by Alessandra Ressa
Earlier than usual, Trieste commemorates its Holocaust victims by positioning 20 new stumbling stones around the city.
These symbolic ten-centimeter square brass plates are inscribed with the name, date of birth and date and place of death (in most cases, one of the many infamous Nazi extermination camps in Europe), of Trieste’s Jewish victims of the Shoah. Each stone has been positioned at the last place of residency at the time of arrest and deportation.
Every year, with the approaching of the date of international commemorations of the Holocaust on January 27th (when the gates at Auschwitz where finally forced open by the Russian liberation army) the Jewish Community of Trieste, with the support of the local Municipality, organizes an itinerant ceremony where the stolpersteine (stumbling stones), a project initiated by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, are positioned.
The artist was not present this time due to the Covid-19 pandemic. There are a total of 83 such stones in Trieste now. All the locations are listed on the website of the Jewish Museum of Trieste www.museoebraicotrieste.it.
In via San Maurizio, a quiet street off Largo Barriera, eight stumbling stones were positioned at the entrance of n. 8, where eight Triestini living in that same building were arrested, deported and later killed. A stumbling stone has been dedicated to Lucia Eliezer Del Cielo, deported to Ravensbruck and Bergen Belsen when she was 19. She was one of the very few to survive the camps, and died in Trieste in 2014. Hers is the only commemoration stone placed inside Trieste’s Jewish ghetto in via del Ponte 7.
