A two day walk to Bath
The Honouring Esther walk is now shaping up well ahead of the launch of the project on January 27, the link up with historian and librarian, Peter Jackson, is generating powerful material informing the walk.
Further research with Esther supported by contact at the Bergen Belsen Memorial Museum indicate that the death march took several days. Esther recalls the feel of the cold frosty ground, it must have been a desperate experience, starved half to death, worked to the point of death and then forced to march in flimsy worn out clothing with no protection against the elements. In winter in Germany. There were deaths along the way.
This map of shows the route of the February 1945 death march. The caption says ‘On the way past forests, villages and a school. The route taken by the evacuated Concentration Camp prisoners to Bergen-Belsen. The crosses mark the sites where prisoners were buried’.
In consequence we are now planning for a two day walk, beginning in Frome, Somerset on Tuesday 14 April and walking to Hinton Charterhouse, then on Wednesday 15 April walking from Hinton Charterhouse to Combe Down Bath. It looks like there will be approximately 10 points where the actual walk coincides with the symbolic line of the death march, in principle each one of these will be the site of some kind of intervention. Strangely some of the graves marked on the map are almost exactly at points where the actual walk we will do in April cross the symbolic line on the map.
reference: ‘Besondere Vorkommnisse nicht bekannt: Zwangsarbeiter in unterirdischen Rustungebetrieben: wie ein Heidedorf kriegswichtig wurde’.The author is Annette Wienecke, who was a school teacher in Hambuhren and wrote the book in 1998.