Stolpersteine are monuments to Jews who were deported and murdered during the Third Reich (the period in German history when the Nazis ruled). These reminders of the Holocaust were started by the artist Gunter Demnig in 1992 as a way of emphasizing that ordinary, law-abiding citizens were taken out of their homes  and murdered by their government because of  the bizarre beliefs about race held by the leaders of Germany.

This example of Stoppelsteine was taken from a street in the city of Wertheim in Germany. Each stone is structured in the same way:

Each starts with the phrase: “Here lived” because the stones are placed in front of the homes where the named person lived and from which they were taken.

Then comes the name, in this case (in order from left to right): Betty Rsenbusch (nee Klaus), Gerda Braunold (nee Klaus), Sigmund Klaus, Henriette Klaus, and Ernst Klaus.

There follows their birth year.

Then comes what happened to them.. Three say “Deported”, Two of them then have the name of the camp to which they were deported (Riga, Gurs,  Heilanstalt (roughly, “sanitarium”)  Grafenur, Followed by when and where they were murdered. For Betty Rosenbusch it notes that she fled to France in 1933 (the year the Nazis took power in Germany)  but was imprisoned  at Gurs (in  France) in 1940 , which was when  the German army defeated the French army and the German government took over France. The stone notes she was eventually murdered in Auschwitz in 1942.