In Stum­bling Blocks, Jen­nifer Krebs writes about her family’s Holo­caust sto­ry as a sec­ond-gen­er­a­tion sur­vivor. Through inter­views and mem­o­ries across decades, Krebs details the expe­ri­ences of her father and his fam­i­ly from Kristall­nacht through the end of the war. Some fam­i­ly mem­bers made it safe­ly to the Unit­ed States where­as oth­ers per­ished in con­cen­tra­tion camps. 

Every few chap­ters, the author alter­nates between the sto­ry of the child­hood of her father, Paul, in Berleburg, Ger­many and her own analy­sis of research she con­duct­ed about her fam­i­ly his­to­ry. She also relates her expe­ri­ences as a child and then adult car­ry­ing the weight of being the daugh­ter of a Holo­caust sur­vivor. Krebs includes pass­port pho­tos and oth­er fam­i­ly pho­tographs as well as sig­nif­i­cant doc­u­ments about emi­gra­tion and the fate of her family. 

One of the most shock­ing and upset­ting moments she recalls from her father’s child­hood is the morn­ing after Kristall­nacht. Even though the family’s win­dow was bro­ken by rocks and Nazis tried arrest­ing Paul’s father only to find out he was recov­er­ing from a recent surgery at the hos­pi­tal, Paul’s moth­er didn’t real­ize the extent and inten­si­ty of the dam­age, so she inno­cent­ly sent Paul and his sis­ter to school the next morn­ing. They were brought to the principal’s office soon after enter­ing and were told, ​“All Jew­ish chil­dren are expelled from Ger­man schools.” 

For their safe­ty, Paul and his sib­lings were sent by train to their aunt and uncle’s home in Bel­gium. Sep­a­rat­ed from their par­ents, they expe­ri­enced sad­ness and anx­i­ety, and soon also had to flee Bel­gium when Ger­mans start­ed to take over the coun­try. Paul, his sis­ters, his cousins, and their aunt spent days walk­ing toward France, sleep­ing in barns along the way, often with­out any food. Even­tu­al­ly, Paul and his sib­lings returned to Ger­many on children’s visas; their Bel­gium rel­a­tives were mur­dered in con­cen­tra­tion camps. 

Because Krebs’s father wasn’t a pris­on­er in a con­cen­tra­tion camp, he strug­gled with the label ​“Holo­caust sur­vivor” to describe him­self, even though he was a vic­tim of Nazi atroc­i­ties. Krebs writes about tour­ing con­cen­tra­tion camps in Europe as an adult and vis­it­ing the parts of Ger­many where her fam­i­ly is from. In the ear­ly 2000s, a project was under­way to install Stolper­steine (stum­bling blocks, or stum­ble stones) ​“in front of all the hous­es, in which the [Jew­ish] peo­ple lived, who were pur­sued and were deprived of their rights and a lot of them mur­dered.” The Stolper­steine, some of which Krebs has pho­tographed and includ­ed in her book, are small memo­ri­als that force any­one walk­ing by to ​“stum­ble” into the past and remem­ber what hap­pened there. Stum­bling Blocks, like the stones the book is named after, cre­ates a way for read­ers to stum­ble into one family’s sto­ry of sur­vival and tragedy dur­ing the Holo­caust and how that trau­ma impacts the next generation.