Forced Walks is a programme of artist-led performative, socially engaged, public walks, and digitally connected journeys at the edge of memory. Walks witness and are mindful of refugees, migrants, water-carriers and others who were/are forced to walk to survive.

Forced Walks reveals hidden stories of those dispossessed of land and home by war, economic and climate change and seeks to generate contemporary and locative resonances.

We walk at a time and place of our choosing in solidarity with those who had no choice.

Sara’s Last Steps is our current project

The first of our journey at the edge of memory, Forced Walks: Honouring Esther, took the route of a Nazi Death March and transposed it onto the English countryside. The second, Sara’s Last Steps, traces the final steps of a Jewish mother forcibly parted from her children at the Auschwitz selection point, transposed to the Lake District. The walk traverses the site of a WW2 workers housing estate near Windermere. In 1945 part of the site was requisitioned for a group of Jewish child Holocaust refugees, ‘the Windermere Children’. As part of a series of legislative measures to isolate, identify and exclude Jews from social life in the 1930’s the Nazi regime required Jews to wear the yellow star, for men to add Israel to their names and women to add Sara. Many of those young refugees would have known of, or were to discover the murder of a mother, grandmother or aunt by the Nazis. Many hoped for reunions with friends and family members. Traversing the estate remotely and perhaps one day on foot, Sara’s Last Steps explores a journey towards a surviving sister and a new life, a walk and a journey inexorably entwined in the knowledge of the death of their mother at Auschwitz. Walking in the 21st century in England, the project draws out contemporary resonances on exile, belonging, child refugees and family reunion.

On the 75th anniversary of the arrival of those refugees, Sara’s Last Steps was intended to form part of a cycle of work, Sanctuary and Exile, commissioned by the Lake District Holocaust Project. The anniversary events were severely curtailed by the virus, the commission continues online here and in remote small group walks near the artists’ home, with the intention of returning to Windermere in 2022.

A walk about time and the land, exile and belonging, the drift of memory and forgetting: memorialising in an era dense with anniversaries.

 Sara’s Last Steps was planned as a participatory performative walk for a maximum of twenty five people, the artists extended an invitation to second and third generation Holocaust survivors, former residents of the Calgarth Estate and their children, present day refugees and their friends, family and supporters.  The project seeks to extend the resonances of the welcome received to child refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War to the experience of contemporary unaccompanied child refugees.

Artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein offer an open invitation to help develop activity within this framework:

• willingness to participate, contribute and share online
• walkers create, gather and share responses
• participants agree to be present on foot, online or both

Find out more and get involved with Sara’s Last Steps walking project, join the mailing list!
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