Hertze Caplan

Look down before you look up. Set flush into the pavement is a square of brass about ten by ten centimetres, polished brighter than the stones around it by weather and by the feet that cross it every day. Up close, a name and a few carved words come into focus: Hertze Caplan. This is one of the stolpersteine, the small memorials that artist Gunter Demnig began laying in 1993, each one placed into the ground at or near where the person it remembers once lived or worked.

The idea is plain and stubborn: put a name back where it belongs. The stones appear before houses, shops and doorways, in the middle of ordinary daily life rather than set apart from it. In Norway the first ones were laid in 2010, and their placement depends on museums and local groups who research addresses, names and biographies before a plate is ever cast. Worldwide, tens of thousands of these squares now sit in pavements, each carrying a single person's story.

Stand here for a moment and picture the street as it was when Hertze Caplan walked it: neighbours who knew his face, deliveries and comings and goings, routines that political violence then broke apart. Today the same pavement carries commuters and dog walkers, and the brass interrupts that flow, a quiet friction between the present and what was taken. Before you move on, crouch and let the metal catch the light. Read the name slowly. A life reduced to a small square on the ground becomes, the moment you notice it, immeasurably larger.