Sara’s Last Steps
walking and memory: enforced exile, separated families, unaccompanied children …. towards an unimaginable reunion
This is a walk in progress, the site is being updated frequently as we walk the stations of Sara’s Last Steps. We are walking and asking questions, generating and drawing in contemporary resonances as the layers ripple and fold. These are slow acts of resistance and awareness raising, walking towards a kinder future.
News of most recent activity : a special Mothers Day walk in North Somerset
In the time of the virus this Forced Walks project, planned for the Lake District in 2020, continues to evolve through a series of walks close to the lead artists’ home towards online presentation and a return to Windermere in 2022. In the absence of safe routes for refugees and a new war in Europe, stories of separated families, unaccompanied children, forced migration and enforced exile are pressing and poignant. We walk in witness to the child Holocaust survivors who were brought to Windermere in 1945. A walk remembering those who did not survive, bringing to mind lives and cultures extinguished by oppression and bigotry. A walk in recognition of a tradition of welcome, offering refuge and asylum offered by ordinary people, even if not by their governments.
The six ‘stations’ of Sara’s Last Steps
The enforced final steps of a Jewish mother parted from her daughter at the Auschwitz selection point transposed to the site of a temporary WW2 workers village in the Lake District. The Calgarth Estate, near Windermere, was home to Flying Boat engineers and their families: in 1945 part of this accommodation was requisitioned for a group of Jewish child Holocaust refugees ‘the Windermere Children’. Opening out from the story of two child Holocaust survivors, siblings who found each other as one was recuperating in the Lake District and the other in Sweden, the project continues to evolve.
Sara’s Last Steps emerges from the juxtaposition of two journeys.
On the aerial photograph, the route from the selection point at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp to the gas chambers, marked in blue, is transposed to the site of the Calgarth Estate, Cumbria, retaining scale, orientation and duration
Numbered points refer to the ‘stations’ of an imagined walk on the site, marked in red.
Imagining and perhaps actually traversing the site of the Calgarth Estate involves walking round modern buildings, avoiding fences, opening and closing gates that were not there in 1945. Each obstacle presents an opportunity to consider layers of disruption, displacement, memory and erasure. The artists identified six key nodes, ‘stations’, from the juxtaposed layers where the present intervenes. These six interventions abstracted from their original geographic sites and transposed elsewhere become provocations for wider empathic reflection. The intention continues to be to find new ways of sharing this story as part of a process generating contemporary resonances and responsibilities. The project is commissioned by the Lake District Holocaust Project
The walk follows the transposed route from the selection point to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, a journey that may have been forced upon the parents and loved ones of many of the young Holocaust survivors cared for near Windermere in the summer and autumn of 1945. On August 17 1938 the Nazi government in Berlin decreed that all Jewish women must include Sara in their first names and men the name Israel. As the Holocaust destroyed the lives of disabled people, gays, Roma and Jews and many others across Europe hundreds of thousands of Saras would have been forcibly transported to Nazi death camps.
Sara’s Last Steps, the six ‘stations’
1. Separation
Where the selection point at Auschwitz overlays the site of a hostel on the erased Calgarth Estate.
Unaccompanied child refugees were housed in the vacant single workers hostels on the estate. In 1945, although the aircraft factory was winding down, Calgarth was still a lively workers’ village with families and children.
In the summer of 1945 a group of young Jewish refugees arrived at the Calgarth Estate, the ‘Windermere Children’. Perec Zylberberg, Lorna Brunstein’s uncle, was one of those orphaned children. On arrival he did not know if any of his family had survived. His father and older brother had escaped to the east and joined the resistance. He last saw his mother and sister alive in the Lodz ghetto. He was to discover that they were taken to Auschwitz where they were separated at the selection point.
Thoughts on moments of separation, departure/moments of arrival.
Parting.
Parents separated from children.
Sibling separated from sibling.
Arrival at Calgarth, arrival at Dover, arrival at Tilbury
Lorna Brunstein recalls her 2017 visit to Auschwitz:
“Standing at the selection point in Birkenau with Alicia, my daughter, I remember my mother telling me that at the selection point the infamous Dr Mengele decided her fate and that of her mother with a flick of the thumb. I stood at that point with Alicia who now at 26, is 10 years older than my mother was when Mengele made the choice of life for my mum and death for her mum. My grandmother age 45 was sent directly to the gas chambers. My mother never saw her again, she did not pass selection for life.“
“We left devastated, but afterwards strangely uplifted, with heads held high. Having gone back with my daughter to the place where my mother only just survived and where my grandmother tragically didn’t, confirmed for me that I will always, in whatever way I can, challenge the evils of bigotry and hate. I will hold onto the ideals and values of my mother’s Bundist socialist upbringing, that never left her through those darkest days – Equality, Freedom and Justice. That was her greatest legacy.“
Read the full account here.
