Book: Letters of Stone. From Nazi Germany to South Africa.
Author: Steven Robins.
Reviewed by: Samantha Keogh.
Review made possible by: Penguin Random Books South Africa.
When I received this book, the blurb reminded me of so many other books telling the story of the atrocities committed against humanity that were the holocaust of World War Two.
However, Letters of Stone is not a mere retelling of the same story.
Rather it is a poignant tale of Steven Robins’, a professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at the University of Stellenbosch, journey to find his lost relatives – the Robinskis, originally from Poland, who were living in Germany at the start of the war.
Steven and his brother David grew up as middle-class white, Jewish children in Port Elizabeth, never knowing their grandparents or the story of their lives.
Although his father had a German accent until his death in his 80s, he never told his children about his family from Poland and Germany, or the story of their deaths in Hilter’s death camps – part of the Führer’s “Final Solution”.
It was only after his father’s death, and the discovery (by his cousin in his aunt’s flat) of letters from Germany from his grandmother, Cecilie Robinski, to her two sons who had managed to escape to South Africa, that Steven was able to start his journey to piece together his family’s history.
The story is the history of a family, not a period in history, and tells of Steven’s mental, emotional and physical journey across South Africa and Germany to map the the history of his family and their final days before they were sent to different concentration camps in Poland and Germany.
Part of his journey included the discovery of stolpersteine* (literally translated as stumbling stones), and commissioning two of these to be placed outside the home of his aunt and uncle, Edith and Siegfried Robinski, in Berlin.
Steven’s discoveries and the account of his family are both terribly tragic and triumphant.
A sense of tragedy sets in as the reader shares Steven’s discoveries of a family he never knew existed and the pain of coming to terms with what his family must have felt and experienced in their last months, as told through the letters of his grandmother. Yet there is a sense of triumph in his reinstatement of the existence of the family in Germany through the laying of the stolpersteine and sharing his discoveries about the family with historians in both Germany and South Africa.
I would highly recommend this, above most other books giving accounts of the holocaust, for the personal story which illustrates the story of the holocaust far better than any impersonal history book ever could.
*The stolpersteine is a type of monument created by artist Gunter Demnig to commemorate victims of Nazi oppression, including the Holocaust.
Stolpersteins are small, cobblestone-sized memorials for individual victims of Nazism, commemorating individuals – both those who died and survivors – who were consigned by the Nazis to prisons, euthanasia facilities, sterilisation clinics, concentration camps, and extermination camps.
