Some years back, my husband and I overnighted in Berlin on a mission to tour Bergen-Belsen, the DP camp where I lived with my family, after the camp’s liberation. Coming out of our hotel, I was distracted by several bright brass plates embedded in the sidewalk. I learned these were called Stolpersteine the English, stumbling stones. Now, a new book Stumbling Stones is based on the life of a German/Jewish woman, lost to history, memorialized by author Bonnie Shuchman.
Traveling home from Israel to the USA author Suchman and husband Bruce had a long layover in Frankfurt. The time allowed them to visit the place that once housed the Heppenheimers, distant relatives of the author’s husband. What remains there are three 10 by 10 inch brass plaques embossed with the names Emma Heppenheimer, her daughter Stella and husband Lewin Lippmann, the date they last resided at that address, the dates they were deported and murdered. Strangely, there was no plaque for Alice, Emma’s other daughter. Intrigued by the obvious omission the author wondered, “What happened to Alice”?
Born in Frankfurt into wealth Alice Heppenheimer felt fully German. Brimming with promise Alice studied art and fashion in 1917 Nuremberg, a charming, old Bavarian city. Ambitious, Alice focused on opening her own business, designing fancy beaded handbags. Her dream materialized in 1926 with 1,500 Reichmarks borrowed from her supportive family and their promise to double it on success.
Eternally optimistic, Alice ignored the changes taking place in Nuremberg, a city rife with an undercurrent of antisemitism. She shut her eyes to the brown-shirted, Nazi hooligans that roamed the streets and naïvely overlooked the high demand for Mein Kampf, a book in which its author, Adolf Hitler, envisioned an Aryan nation, “free of Jews”. When the stock market crashed in 1929, antisemitic cartoons posted on public kiosks at bus stations, presaged darker times blaming Jews for Germany’s economic downturn. Her business in shambles Alice returned home to Frankfurt a more liberal city to start over.
Dewey-eyed Alice trusted Paul von Hindenburg President of Germany to keep Jews safe ever upbeat dodging new decrees, edicts, directives piling up to make Germany “Judenfrie”.
In 1938, following Kristallnacht’s devastating pogrom things changed dramatically. It was “rare to find a place that was OK to be Jewish”. Forced to close her fashion business Alice and her beloved husband Alfred applied for exit visas but it was “a challenge finding a country to allow them to immigrate.” And so they waited.
Perhaps best described as a primer on the fate of German Jews Suchman’s novel may not win prizes for its literary turn of phrase or inventive figures of speech. Stumbling Stones, however is a potent blend of history and fiction best suited for anyone uninitiated in Holocaust literature.