Leo Gustav Salomon

At your feet, set flush into the pavement outside what was once the Kaiser Wilhelm Gymnasium, a small brass square catches the light: a Stolperstein carrying the name Leo Gustav Salomon, born in 1894. This is one of the artist Gunter Demnig's memorial stones, laid into streets across Europe at the places where people lived, learned and walked. Here the stone marks a school site, and it invites you to stop mid-step and look down.

Leo was one of twin brothers who grew up in a Jewish family in this city, and both boys attended this very school. In 1935 he was arrested under Paragraph 175, the law that criminalised homosexuality. The following year brought a sentence, then a stretch through several prisons marked by isolation, fear and arbitrary treatment. On 11 October 1942 he died in Wolfenbüttel prison. His twin Ernst was murdered a year later in Auschwitz. Of the twenty-four stones laid here for former Jewish students of the school, two belong to the Salomon twins.

For decades no photographs of Leo or Ernst survived, but recent research has finally brought their faces to light, and you can now see the young men behind the names. That is what makes this small, shining stone worth your pause: it remembers not only how Leo died but who he was, a son, a brother and a pupil, part of this community, and it holds all of that in a square of brass barely wider than your shoe.