living in the hope of reunion

walking with unbearable separations and unimaginable reunions.

A series of walks and other artworks to be presented online, in Windermere and beyond

Making The Return: these are urgent and critical works of memorialisation in the context of the passing of eyewitnesses to the Holocaust, the resurgence of the far-Right and war in Europe. As living memory becomes archive we present and host creative acts of solidarity and walking witness. The walks set out to make the return to past injustices as a co-created contribution to social repair. The project references accounts and documentation both of the aircraft factory workers’ village in the Lake District and historic and contemporary campaigns to provide sanctuary for child refugees. Working with living memory, testimony and archive of the group of child Holocaust survivors brought to the Calgarth Estate, their hosts and neighbours, we will invite further contributions towards presenting a series of curated walks out of which other art work will emerge

Rupture and Reunion: the walks and other art works explore the shared experience of rupture, the unbearable separation from home, family and friends and the longed for, almost unimaginable, reunion. The project will reference the experience of present day child refugees and the reunions frustrated by government quotas etc. For many of the child Holocaust survivors an imagined reunion remained a lifetime’s search, for a few it was part realised in the discovery of a member of a scattered, disrupted community. The project is grounded in the story of Perec Zylberberg who, whilst at the Calgarth Estate in 1945, discovered that his sister Esther had been liberated from the Bergen-Belsen death camp to Sweden.  Esther and Perec, despite years of hoping to the contrary, came to accept that no other member of their family had survived.

Love and internationalism: the work resonates with the spirit of internationalism and faith in humanity borne of Perec and Esther’s childhood in a Bundist home immersed in Yiddish culture. It carried Perec eventually to the Yiddish community in Montreal and Esther, as Holocaust denial surfaced in the UK, to become an antifascist speaker and educator. Married to another survivor, artist, Stanislaw Brunsten, Esther Brunstein was a key campaigner for a Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK. Artist Lorna Brunstein is Esther’s daughter. Walking artist, Richard White, is Lorna’s partner, his emerging iteration of walking-with informs their co-creative approach to this work.