So-called stumbling blocks in Berlin now commemorate the escape of Israel’s ambassador Ron Prosor’s family from the Nazi regime. The inventor of the memorial project, Gunter Demnig, laid the stones in Eisenzahnstrasse in the Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf district in the presence of the ambassador and his wife Hadas Prosor.
Almost 91 years after his grandparents fled, Ambassador Prosor was visibly moved as he watched the ceremony, which was also attended by Bundestag President Bärbel Bas and Holocaust survivor Margot Friedländer. The ambassador recalled the motives that led Elfriede and Berthold Proskauer to leave their homeland with their children Liselotte and Ulrich in October 1933.
Stolperstein project commemorates Nazi victims
“Ulrich Proskauer was my father. When he landed in Jaffa on November 20, 1933, the State of Israel did not yet exist; it would not be founded until 15 years later. On that day in November 91 years ago, Ulrich probably could not have imagined in his wildest dreams that his son would one day represent the Jewish State of Israel in Germany as ambassador. And yet that is exactly how it happened,” wrote Prosor in a guest article in the “Tagesspiegel”.
With the Stolperstein project, Demnig, who was born in Berlin in 1947, wants to commemorate the victims of National Socialism; it is considered the largest decentralized memorial in the world. The stones, which have small brass plates with the names of the victims on the top, have been laid in the street or sidewalk pavement in front of their former homes since 1996 – usually by the artist himself.
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