Absences, presence and resonances on a death march transposed, returned and retraced.

A two year walking project in Somerset, England and Lower Saxony, Germany.

The walks worked with the testimony of survivor and human rights activist, Esther Brunstein.

Watch the film and view all the installation media here

Esther Brunstein: 1928 -2017

Esther Brunstein died shortly before the end of the Honouring Esther project, she was our number one supporter, advocate and inspiration.

We know she would have wanted the project closing exhibition and this web record of the project to continue so we offer this in the spirit of her life with love, hope and solidarity

Lifelong Bundist  

Yiddish speaker, interpreter and teacher 

Human Rights activist.

Mother 

Grandmother 

Great grandmother

Esther Zylberberg was born in Lodz 1928. Her pre-war childhood was spent immersed in Yiddish culture. Esther’s parents were active members of the Bund, the Polish Jewish Workers Socialist Movement whose values of equality and justice informed Esther throughout her life.

The youngest of three children, Esther managed to stay with her mother as far as Auschwitz where they were separated and her mother killed. At the end of the War, Esther was liberated from Belsen and evacuated to Sweden where she stayed for two years. She came to England and settled in London to be with her brother. Out of her entire extended family only Esther and her brother Perec survived.

Esther became a leading member of the Yiddish Theatre in London where she met her husband, scenic designer, Stanislaw Brunstein. In the 1990’s Esther found her voice again speaking out on human rights issues and campaigning against Holocaust denial. She spoke at huge rallies alongside the great campaigners of the period and opened the Holocaust gallery at the Imperial War Museum, London, alongside the Queen. She shared childhood stories of prewar life in Poland and her experiences of the Holocaust at hundreds of school visits to thousands of school children. She always made the connections from her specific experience to that of other people resisting oppression elsewhere in the world.

Esther Brunstein was one of the key figures in the campaign for a Holocaust Memorial Day. She was a passionate internationalist and human rights activist and spoke at the United Nations on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

This walking arts project began with her testimony of the death march she endured. Esther closely followed the project led by her daughter Lorna Brunstein and co-artist Richard White, sadly Esther has gone but her spirit and energy lives on.

April 14-15 2015:  A 2 day walk in Somerset as close as possible to the transposed line. Where the walk intersects the line, interventions. An intimate performative walk-in-witness exploring human rights  and personal resonances on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Belsen. Second and third generation survivors walk with second and third generation liberators.

The walk finished at the Bath Jewish Burial Ground with a reading of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Honouring Esther was launched as part of the Bristol Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 programme. Research continues to generate local resonances from descendants of soldiers who liberated Belsen, a pioneering local human rights activist and Frome resident, Alice Seeley Harris and the discovery that the Somerset walk passes close to the unmarked graves of those who died in the Bath Workhouse at Odd Down.

Belsen was liberated by the British army some of whom came from Somerset, amongst the inmates were survivors of death marches who eventually came to live in England.

One of those survivors was Esther Brunstein, Lorna Brunstein’s mother.

The route of the death march she survived in February 1945 is the thread of the project.

This annotated version of the route shows deaths, possibly temporary burials, along the way.

Richard White, Lorna Brunstein and other walkers followed the exact route of the death march into Bergen-Belsen. 

Seventy-one years after Esther Brunstein and other survivors of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz were marched at gunpoint from the slave labour camp near Hanover to Belsen, their steps were retraced.

The walk followed the same model as the walk in Somerset actively seeking to generate human rights resonances. 

For second and third generation survivors, liberators, perpetrators and witnesses as well as those more recently exiled and dispossessed by war and prejudice, the walk offered a space for moments of reconnection, reconciliation, reflection and solidarity.