Newsletter for Generation 2 Generation

Editorial

Stolpersteine

As ever, the month of November recalls the 1938 pogrom that took place across Germany, including Austria and the Sudetenland. It used to be referred to as Kristallnacht, the Night of Broken Glass. The term has been replaced by ‘the November Pogrom’, as Kristallnacht is the name used by the Nazis. The Nazis had taken victims before that date: as we tragically know, they went on to take millions more. Most of those who were killed, in one way or another, have no gravestone. They disappeared, unmarked and unacknowledged, into the earth or the air.

Stolpersteine – ‘stumbling stones’ – commemorate the fate of people (not necessarily Jewish) who were murdered, deported, expelled or driven to suicide by the German Nazis. They consist of brass plaques with a text giving key information about the victim’s name, birth and death. Stolpersteine are always installed in front of the last voluntarily chosen place of residence, in public ground.

 In late 1992, the first stone was laid in Cologne (Köln) by the project’s founder, a non-Jewish German artist called Gunter Demnig. To date, 116,000 Stolpersteine have been laid in 31 European countries, including England, but most of them are in Germany. This makes the art memorial the largest decentralised memorial in the world. 

Our feature this month is a collection of the experiences of six people, either G2G / NHEG speakers or members of their families, who have had stones installed. Should you wish to embark on this process yourself, please visit www.stolpersteine.eu

Vivienne Cato

1 From  https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-nuremberg-race-laws

G2G Upcoming Events

G2G News

G2G is growing from strength to strength!
We are pleased to say that as of 1 November we have received 231 speaker bookings from 155 organisations for academic year 2025/26 – including schools, universities, community and civic organisations, prisons, public and private organisations. Ninety-nine of them are repeat bookings.
We also expect to have four new speakers complete their presentations by Holocaust Memorial Day, bringing our total number of speakers to 45.

Help us extend our reach
To continue to keep our speakers busy and to ensure our Holocaust talks reach more people, we need your help. If you have a contact at an educational institution, community, civic or private organisation that might benefit from hearing a Holocaust story, please introduce us.

We are constantly looking to enable new speakers to tell their family stories, particularly in areas outside London. Please spread the word.

Our Tenth Anniversary
In the lead up to our tenth anniversary we will be holding several fundraising events. A special thanks to Doris and Hyman Wolanski for opening their home for a jewellery and clothing sale to benefit G2G. This was the first of many more events that we will announce over the next six months.

In the meantime, if you would like to support our work you can donate here.

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80 Years On: Holocaust Descendants Unite in Paris to Remember and Resist
Debra Barnes, G2G Speaker and AJR “Next Generations” Manager

This year’s World Federation of Holocaust Survivors and Descendants conference was held in Paris, a city with Europe’s largest Jewish community and a troubling rise in antisemitism. The 2025 Paris Conference brought together 300 participants from 15 countries across five continents, including 100 survivors. For myself, daughter of a French hidden child, the event was deeply emotional. I connected with child survivors whose stories mirrored my mother’s, and it was an opportunity to reunite with a historian friend who helped me greatly with my family research.

Paris was chosen to mark 80 years since France’s liberation from Nazi occupation. Despite the loss of 76,000 Jews during the Holocaust, 75 per cent of French Jews survived, and 93 attended the conference. Highlights included meeting Serge and Beate Klarsfeld, renowned Nazi hunters, and hearing Arlette Testyler’s harrowing account of the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver round-up.

Panels also featured second-generation survivors like Pierre-François Veil and Leah Pisar, who shared how their parents’ Holocaust experiences shaped their lives. Pisar, daughter of Auschwitz survivor Samuel Pisar, spoke of his dark humour and global influence.

The conference concluded with a sobering discussion on rising antisemitism. Speakers from multiple countries emphasized education and interfaith efforts, but Jacques Fredj of the Mémorial de la Shoah warned, “If we don’t fight, no-one will fight for us.”

And, of course, it was comforting to spend a weekend in the company of descendants from all over the world from similar backgrounds and upbringings, who ‘get it’. As the 3Gs might put it, ‘IYKYK’ – If You Know You Know! 

The next conference will be held in Philadelphia, October 2026.

Features

Below we present the experiences of G2G presenters and their family members in installing Stolpersteine in Germany, Austria and Slovakia.

Helen Stone, G2G Presenter
It’s not often you manage to get together 22 members of the same family, half of whom have crossed the Atlantic, at a Stolpersteine Ceremony. In May 2024 my brother and I and our families joined my first and second cousins, who had travelled to Germany from America, for a memorial to our great aunt and uncle, Gustav and Elfrida Kaufmann. Gustav was the older brother of my grandfather, Siegmund, one of ten siblings. Sadly, Gustav and all the others, together with their wives, were murdered by the Nazi regime. My grandfather was the sole survivor.

