Waldeslust found

admin on January 24, 2015

After much research and with invaluable help from Peter Jackson we have now found what we think is a photograph of the slave labour camp for the Jewish women transported from Auschwitz to Hambuhren-Ovelgonne known as ‘Waldeslust”, the camp where Esther was a prisoner from August 44 until February 45
the slave labour camp

According to Peter the photo was taken in 1951 and was found in a small book about Hambuhren during the war, written by a local resident Rainer Fabisch. Peter says “The Waldeslust photo shows it to be a pleasantly wooded place with no sign of any of the conditions that the camp inmates had to cope with.horrors. It looks a perfectly habitable place and may have been used to house some of the thousands of refugees from what was eastern Germany and became part of Poland after the war”

In Peter Jackson’s book on Hambuhren he describes Waldeslust as

‘one of three sub-camps of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, some ten miles away. It was built in 1942 and at first housed Russian POW’s, Dutch workers and from February 1944, British and Canadian airmen. Called on some maps the ‘Judenlager’ or ‘Jewish Camp’, it was concealed in woodland on the edge of Ovelgonne on what is now the road from Hambuhren to Oldau. It was surrounded by barbed wire and cut off from the rest of the camps and from the outside world. It had the rather picturesque name of Waldeslust, literally “woodland joy”, and it functioned as a concentration camp from August 1944, when prisoners were being transferred westwards from Auschwitz-Birkenau which was being closed down as the Russians advanced towards it.

The camp lasted for just six months, until February 1945, when it too was closed and its prisoners moved on foot to Belsen.

A two day walk to Bath

admin on January 13, 2015

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’.
map
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.

Esther’s Walk transposed to Switzerland

admin on October 10, 2014

We have had a request to provide the line of Esther’s walk to a colleague visiting Switzerland during the time that the project will be taking place. Here is the ‘line on the map’ with a destination yet to be finalised.
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zG0FerrHE65o.kGgIneoaR1Io&w=640&h=480]

Honouring Esther walk ready for ground truthing

admin on October 1, 2014

I have now re drawn the route that we think Esther might have been forced along from the slave labour camp back to the death camp at Bergen Belsen taking into account her testimony and our research. Roads will have changed since 1945 but this is mapped against a current road route rather than tracks through the country. So we have a river crossing and a walk through  at least two settlements. I have transposed the shape and orientation of that route to England in Scribblemaps as described in the route finding section of this site and hooked it to our chosen finish point in Bath.

I imported the .gpx file of the death march Esther was on from Scribble maps to Viewranger

Using a combination of  Viewranger and Scribble maps I have now worked out a route in England. More or less from Frome into Bath. This weaves like a memory or a DNA spiral around the historic route and provides us with a series of intersections where we can plan moments of memorial and reflection.

Here’s the link to the routes in Scribble map, the red indicates the ‘historic route’ same length and orientation as the walk Esther was forced on in 1945 and the green indicates a possible route of a walk in Somerset retracing that historic walk as closely as possible. This could give us up to 10 intersections.

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zG0FerrHE65o.kag4W27uQz-M&w=640&h=480]

I’ll publish this to Viewranger when I have ground truthed it. About 15 miles with up to 10 point of intersection. At these points we will create some kind of intervention reflecting on those who did not survive, those who did and those who are still walking from war and persecution.

Honouring Esther …. draft for walking in April 2015

admin on July 29, 2014

Esther’s Walk in UK first draft.
On the basis of Esther Brunstein’s testimony and research to confirm locations Richard has plotted the route from the work camp near Hamburen to the death camp at Bergen Belsen.
“Using scribble map I was able to drag the line of that estimated route retaining shape, scale and orientation and drop it on to our chosen finish point in Bath. The line offered a starting point on the edge of Frome. I have now plotted a contemporary route on rights of way as close as possible to that historic route.”
Dragged and dropped estimated historic route is in red, contemporary route in green.

Tags remain on Bergen Belsen and Waldeslust near Hanover indicating the actual starting and finishing points of the route that Esther and a group of some 80 Polish Jewish women  were forced to walk in the depths of winter, February 1945.

http://scribblemaps.com/api/maps/images/450/450/2cp27cMdhF.png

The estimated route of the the walk from the slave labour camp to Belsen:

[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zG0FerrHE65o.k5kvqlATWHv0&w=640&h=480]

Our proposal is to undertake some personal and collective acts of reflection, honouring and respect at the points where the historic route and the contemporary route intersect. We will encourage participants to mark this and share it in some way and subject to mobile signal our intention is that some of this will be networked live via social media to those unable to make the walk. We will further gather and network at the end point.

Spaces of Memory & Performance: Trauma, Affect, Displacement

admin on July 1, 2014

Last weekend 20-21 June 2014, Lorna attended a 2 day International Conference on ‘Spaces of Memory and Performance : Trauma, Affect, Displacement; at University of East London, Centre of Performing Arts

This was an intense, jam packed 2 days of stimulating presentations from delegates across the globe. Great work being made and research carried out by artists and academics in response to acts of atrocities, displacement and trauma from ‘The Disappeared’ in South America, to the continuing impact of the Holocuast, and the communities left behind in the transition from Communism in Eastern Europe.

“I felt privileged and inspired to be part of it, exciting, creative, important times ahead!”

Speakers included Claudia Fontes (visual artist), Lola Arias (theatre director), Vikki Bell (Goldsmiths), Anne Huffschmidt (Freie Universitat Berlin), Ananda Breed (UEL), Carl Lavery (University of Glasgow), Valentina Salvi (UNTREF), Patricia Violi (University of Bologna), Eve Katsouraki (UEL), Lisa Peschel (University of York), Marcelo Brodsky (photographer artist), and Alan Marcus(University of Aberdeen)

‘Places are lost – destroyed, vacated, barred – but then there is some new place, and it is not the first, never can be the first.’ – Judith Butler

The conference was billed as follows:

“The aftermath of episodes of trauma and loss have traditionally given way to urban rituals and encounters with sites of public grieving. Even so, the emergence of disparate sites of trauma has not been enough addressed from a performative perspective. The very existence of the so-called ‘spaces of memory’ requests the reconfiguration of modes of engagement with the public space in the face of trauma and its performance. With this in mind, this two-day symposium will explore unconventional forms of intervention in performance and visual arts in a wide spectrum of geographical scenarios. “