Crown Princess Mette-Marit has attended a solemn ceremony in Oslo as ‘memorial stones’ were placed in the street to commemorate the Jewish victims of the Holocaust.
The stones, placed along the Akershusstranda, represent the victims of Nazism and are set in places where those victims once lived before their deportation and death.
“The passers-by who discover the stones become aware of the fact that the Holocaust also took place exactly where they are standing. In this way, the stones also have a clear pedagogical effect; they alert those who happen to look down when passing by,” the Jewish Museum of Olso’s website states.
The project is a worldwide endeavour that began in 1993 in Germany, with 75,000 stones placed in 26 European countries. The stones came to Norway in 2010 and have been placed around the country in memorial services ever since. The artist behind the project, Gunter Demnig, often lays the stones himself, and he was in Oslo to lay the next three stones in his project.
At the ceremony, on September 1st 2022, three stones were laid in the presence of Crown Princess Mette-Marit: they remember Ernst Josef Adler, Fritz Gustav Löwy and Meta Hirschberg, whose biographies were then read out to the gathered crowd.
Each stone lists the person’s name and the years they were born, deported, and died. The place of death is also engraved upon the 10cm x 10cm stone.
Following the outdoor ceremony, the Crown Princess attended a reception at the nearby Defence Museum where she read an excerpt from the poem ‘Stumbling Stones’ by Ole Robert Sunde. The poem is included in an anthology called ‘Hjemlandet’, of which she is a co-editor.
She was joined by Toril Hole, the director of the Jewish Museum, who gave a speech; and Harald Korn, from the Mosaic Faith Community, who read a prayer.