An amazing group of Germans who live in the Eifel, where my family came from, have dedicated their lives to ensuring that the memory of the Jews of the area is not forgotten. They teach the young teenagers about them as part of their local history project and the youngsters even lead village tours of the former Jewish homes. It was this group that had made all the arrangements for the Stolpersteine to be laid, in the village of Hostel. What’s more they had booked all 22 of us in into a hotel for the weekend and arranged a full programme of events.

It was a truly memorable visit.

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Joan Noble, G2G Presenter

Several years ago my sister and I decided to lay Stolpersteine for our maternal grandparents, whom we never knew, only to find out this had already been done.

We were perplexed as to who had done it! Subsequently we discovered that a local historian, Mr Ulrich Herlitz, had taken it upon himself to record the story of Alex and Elfrieda Katz.  Living in Grevenbroich, a small town in the Rhine area, he has recorded the lives of all the Jews who once lived there and in surrounding villages. Incidentally, he also knew Alex’s sister Johanna who had survived the war, having been hidden by her husband’s Christian family.

Through meticulous German documentation archives he was able to inform us of the family history dating back to 1650, gravestone locations, and details of their flight in 1939 through Belgium into France and their imprisonment and deportation to Auschwitz Birkenau in 1942.

Another Stolperstein was, to our surprise, also laid in laid in Köln for my paternal grandmother by an unknown German young man. This led to fifteen years of research into my father’s family culminating in a book by Michale Vieten on the Katz family of Köln.

We hope next year to lay Stolpersteine with Gunter Demnig for our parents who fled Germany to Palestine and South Africa.

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Ernie Hunter, Northern Holocaust Education Group

My mother, Fanny Höchstetter, had a favourite bachelor uncle who, when she was growing up, helped get her out of various scrapes – saving her many a good telling off from her strict mother.

Richard Rothschild (born 5 September 1892) lived at Hauptstatter Strasse 39, Stuttgart. He co-owned a textile business there manufacturing Tricot fabrics.

On 1 December 1941 Richard was deported, on the first transport East from Baden Wurttemberg to Riga. For this privilege he had to pay a train fare of 56 marks. He was murdered in Riga in January 1942.

I felt it was important that Richard be remembered as he had no marked grave. This was organised this through the Stuttgart Stolpersteine initiative. The city council made all the arrangements and paid all the costs. Gunter Demming came and set the Stolperstein in front of an invited group of guests and schoolchildren at a ceremony in 2017.

May his name be for a blessing.

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Judith Hayman, G2G Presenter

I met my maternal grandfather once, when I was four, at a park near his home in the Bronx. He died soon after. My American cousins said he was a stern man who rarely smiled. This is hardly surprising. I discovered only five years ago that he had been on the Italian front fighting for the Austro-Hungarian Empire during World War One. Like his brothers Max and Arnold, he was awarded an Iron Cross medal.

My grandfather and his siblings were born in Berndorf, Lower Austria. So was their father Adolf, who established a shop in the high street of this small town. Their home was behind the house. Today the site of the house is the town library, and the shop is now the tourist office.

My grandfather survived the Holocaust, but his two brothers and their sister Marie were all deported from Vienna to the Łódź Ghetto in Poland. None of them returned.

Two years ago I travelled to Berndorf with my husband, daughter and grandson for the unveiling of a Stone of Remembrance for Max, Arnold and Marie outside the family store. The event was attended by the Mayor, and the Berndorf Choir sang Hebrew songs. My new Berndorf friend Gitta arranged the event and translated my speech.

Last year I re-visited Berndorf. Sadly the brass plaque was tarnished and almost illegible. The gesture was noble, but maybe people just did not care enough.

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Peter Kupfer (USA), cousin of 2G Paul Sinclair

My father’s family were prominent members of the Jewish community in Weiden, a small Bavarian city near the Czech border. The Kupfers had been in the glassmaking business for generations and had owned several factories in the region. In 2015, during a visit to Weiden, I met with a representative of the local Jewish community to discuss the possibility of installing Stolpersteine to honour my grandfather and other members of my family who had perished in the Holocaust. The woman was sympathetic to my proposal but said members of the community were opposed to Stolpersteine because they thought it was disrespectful to allow pedestrians to walk on the memorial stones. (It is for that same reason that Munich and some other cities have banned Stolpersteine.)

But I persisted, and in 2022 the city, with the blessing of the Jewish community, agreed to allow the Stolpersteine. On a cool, blustery late November day, I, along with my cousin Paul, my niece Ariel, the mayor and other civic and religious leaders, along with a couple of dozen local residents, gathered on the sidewalk in front of the site where my grandfather’s villa once stood, across the street from the railroad station. Gunter Demnig himself was there to say a few words and install the stones. As I addressed the crowd, I could sense the presence of my father and grandfather solemnly nodding their approval. The ceremony coincided with the publication of my memoir about my father, titled “The Glassmaker’s Son: Looking for the World My Father Left Behind in Nazi Germany.” 

