(UN)ORDINARY: Trevor cleans the stones of the disappeared in Prague. He does not want the victims of the Nazis to be forgotten | (Un)ordinary | Gossip | Prague Gossip
Maybe you added them on your walks in Prague. Brass plaques in the shape of cobblestones with the names of people who lived there and were persecuted by the Nazis during the Second World War. Some escaped, most died in concentration camps. Briton Trevor Sage also makes sure that they are not forgotten. The so-called stones of the disappeared clean and collect the stories of people, they carry extensive names.
“It always gets me when I look at the ages of the kids”
I let Trevor decide the meeting place. I wanted us to meet at the stone that is important to him. He chose a stone commemorating Petr Ginz in Stárková street in Prague 1.
“Petr lived here with his mother, father and sister Eva. Peter’s father Oto was a Jew, but his mother Maria was a Christian. When Peter was fourteen, he was deported, without his parents. He was an extraordinary young man. At fourteen, he wrote five novels and a dictionary from Czech to Esperanto,” Trevor told me.
In Terezín, Petr then became the editor-in-chief of the magazine Vedem. He published over 800 pages in two years, secretly of course. They buried all the copies in Terezín and up to one of the nine surviving Vedem members dug them up. They wrote the first thirty copies on a typewriter. When we ran out of tape, we had to do it by hand. Sometimes he didn’t have enough articles from others, so the boy wrote them himself under a pseudonym.
“It always gets me when I look at the ages of the kids. They would be here with us today, they would be younger than my parents. Peter’s father and sister survived, she allowed me to use the family photos and Peter’s drawings. She died in October of this year.’ In addition to taking care of the stones, Trevor also created an online map of Prague of all the small monuments, which also includes photos and people’s stories.
Today, according to him, there are 549 of them on the streets of Prague. According to them, he also planned routes through several parts of the city, along which people can walk and view the stones.
“As a foreigner and not yet of Jewish origin, I felt that it was not my place to do anything about it”
The Londoner moved to Prague sixteen years ago. “I’m not Jewish. I am from England and no one in my family was affected by the holocaust. When I was on a tour of Josefov, he showed us the Stolpersteins, the stones of the disappeared. And it seemed to me that those names were disappearing under the dirt again,” described the beginnings of the project.
“However, as a foreigner and not yet of Jewish origin, I felt that it was not up to me to do anything about it.”
The Stones of the Disappeared were created by artist Gunter Demnig. The first one was illegally placed in front of the town hall in Cologne in 1992. It was larger and engraved with the first sentences of Himmler’s Auschwitz decree. Another, of this size, was laid in 1996, in the Kreuzberg district of Berlin. Since then, there are 96,000 of them in thirty countries, in two thousand towns and villages across Europe. He would like to place the hundred thousand in June next year.
However, he learned of a man in Salzburg who, like him, was retired and not Jewish, but nevertheless cleaned all the stones in the city. “So I said to myself, this is an example for me. I’m going to find them all and clean them up. I started it in 2016.”
And no one has done this before, I ask. “Not as far as I know. They started placing them on the initiative of the Czech Union of Jewish Youth in 2008. But nothing happened with the stones since 2016, until in 2018 František Bányai from the Prague Jewish Community renewed the project. And since then they have placed another three hundred stones.’
Cleaning has its own rules
Trevor has a system for cleaning stones. You pull out the folded towel below your knees, then reach for the cleaning supplies and pull on the gloves.
“I tried a few things. One problem is when people use natural ingredients like orange juice or salt. If people are not careful and wash the stones badly, they turn green.” The stones are brass.
Trevor soaks, scrubs and finally polishes the stone to a nice shine. But the best tool for him is a tablet with a photo, which he placed right next to the stone. It helps him connect with a person. “I am moved when they are children. They left this door, they took it. For example, they gave Peter a letter, you have to come with a maximum of ten kilos of luggage, without your parents.”
“One stone was under asphalt concrete, they just made a new sidewalk and covered it”
“When I started cleaning the stones, I found myself wanting to know more about these people. I found the information, put it on my map, but I wanted it all in one place. That’s why I decided to create the Prague Stolpersteine book. But it is a compilation of the work of others. And relatives who write stories.’
They are currently correcting the Czech translation, it should be printed in January and sold in March.
“You take care of it here? Thanks”
“You take care of it here?” asks a young American who is just leaving the house where Petr lived eighty years ago. “Thanks.” He shook Trevor’s hand and went on his way.
I admit that this is not a usual situation for him. “It happens, but only exceptionally. Once I cleaned about seventy stones and a lady came up to me and asked what I was doing. I told her about this project and she then asked if I could take a picture of me and put it on Facebook. I had no idea what kind of response it would have. In no time it had thousands of likes and eight hundred shares. The British Embassy also saw it and put it on Twitter. The media was also interested. Because of that one photo.’
It takes Trevor several minutes to clean one stone. “Some took me an hour. One stone was under asphalt concrete, they just made a new sidewalk and covered it.”
“They are plaques, not graves”
It is clear that the stones never stay clean, in a few weeks they are dirty again. “It’s kind of ironic. The placement of the stones is important to me. If they are too close to the wall, the switches will pile up on them. When they are on the sidewalk, people walk over them and help clean them. But this is a problem for members of the Jewish community in Munich. They think it is disrespectful and did not allow the stones to be placed. And the city management doesn’t want to go against them.”
“They are memorial plaques, they are not graves. Some people find walking on them offensive, but I don’t see it that way.”
Ninety percent of the stones in Prague are dedicated to Jews, but they can bear the names of anyone who was persecuted by the Nazis from 1939 to 1945. This includes homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, dissidents and survivors.
He could not find any information about some of them, over the years the memories were either lost or destroyed.
“They read their names, and as long as they are read, these people will not be forgotten.”
While it is sometimes too much for him, people’s fates are often too sad. “It happens. The children. It breaks my heart to think what they’ve been through.’
He copes with this precisely by taking care of the stones and remembering people’s stories. “It gives me satisfaction to see that their names are not forgotten. On Facebook every month I will make a list of birthdays of people who have a Stolperstein in Prague. And I write about them on their birthdays. Keep their names alive through people who follow my posts. They read their names and as long as someone reads them, these people will not be forgotten. And that’s important.”
Trevor no longer has to take care of all of Prague by himself. In 2019, he asked volunteers to help with cleaning, it was too big a project for one person. More than a hundred people signed up. Thirty-five of them were schoolchildren from the Lauder schools in the Jewish community. “We divided them into groups of five, I gave each a few cards with photos and names. When a little girl was looking through them, she found her great-grandmother.”
In 2020, the teachers of the Lauder schools at the Jewish Community initiated the adoption of the Stolpersteins. All stones were thus adopted by individuals, families and groups of pupils.
He decided to retire in Prague after living in London. At sixteen, he joined the British Royal Navy, where, according to his own words, he learned discipline. He used to go to our capital city for work, repair machines, and therefore he was here fifty times.
“I love this city. I never get tired of walking around the city, I enjoy the architecture and the people. Now I feel like I’m giving something back to the place that is now my home.”
We go just a little further, to the next street. There are three stones near the house, very dirty. I wouldn’t have noticed them myself, but good Trevor knows they’re there.
She hopes they are adopted and someone will clean them up soon. Otherwise, the names on them are slowly disappearing again.