They call them "stumbling stones" - small bronze tiles in the sidewalk that mark the addresses where Holocaust victims once lived.
As the Netherlands marks 80 years since its liberation, debate has flared over the installation of "Stolperstein" for 45 Dutch political prisoners - Jewish activists, communists, Christian outspoken - who were "experimentally" gassed by the Nazis at the Bernburg psychiatric clinic in Germany in 1942. , the Guardian reports.
Although about 102.000 Jews, Roma and Sinti from the Netherlands were deported and killed, more and more evidence is being given to the complicity of the Dutch state in handing over lists of politically ineligible people.
For the past year, Jan Boksem and Steven Brandsma, cousins through their partners, have been campaigning to place stumbling blocks across the Netherlands to mark the stories of 45 people from Bernburg. But they say they have encountered obstacles in the form of a lack of money, bureaucracy and conflicting ideas.
"Last year Jan and I went to Germany to pay our debts to history. Jan's uncle was gassed there, something he only found out when he started researching. Although his uncle was in the Nojengame camp and the cause of death was reported as serious illness, he was actually gassed in Bernburg... he was burned in a furnace and his ashes thrown into a river in eastern Germany," Brandsma says.
The uncle, Hendrik Wisker, a communist from the town of Enschede, was one of several thousand people whose files were handed over to the Gestapo by the Dutch police. "This is almost not acknowledged. It is a huge scandal," Brandsma said.
However, their pleas have run into bureaucratic and financial hurdles, especially in Haarlem, where the volunteer foundation Struikelstenen Haarlem has the city's permission to place stones only for the 733 Jewish, Sinti and Roma victims of the Holocaust - a process that takes ten years.
"In Harlem, a decision was made to place stumbling blocks only for Jews who were deported during World War II. This is what the foundation is working on. So if someone wants a stumbling block, but the victim does not belong to this group, we see if there is another a way to remember them or pay attention to them. This was offered in this case too – but they want struikelsteen (the Dutch word for a stumbling block) or nothing," said Marieke Gerts, spokeswoman for Mayor Jos Vienen.
Others see things differently. In Maastricht there is a stumbling block for the resistance fighter Lambert Kraft, and a street is named after him – Bèr Kraftstraat. In Utrecht, the request to place stones for two victims was approved and financed in one afternoon.
Meanwhile, in The Hague, local VVD party leader Lotte van Basten Battenburg raised funds for seven stones in cooperation with colleagues from the SGP Christian Union in one afternoon.
"Jewish victims are very important to commemorate, but these political victims have a special place because the government persecuted them for a long time. We must never allow that to happen again," she said.
Dr Samuel Kruizinga, a historian of 19th- and 20th-century wars and violence at the University of Amsterdam, said the key question was whether the state should bear responsibility for the costs.
"What certainly happened is that the Dutch security services kept lists of suspect populations – radical trade unionists, communists – and allegedly the lists were burned when the Germans invaded in May 1940," he said.
"But copies were sent to local police stations, and the German security services in the occupied Netherlands put together the pieces of the puzzle. The Dutch security services had a particular animosity towards leftists, whom they saw as a greater and more immediate threat to Dutch democracy and society. Many of these people were horribly tortured for information and then sent to their deaths. This history is complicated perhaps by the overzealousness of the Dutch security services and the active assistance of the Dutch police," the historian added.
These stumbling blocks – spreading through the streets of the Netherlands – represent both a metaphor and a memory.
"Whenever my niece, who just turned four, sees one of them, she kneels and cleans it of dirt or leaves. They are like lights on the sidewalk that illuminate the souls of those we remember," said Van Basten Batenburg.
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