The Big Read: The magical stumbling blocks

I have been away for nearly six weeks now but I am preparing to return and, sooner or later, in odd moments and against my better judgment, my mind starts turning to South Africa again.

I'm in Rome, in an apartment in what was once the ghetto, the Jewish section tucked into a bend of the Tiber, just alongside the island. In the cool of the late evenings I walk to the Piazza Venezia, then down Mussolini's Via dei Fori Imperiali to the Colosseum, all lit and looming in the moonlight, then across to the Circus Maximus and down along a footpath that cuts through the middle where the chariots once raced, then across to the river and home.

I prefer Rome by night - by day it's a splendid but slightly overwhelming jumble of stone and broken tourists sitting on sidewalks and arguing with their spouses and splashing water on their faces and staring at the stone, trying to understand precisely what they're looking at. There is so much history in Rome, so much power that has risen and fallen and tried to be remembered that after a while all the monuments and memorials stop referring to anything in particular. Everything is still there, so nothing is still there; it's all just scenic backdrop or confused points on an itinerary. How would you even try to publicly commemorate something in Rome today? How would you remember apartheid, say?

The streetlights in Rome are a particular hazy yellow, and throw a pleasingly dim light on the square black stones of the streets. As I approached my apartment I noticed that one stone outside the front door gleamed with a different light. It was shiny and metal and it had writing on it. In Italian it said:

Here lived Angelo Sed.

Born 1905.

Arrested 1/4/1944.

Deported to Auschwitz.

Murdered.

I looked up at my block. I wondered if Angelo had lived in my apartment, or the one next door, or the one below. I wondered if they had come for him in the early morning when he was still asleep or whether they had come at night, like this, when he was just beginning to relax and believe he'd made it through another day. I wondered whether Angelo lived alone or if he had a family who bit back their tears at the doorway, trying to be brave for him as he was taken away. Or maybe they had already been taken.

I thought of him walking down the smooth stone staircase I'd walked down earlier that evening, his feet finding the same worn indentations that mine did. The street would have been too narrow for an army truck, they would have had to walk him out to Via Santangelo. I thought of him disappearing up the narrow dark street with a soldier on each side.

The plaque is a stolperstein - a "stumbling block", something that interrupts your everyday routine, that doesn't catch your foot but your eye and then your imagination. There are about 60000 of them in locations around Europe, each commemorating a victim of the Holocaust, each individually handmade as a sign of intimate respect to the victim they commemorate, and placed as close as possible to the place where that person lived. They are the creation of the German artist Gunter Demnig, who made the first batch in 1996 and installed them without official permission. He has been making them ever since, a grumpy fellow in a floppy hat, assisted by a growing army of volunteers. Each stolperstein costs about R1800, and I think they are the most elegant system of remembering that I have ever seen.

There is something so simple and beautiful about remembering the crime by honouring the victims: locating them where they lived, not where they died, making them real and putting them right there, where you are now. I have thought about the Holocaust for decades with horror and anger, but I think until I stood there in that yellow darkness with my head bowed over the name of Angelo Sed I hadn't done a halfway good enough job of personally imagining it, of investing myself, of placing myself there. Each foot treading on a plaque buffs and shines and honours it, and embeds it more firmly in the fabric of the neighbourhood and the city.

A crime like the Holocaust or apartheid resists memory by being too vast. When the crime is reduced to a single word and all the individual victims are effaced and forgotten then the crime is being committed again. There won't ever be 6 million stolpersteine turning the streets of Europe a brassy gold, and we won't ever find a way to remember every victim of apartheid, but one at a time is a good way to start.