We came to Essen, Germany for a quick 48 hour stop over to visit my great grandparents’ stolpersteines. They are something I’ve always wanted to see and when else will I be passing through Europe with enough flexibility to detour through Germany for a couple of days?

I was awoken this morning by Nick groaning to ask for a glass of water. He was miserable and had a fever of 103. Immediately I knew it would just be me and Millie on today’s outing. As we were leaving, I said “it’s a girl’s day!” And she said “mom it’s not nice to leave boys out”. My little men’s rights activist.

We set off and drove the 10 minutes from our Airbnb to the address listed on the stolpersteine website. It is where my grandmother spent her late childhood and teenage years before escaping to England and where my great grandparents lived until they were deported and then murdered.

I felt nervous driving up. The neighborhood is nice and people were going about their business doing types of things you do at 9am on a weekday, like walking dogs and leaving for work. As Millie and I found the address we looked down and there were the stones.

As I started reading them to her and explaining who these people were I started crying. She has only seen me cry a couple of times so this really freaked her out and she started crying hysterically. So before I knew it we were both standing in this neighborhood just sobbing.

She asked me if I knew them and for a moment it felt a bit silly to be crying for people I never met. But then I thought about how close Millie is to my mom, and that these names are the same distance to my mom as she is to Millie. And they never got to meet. We are all connected.

As people walked past I wondered if they ever notice their names, and think about whose family it is. I wanted to stop everyone and tell them “Can you believe it??? This is my family! They lived here!” But of course, I didn’t.

From what I know about them they were business owners, quite successful, respected by their neighbors, and never imagined that the holocaust would affect them. Being in the neighborhood I could see why. I was struck by how nice and normal everything was. It didn’t feel like a place where anything bad would happen. Was this the door they were pulled from?

I thought about the people who lived in the buildings now and how they got there. My family owned two of these buildings and then… they didn’t. Who owns them now? How have things changed hands?

It felt kind of weird to just get in the car and drive away again, so Millie and I walked down the block in search of a park. I thought about my teenage Granny walking this block. Where did she go to school? Which neighbors did she know? Did she walk to this same park like we were doing?

We walked and walked and walked to attempt to get into the nearby Grugapark but couldn’t figure out how to enter. It was almost comical. We could hear kids playing but could not for the life of us find an entrance that was unlocked. We even walked through wooded areas but there were fences everywhere. After 30 minutes we gave up.

We drove on to the Ruhr Museum which is a museum showing the history of the area staring from, seemingly, amoebas. Millie was very impressed by the length of the escalator to get in.

We stopped at the cafe first to get an extremely German lunch: rhubarb juice, a pretzel, and currywurst.

The museum itself was kind of strange but kept us occupied. It really had everything.

They had a small (compared to the birds) section about the holocaust and the local area’s role in it. Two things stood out to me. First they mentioned that most people in the region were supportive of Hitler’s regime. When I read things like this I’m furious and don’t want to believe it, but then I know how insidious this stuff can be. Seeing the shift in American politics over the last 12 years has made me believe it.

Second, they had a section that slowly rotated through the area’s holocaust victims. I debated waiting to see if my family’s names would be there but it was only in the Ks. And there were so many of them. It would have taken hours to loop back around to H. That’s how many families were affected in this town alone.

We left and drove past the barf shop.

I was still annoyed about not finding an entrance to the park and wanted a retry. This time with the car. So we drove around until we could find an entrance, paid 5€ to get in, and played for a while.

It had multiple playgrounds and farm animals everywhere.

Then we stopped by a grocery store and came home to a still-feverish Nick. We ate and hung out and eventually his fever started to break. Will tomorrow be the first day in 2 weeks that all three of us are healthy? Stay tuned.