A special Mothers Day walk

Mothers Day walk: Walking in witness to separated families and child refugees. A new layer in the ongoing project, Sara’s Last Steps, exploring contemporary resonances from the experiences of child Holocaust survivors. In 1945, at the end of World War 2, a group of Jewish child refugees were flown to the Lake District, separated by war and genocide from mothers, fathers, brothers and sisters.

Our walking conversations were threaded with thoughts of those forced to walk into exile, coerced by gunfire and explosion, discrimination and genocide. For Ukrainians in the news at the the moment, but also the Afghans, Syrians, Sudanese, Libyans and so many other people forced out of their lives by war, famine and drought.

Each stopping point imagined as surfaces touching, folded layers and ripples of the living tissue of memory, life, time, geography and place. Connecting. Resonating.

On Mothers Day 2022 we walked an imagined transit across their temporary refuge in the Lake District, following the transposed route of many of their mothers from selection point to gas chamber, interrupted. Punctuated and performed at stopping points, defined this time on Watch House Hill, Pill in North Somerset, by:

a mound made from the rubble of demolished farm buildings;

an old orchard,

a fence,

a shelter by a track,

a viewpoint.

Intersections themed and resonating: separation, bittersweet reunion, solidarity, forced migration, resistance/dignity, custodians of memory.

At the mound, the Tump on Watchhouse Hill, Pill, hosted by artist, Lorna Brunstein we heard testimony from Holocaust survivors: her mother, Esther Brunstein, and her uncle, Perec Zylberberg, about the last time they saw their mother. Their mother Lorna’s grandmother was among the many Jewish mothers killed by the Nazis. The Tump made from the rubble of a bulldozed farm, resonating with the heaps of Second World War rubble still dominating some of the cities of Europe and rising again in the bombed cities of Syria and Ukraine.

In the imaginary of the story of the walk, this point was both the Selection point at Auschwitz and a bunk house in the Lake District village where 300 Jewish child refugees were welcomed. That village, the Calgarth Estate has been erased, there is not even a pile of rubble.

On common land enclosed by slaveowners, we walked into an old orchard that once supplied the nearby Isolation Hospital. The orchard had been off limits to villagers for years, surrounded by barbed wire and signs threatening a fatal contamination.

A later conversation explored contaminated networks, the networks of trade and empire. The orchard today is a community resource, its complex history documented here by Liz Milner, one of the Mother’s Day walkers. Listening under the apple trees to Perec and Esther we contemplated the unbearable knowledge they carried and the moment of their bittersweet reunion.

It took two years for Esther to be reunited with Perec in England, her only surviving brother. We learned that under existing legislation Esther may not have even been admitted to the UK and that certainly under current proposals Esther and Perec would not have been reunited in this country.

We walked on to the sound of a Yiddish folk song, into the woods, the points on the walk folded time and place to our home, our village with distant places and lives. A majestic beech tree twinned with the huge tree by the post office on that now demolished and cleared Lake District village. Here linked with there and then juxtaposed with now.

We talked about other trees as meeting and memory places, a sadness about the tree on Watchhouse Hill was revealed. We stroked its much scarred bark and noted the remains of spring flowers, perhaps someone’s ashes are here.

Considering solidarity and friendship the conversation turned to Bristol City Of Sanctuary and the interconnected support networks locally; in contrast one walker shared the story of one young Afghan refugee whose schooling had been interrupted by war and exile and had been the victim of discrimination as he attempted to resume his education in the UK.

Walkers were invited to find an object or write a note and somehow embody it with the spirit of solidarity and friendship we would want to offer that young Afghan refugee, the spirit that reconnected Esther and Perec. We set off across the open fields towards a green fenced basket ball pitch.

This fence, not unlike the current one at the back of the Lakes School built over part of the Calgarth Estate, evoked thoughts of other fences from those that now enclose refugees, to Trump’s fence across the US border with Mexico, the Israeli West Bank fence and the barbed wire topped enclosures of the Nazi ghettos. Here, bearing witness to those fences, those obstructions to human interaction, we exchanged objects and notes endowed with solidarity, friendship and love. We stood and reflected on Primo Levi’s statement from If This is a Man (1947), written just a short time after his liberation from Auschwitz.

Even in this place one can survive, and therefore one must want to survive, to tell the story, to bear witness; and that to survive we must force ourselves to save at least the skeleton, the scaffolding, the form of civilization. We are slaves, deprived of every right, exposed to every insult, condemned to certain death, but we still possess one power, and we must defend it with all our strength for it is the last — the power to refuse our consent.” 

In resistance, our bodies hold feelings, memories, songs and rhythms, I refuse to give consent to my oppression. Close to an old track we walked to a shelter where we heard a clip from Esther Brunstein’s speech at the Imperial Museum, London. On the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation of Belsen, she passionately recalled the small and powerful acts of resistance that took place even in the Death camps of the Nazis.

We spoke about the Bund and Yiddish and internationalism and again walking on, heard the glorious voice of Paul Robeson singing, The Partisans Song, ‘Never say this is the final road for you’, in Yiddish, in solidarity with Jewish socialists locked up by the Russians.

There must be similar songs from the Syrian resistance, the Kurdish resistance, Sudan, Libya …. for future walks we will find them.

The old track takes us to the viewpoint, on our Mothers Day walk, to a view over Pill, the river and the bridge. In the fold of time and place it is the gas chamber and crematoria of Auschwitz where so many Saras were killed and it is also a bronze age burial mound on top of a hill overlooking Lake Windermere. On this hill you could see the Calgarth Estate and the lake and the path to the Flying Boat factory where the people who hosted the wartime child Holocaust refugees worked. On this hill they picnicked.

Looking out over the River Avon the river that carried the ships and extracted wealth of empire into the city of Bristol and a surrounding landscape inscribed with that wealth, notions of contamination and reparation returned. We talked about memory, the responsibilities of survivors to live and tell the story, ourselves as storytellers, custodian of memory.

Reaching out to a future in which it should never happen again, and walking with it so that at least in the repeated re-telling, layer upon layer, linking landscape to the telling, it is never forgotten.

Stopping places.