The first thing we’ll point out is something you’ll be seeing all over town: brass plaques embedded into the sidewalk Stolpersteine, or Stumbling Stones.These are small brass plaques with a name, year of birth, date of death, and where each person was deported to and murdered.In their simplicity, in their size, they catch our attention. We bend down, we read the name, figure out the age of the victim, and ponder those words “ermordet in Auschwitz,” or “Treblinka,” or “Theresienstadt.”Gunter Demnig, an artist in Cologne, started the project in 1993, and in very short order the concept spread throughout Germany. At first, Demnig laid every stone himself, but by now, there are more than 9,000 in Berlin alone, tens of thousands in other German towns and cities and more in Austria, Italy, Greece, Hungary and other countries. The count is over 75,000. And rising.Let’s now turn our attention to the history of Berlin. A very truncated version.This section of Berlin Mitte is where Jews settled from the time they were allowed to live here in the late 1600s. Almost all of them were Orthodox, and that would begin to change only in the late 1700s and throughout the 1800s.As the city’s population grew, Berlin’s Jews began integrating into German society. They worked in the professions and commerce, in finance, too--and those who could afford to moved out of Mitte and into more affluent sections of this growing metropolis.By the 1920s, some 50,000 of Berlin’s 175,000 Jews lived right here. Many had recently arrived from Eastern Europe, fleeing pogroms, revolution, and the coming of Communism in what had become the Soviet Union.A large percentage in Berlin Mitte remained Orthodox and desperately poor. They depended on the Berlin Jewish community for help, which responded as best it could with medical care, job training, and housing.On Centropa’s walking tour, you will see some of those institutions—or at least the buildings they were housed in.As we walk along, we will also draw on two people Centropa interviewed and both of them grew up right here in Berlin Mitte, and both were lucky enough to get away once the Nazis came to power. Every once in a while, we’ll use the transcripts from their interviews. In the next few minutes you’ll meet Rosa Rosenstein and Hillel Kempler.