Lorna followed the route taken by Sara, her grandmother, Esther and Perec’s mother, from the selection point to the part-destroyed gas chamber at Auschwitz-Birkenau where Sara was killed. That journey, transposed to the site of the Calgarth Estate forms the core gesture of this project. The Auschwitz selection point overlays the site of some of the single workers housing, where Perec and the ‘Windermere Children’ were housed. The estate was subsequently cleared and completely demolished. An archaeological dig has begun to uncover traces of this erased village whose residents welcomed the Jewish child refugees in 1945. The full story of the dig, the Lake District’s wartime seaplane factory and the aircraft workers who came to build them and lived at the Calgarth Estate can be found here.
Its is estimated that by the end of the Second World War ninety per cent of Europe’s Jewish children had been murdered. The group who became known as the ‘Windermere Children’ were found and brought to Britain as a result of the activism of Leonardo Montefiore and the Central British Fund who had pursuaded a reluctant British Government to admit them. The Government agreed to permit a thousand child refugees to enter on a temporary basis, only 732 could be found and 300 of them were flown to Carlisle by the RAF and bussed to Calgarth.
The arrival of the group of Jewish child refugees at Calgarth in 1945 is now celebrated as a great act of charity in a tradition of offering sanctuary and place of exile. It was a qualified welcome not unlike those received by refugees today.
Perec Zylberberg recalls,
“When we touched down in the U.K. we became painfully aware of having gone away from the continent of Europe. Very few of the crowd around me had one or more siblings. Mostly we were alone...
The whole transport, which consisted of about 300 youngsters, was taken in buses to our new place of residence, which was to be a place of convalescence. We passed pleasant hills and many lakes. I remember clearly a big sign on the road with the name of “Windermere” on it. The sign itself was not of any significance to me. It soon became very significant, though. This was the place that we were driven to. It was a large collection of low houses, all identical in size and colour. There were some trees and flowers on the tiny plots of land between the buildings. We were assigned about 30 to a house. It was of course very clean and peaceful in those modest but quite comfortable places. There was a central area for dining and assembly which also served as the place of entertainment. As we were not confined to a separated area, we started exploring the neighbourhood. It was very picturesque. We were positioned on the banks of Lake Windermere. The collection of low buildings that comprised our residences was a previous hostel for workers of a seaplane plant. It was comfortable enough to feel good and hopeful.
Just behind the perimeter of the housing complex where we lived, there was Lake Windermere. In the background there were fairly high hills. Not far from where we lived, there was the town of Windermere. It was a quiet sleepy place. It did not take long at all before the town woke up to the presence of strangers who stared at everything and could not speak a word of English.
….so we found ourselves in the middle of England, in the well-known area for its beauty, the Lake District. It was really nice and heart-warming to find yourself in such a tranquil place after so much recent turmoil and degradation.“
Questions of heritage, power and wealth swirl in the mist of passing time. We walk and ask questions and it takes us quickly to present time. Refugees waiting for visas, separated families, unaccompanied children and the work of activists and ordinary people trying to make them welcome.
Walking and asking questions along the interrupted route of Sara’s Last Steps, exploring the ideas that emerge at each ‘station’ is an ongoing process. At these points time and place ripples and folds setting up powerful juxtapositions, uncanny encounters and searching questions.
The Lakes School now stands on part of the site of the Calgarth Estate, a group of Year Ten students took some time to reflect on the story that in part at least lays beneath their feet, thinking about their own families and being separated from their own brothers and sisters,
“I was thinking about how horrible it would be to know my mum is dead”
“…thinking about not living with my sister anymore and not knowing if she was dead or alive.”
The students discovered connections in their own family stories: to people who lived on the Calgarth Estate and to ancestors who had helped liberate Nazi concentration camps.
Empathy and imagination brings a story from the past into present time.
Transposing the stations of the walk to North Somerset we hosted a walk with members of the Second Generation Survivors group. Considering the resonances of the traumas of Holocaust, exile, separation and displacement as they manifest through subsequent generations. Here on land once owned by those who profited from a trade in captured and enslaved Africans, the largest enforced migration in human history, and overlooking the river on which that wealth was transported we considered inheritance and response-ability.
Here on land once owned by those who profited from a trade in captured and enslaved Africans, the largest enforced migration in human history, and overlooking the river on which that wealth was transported we considered inheritance and response-ability.
As we walked and asked questions, refugees and asylum seekers continue to wait for visas and travel papers, to seek out news of separated family members and other loved ones.
Perec and Esther only had letters and telephone, today if you have a connection there is the web and mobile phone. Regardless of time there is harsh and immediate pain followed by long lasting trauma resonating through the generations.
2. Bittersweet Reunion
Where the route from selection point to a gas chamber at Auschwitz overlaps the site of postbox/office at Calgarth
Thoughts whilst being coerced to walk.
Communication with surviving loved ones, a connection.
This really happened, I am here.
With joyful reunion comes unbearable knowledge:
Who has survived and who has not, who can not be found.
Brother finds sister and both know hope is a luxury.
