Gertrud Fuld

Set flush into a pavement in Stuttgart, a ten-centimetre concrete cube carries a brass plate with the name Gertrud Fuld. It is one of the Stolpersteine, the stones that mark where people last lived in freedom before the Nazi terror took them. From a few steps away it is easy to miss, which is how the stones are meant to work.

The German artist Gunter Demnig laid the first of these stones in 1992, and each one is handcrafted. Private donations and local fundraising pay for every stone. Most plaques begin with the words 'Here lived', followed by a name and life dates. Begun for Jewish victims, the project has widened to include Sinti and Roma, Poles, gay people, the disabled and Jehovah's Witnesses. Stones lie in Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy and beyond, which makes the network the world's largest decentralized memorial.

The name plays on an antisemitic saying from Nazi Germany: a Jew, it claimed, lay buried under any stone someone stumbled over. These stones take the other sense, the chance discovery, and build memory into an ordinary walk. Bend down at Gertrud Fuld's stone: the brass gives a name and dates, fixed to the place where that life was lived.