Leah Davenport stumbled, almost literally, upon a method to raise awareness of one murdered Jewish family rendered almost forgotten by the Holocaust.

Davenport, a 2025 graduate of the College of Charleston in South Carolina, had seen some of the more than 100,000 Stolpersteine (German for “stumbling stones”) while on a study abroad program in Poland, Germany and the Netherlands. The 4-by-4-inch brass plates are found in sidewalks throughout Europe near the last-known residences of Nazi victims; each is inscribed with the name of a murdered resident who had lived at that address.

The Jewish student—a double major in Jewish studies and women’s and gender studies—was offered the opportunity by her college adviser, Chad Gibbs, to write an article on a collection of letters written in German that had been housed for decades in the college’s Addlestone Library Jewish Heritage Collection. The correspondence was between first cousins Minnie Baum of Camden, S.C., and Malie Landsmann of Berlin.

The two had never met but, throughout their correspondence between 1938 and 1941, Landsmann desperately sought Baum’s help in getting herself; her husband, Chaim; and their two daughters, Ida and Peppi, out of Germany and then Poland “before we are completely destroyed,” as she wrote in one letter.

Baum tried to help but ultimately was unsuccessful. Malie and Chaim were murdered in Auschwitz in 1942. The fate of the girls is unknown, though they are presumed to have died with their parents.

Davenport could have ended her involvement after completing the article. Instead, she decided that was just the beginning.

“The article itself theoretically will exist forever, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the Landsmanns will live on in people’s memory forever,” said Davenport, who will be pursuing a master’s degree in social work this fall at Boston College. “I didn’t want that responsibility of being the only person to remember all of this.”

That’s when she recalled the Stolpersteine—and decided to arrange the commemoration for the Landsmanns. “These stones could be that place, that piece, that keeps them in the public memory.”

On March 9, 2025, Davenport took part in the installation ceremony outside 17 Hirtenstrasse in Berlin, where the Landsmanns had lived. She was joined, among others, by the building’s current residents. “I was incredibly happy,” she said, “to be the one to bring them back.”