They are located on Solny Square in Wrocław. The memorial stones are a reminder of the Herz family, who lived in the city even before the Second World War. Four small cubes were set into the cobblestones in front of the Oppenheim tenement house.
These are not the first memorial stones to be seen in Wrocław. We already wrote about the earlier ones, which are located at various points in the city, two years ago HERE.
For many years, the Herz family ran a shoe shop in the building on Plac Solny. The memorial stones, or so-called stolpersteine, are intended to remind us of this. The idea of installing memorial stones is to remember the victims of the Holocaust. They are small cubes whose top layer is covered with brass and inscriptions with the names of the dead. There are already 20 such stones in Wrocław and almost 100,000 worldwide.
The latest stones recall the history of the Herz family. The head of the family, Ludwig Herz, ran a popular shoe shop at the site since 1894. According to Wroclaw.pl, Ludwig Herz developed a mail-order system. More than a century ago, this was a completely new form of sales.
Ludwig died in the 1920s and the shop was taken over by his second wife Olga and their sons. Over the following years, the family business thrived, until the 1930s, when the Nazis came to power and repression of the Jewish population intensified. Ludwig’s son, together with his wife Hilda and daughter Steffi left for Chile and from there to Argentina. Only Olga remained in Breslau, who was murdered in 1942 in the Terezin Stadt camp.
We commemorate the people who created this city, built its splendour. Thanks to people like Ludwig Herz and his relatives, Wrocław is such a beautiful city today,” said Sebastian Lorenc, Deputy Mayor of Wrocław.
The ceremony of laying the stones at Plac Solny took place on Monday, 19 February. The event was initiated by the OP ENHEIM foundation and the Urban Memory foundation.
In 2023, the first memorial stones appeared in Warsaw. We wrote about them HERE.
photos: Oleksandr Poliakovsky
source: wroclaw.pl
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