Daniel Caplan

Look down at a Norwegian pavement and you find a square of brass set flush with the ground, ten centimetres across. Neat engraved letters spell the name Daniel Caplan. To read them you have to stop, stoop and slow your step, and that pause is part of the design.

This plate is a Stolperstein: one of the small memorials that the artist Gunter Demnig calls stumbling stones. Since 1993 he has set them into pavements across Europe. Every stone carries a name, a birth year and a few words of fate. They mark the last home or workplace that a person persecuted under Nazism chose freely. For Caplan, this threshold once belonged to the daily fabric of the street.

All around, the street hums with cafés, bicycles and conversation. The plate insists that past and present share the same narrow strip of ground. The smallness of the brass stands against the enormity of the loss it signifies. In sunlight the metal throws a warm sheen. In rain the letters hold tiny beads of water, and the name seems to tremble.