As Yom HaShoah begins, award-winning Canadian children's author Kathy Kacer explains how 100,000 small brass plaques across Europe—known as stolpersteine—help pass Holocaust memory to the next generation.

That’s why after publishing over 30 kids books with Holocaust themes, her newest effort Last Known Address, dropped just before Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Kacer uses “stolpersteine”s or “stumbling stones” to connect her young readers with the lives lost or disrupted during the Holocaust.

Kacer showcases the last homes where Anne Frank and 12 lesser-known victims of Nazi persecution lived. Most of the book focuses on Jews, but she also broadens her storytelling to include others targeted by Hitler’s regime: a Roma couple, a gay German man and a mentally disabled brother.

Several of her subjects survived, including the late Vera Katz Schiff of Toronto and Salman Schocken of Israel.

On today’s episode of The CJN’s North Star podcast, Kathy Kacer joins host Ellin Bessner to describe her voyage of discovery tracing the stumbling stones, and why she keeps speaking about the Holocaust to thousands of students at hundreds of schools.

Related Links

Learn more and buy Kathy Kacer ’s latest book “Last Known Address ” through Second Story Press.
Read more about Ellin’s personal encounter with Stolpersteine in the small German Rhine River town of Bacharach in 2017, in The CJN.
Search more about the Stolpersteine on artist Gunter Demnig’s project site .

Credits

Host and writer: Ellin Bessner ( @ebessner )
Production team: Zachary Kauffman (senior producer), Andrea Varsany (producer), Michael Fraiman (executive producer), Alicia Richler (editorial director)
Music: Bret Higgins

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