Furthermore, as Nazis destroyed Jewish cemeteries they would break up the tombstones, using the pieces in the sidewalks where countless passing feet would desecrate them.

Giovanni Gervasoni was born into a modest Venetian family and studied to become an elementary school teacher.  In 1930 he converted to Protestantism, joining the Waldensian Methodist community and working tirelessly in a group which distributed anti-Fascist publications.

Arrested as “a subversive” for the first time in 1932, he began a life of fleeing, hiding, and being under constant surveillance.  “His political activity caused him to travel frequently between Venice and Padova,” recalled Alberto Bragaglia, a journalist and Waldensian, quoted in an article on nev.it.  Bragaglia’s father, who was then an adolescent, told him that he remembered “a tall, lanky man who would suddenly appear at home and stayed as a guest for several periods of time.”

In 1935 he founded, with some men from the congregation, another group dedicated to the clandestine distribution of material from Giustizia e Liberta‘, an anti-Fascist Resistance group. Just a few months later, in April, he was arrested again and sent to the island of Ventotene, one of the regime’s best-known penal colonies for political prisoners.  There he began, with fellow-prisoner Dr. Romola Quarzola, to try to secretly send anti-Fascist tracts to the mainland.  Discovered, he was sent to prison in Rome and then Civitavecchia.

In December, 1938 he was sent to the island of Ponza, a prison island near Ventotene; after an extension of his sentence, he was finally liberated in July, 1943, the conclusion of eight years of incarceration.  Undaunted, he returned to Venice and began to work as a partisan in collaboration with the Anglo-American forces.  Arrested again on January 3, 1944, he was sent to Dachau and killed on February 17, 1945.

I hope this summary hasn’t bored you; I’ve given it to demonstrate the central point of all the thousands of “stones” across Europe.  Gervasoni was only 36 when he died, having spent 15 years, roughly half his life, working against the Nazi-Fascist regime.  What this small brass plaque represents, brightly and bravely, isn’t his death, but his life.