October 1, 2020, was busy day in Gunduliceva Street in Zagreb, Croatia. In front of building number 29, a group of people had gathered to commemorate Lea Deutsch, a Croatian child actress of Jewish origin and the youngest performer ever to appear on the stage of the Croatian National Theatre in Zagreb.
At the age of 16 years old, she died while being transported from Zagreb to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz.
Often referred to as the “Croatian Shirley Temple”, Deutsch has come to symbolize the suffering of Jews in Croatia between 1941 and 1945, during the period of the so-called Independent State of Croatia, NDH, a Nazi puppet state that enforced harsh racial laws and carried out mass killings of Serbs, Jews, Roma and others.
Deutsch was the first person whose life and death were marked in Zagreb with a so-called “stumbling stone”, part of the famous project of German artist Gunter Demnig.
Demnig started the Stolpersteine (Stumbling Stones) project in 1992 and has since installed tens of thousands of small concrete cubes with brass plaques remembering victims of the Nazis, all across Europe. The cubes are placed by the building in which the victim last lived, or worked of their own free will.
By 2023, a total of 62 such memorial stones had been installed in Zagreb, including one to Svetozar Milinov – the first to be dedicated to a Croatian Serb.
But five years on, some of these memorials to suffering have been damaged by vandals or even destroyed completely by ill-wishers.