In the end, 11 Stolpersteine were laid that day, in memory of my grandfather and eight of his siblings who perished in the Holocaust, as well as my father, Robert Cooper, and his brother, Ernst Kupfer, who survived but were forced to flee Germany. The ceremony included a presentation by local high school students about the history of the Kupfer family in Weiden. The local newspaper ran a large article about the event on the front page and later produced a six-part podcast about my family. Since then, I am pleased to say, many other local victims of the Holocaust have been honoured with Stolpersteine in Weiden.

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Below is the speech given by Ivan Koppel, husband of G2G Presenter Vivienne Cato, at the recent installation ceremony of six Stolpersteine in Košice, Slovakia.

We have gathered today to pay respect to and remember some of the people from our families who were murdered during the Holocaust. They are Herman and Johanna Reich, my mother’s parents, with their son Ferdinand; and David and Hanni Koppel, my father’s parents, and their son, Jozef.

The Koppel family lived at no 22 Kukucinova and the Reichs at no 10 – two families to be united postwar in the marriage of Magda Reich and Zoli Koppel, my parents. Despite this we have at the last moment been required to put all six stones in front of number 10 due to last-minute objections from the current residents of number 22. Stolpersteine are normally placed in front of the last freely chosen residence of the person in question.

The story of oppression that resulted in eventual deportation started in November 1938, when Košice as a part of southern Slovakia was annexed by Hungary. The subsequent years saw a progressive deterioration in life for the Jews of Košice through the application of Hungarian anti-Jewish Laws. The first of these resulted, among other impacts, in the limitation of access to higher education (which meant that my father could not continue his studies), whilst the second one in May 1939 impacted on livelihoods severely as licences to trade were withdrawn. The license for our grandfather David Koppel’s wood mill was annulled. How did they survive? I know that our uncle Berci and our father Zoli had to work illegally to bring in some family income.

Most young men of military age were compelled to join forced labour battalions. First, they laboured within Greater Hungary and later, after Germany invaded Soviet Union, they had to serve with the Hungarian Army. Thus, we know that the Soviet counteroffensive in 1943 resulted in the death or capture of many of those Jewish forced labourers. My uncle Nandor, according to official records, is evidenced as missing on 11 February 1943 – we don’t know if he was killed on the spot, or later in a Soviet POW camp. Our father Zoli was captured in January of the same year but managed to survive.

The situation drastically deteriorated with the German invasion of Košice on 19 March 1944. The key reason for this invasion was the lack of cooperation by the Hungarian government with the Nazi regime in solving ‘the Jewish question’ and the attempt by the Hungarian leader Horthy to negotiate with the Allied powers. We can only guess what the impact on our families was, as the only person who survived those ordeals (our uncle Berci) did not wish to discuss those times. However, we know that progressive and rapid restrictions on the freedoms of the Košice Jews eventually meant that the majority were forced in late April 1944 to move to ghettos in town and in the brick factory. We know that the conditions, particularly in the brick factory, were atrocious. Can we possibly imagine how our families managed?
The fate of our ancestors was finally sealed when the transports to Auschwitz started on 16 May 1944. So, both sets of our grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz, and it is safe to guess that they were gassed on arrival.

The figures are grim. From the Jewish population of Greater Hungary (which then included southern Slovakia) that was over 800,000 strong, about 550,000 were killed. In Košice itself before the outbreak of the war more than 11,000 Jews lived a full and varied life. The vast majority were killed after transportation to Auschwitz, and only about 800 came back – among them our parents.

So, what can we recall about the people whose Stolpersteine are being laid today?

My mother’s family, the Reich family, first.

It was a family of strong women.  It seems that Herman Reich, my mother’s father, could not work much after the end of World War One. Thus it was his wife Johanna who kept the family going by working as a seamstress. Johanna was known as ‘wise Hanka’, able to offer advice to all and sundry. Their son Nandor was a talented painter.

Now the Koppel family, of my father.

Our grandfather David married Hani/ Chaja after the death of her first husband; Hani/ Chaja was 14 years older than David and already had five children. They were a family who had moved across Europe.  The Koppels had come from Rumania to Ukraine, and the young couple came to Košice in 1915. Apparently, the new and expanding family worked well. They ran a wood mill; they were a successful middle-class family.

The youngest of three brothers from the second marriage, Jozef was a good communist. He seems to have vanished, probably in 1940, into the Soviet Union, but we have no documentation about this. His fate is ultimately unknown.

So, we are inaugurating six Stolpersteine to remember these people – my four grandparents and two uncles. In Košice, as far as I know, there are another four sets of stones already. So these six almost double the number in my town – a total so far of fifteen stones from a prewar Jewish population of eleven thousand. They are meant to serve as a reminder to the people living in the towns and villages where these atrocities took place. They also give a voice, however silent, to those who were killed just for being Jews. They have no other gravestone. We, their descendants and relatives, offer them our love and appreciation and a resolve to hold them in our memories with respect.

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