Whilst at Calgarth, Perec discovered that his younger sister, Esther, Lorna’s mother, had also survived and had been liberated from Bergen-Belsen to Sweden. No other member of their large extended family survived. Esther had been separated from their mother at Auschwitz.
Perec recalls journalists visiting the convalescing refugees at Calgarth, writing letters and hearing his own language again:
“Among all those constant visitors came a group of Yiddish speaking journalists. For very many of the youngsters crowding around those journalists, this was a heart warming affair. To hear Yiddish spoken loud and clear was for me too a real joy...
“It all created an atmosphere of great expectations. We knew instinctively that we would not be alone much longer. All sorts of conjectures were flying around us. Maybe we would find out about our family soon? Maybe some survived? The imagination was working overtime, It looked like the pent-up longings were dominating all our thoughts and feelings. It was a time of great mental fervour. It is hard to describe the state of mind then…
We started getting replies to our letters. The excitement grew as the first letters were followed by others. News of the whereabouts of lots of survivors prompted me to start a virtual mail service. There were lots of younger boys who had difficulties with writing. Whoever could lend a hand in this did. I also helped draft letters to Jewish newspapers all over the world with inquiries as to the whereabouts of relatives and friends. It was really extremely exciting. Every day there were other revelations as to the whereabouts of people. Nothing stood in the way of correspondence to any place in the world.
I got a fantastic letter shortly after this letter avalanche got going. The friends of my family who were on the other side of the Atlantic received an inquiry from my sister, who was in Sweden. She survived Bergen Belsen in Germany. The news was stunning. Could it be that my little sister was among the lucky ones? I could not quite believe it. It was too good to be true.
How did such a miracle take place? I must have acted like a possessed individual. It just could not enter my conscious mind for a while. But before long I settled down to the knowledge of indeed not being alone…We exchanged knowledge about the search for other members of the family and relatives. Each of us started looking for clues. My sister was not too well. She was very exhausted… It was, however, very heartening to get her long letters. Life became filled with mutual care and concern.
“When Perec and I learned of each other’s survival we longed to be together. But this was no easy process. Following liberation from Belsen I was taken to Sweden where I gradually regained some strength.
One would have thought that after surviving this unparalleled tragedy, help and support to unite the remnants of families might have been forthcoming. But no. Strict rules were in operation and no visas were issued to anyone without visible means of support. I wonder what means of support expected of us, having lost all but our lives in the most literal sense.
I waited two more long years before I was able to come to England in 1947 on a special permit – as a domestic worker. And even for this, my brother had to find a sponsor to guarantee that I would not be dependent on the state.“
Esther Brunstein address to the United Nations in New York on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Dec 10 1998
Today the rules are stricter, more bureaucratic and delays even longer.
In 2022, even before forthcoming changes in UK legislation, Esther may not have been allowed to join her brother in England.
Families Together reports that, Addis, a mother from Eritrea, gained asylum in the UK 13 years after making her claim. The 5 year old daughter she had to leave is now 19. Addis is not alone, see the website for more case studies of cruelly separated families. Families Together is a coalition of of small organisations led by Amnesty International, British Red Cross, Oxfam, Refugee Council and UNHCR.
“Under the current rules, parents are only able to bring their children who are under 18 to join them here in the UK. Addis’s daughter is now 19 meaning that she wouldn’t qualify for family reunion under the current rule. Addis’s story highlights the devastating impact of the inhumane waiting times in the UK asylum system, which keeps families separated for prolonged periods of time.“
Walking and asking questions in North Somerset we made this stop in an old apple orchard. A place redolent of Englishness, bleak in winter but holding something of the spirit of the Lake District in the collective imagination. This orchard planted for food in hard times and fruit for the sick in the nearby hospital. Reflecting on the iconography of the apple, the fruit of the tree of knowledge the painful knowledge of the surviving siblings in our story.
Here we listened to archive testimony from Esther and Perec and heard a haunting song in Yiddish about a little girl called Sara walking in the woods. Sara is met by a bear.
Families Together reports (March 2022) that the Nationalities and Borders bill currently going though the House of Lords would separate refugees into two different categories. Those who arrive directly in the UK and those who arrive via another country. The bill if it becomes law will allow the Government to treat those two categories of people differently, including the possibility of being reunited with their families.
Esther was liberated to a country deemed safe, in 2022 she may not even have been considered eligible for entry to the UK. In 2022 sibling connections between refugees where the brother or sister is over 18 appear to have no legal standing despite the ordeal they may have been through.
Perec recalls the yearning to connect:
“It did not come all at once. It had to come, though. As soon as we became aware that the war is really over, everybody that I knew around me started talking about their parents and siblings. There were no adults around whose thoughts and words went to their children or close relatives. We were a large group of youngsters who by one miracle or another survived against overwhelming odds. Together with an instinctive quest for food and shelter, went along a nagging quest for anybody that was family or relative.“
3. Solidarity
Where the route from selection point to gas chamber at Auschwitz overlaps a tree stump, the living tree once a gathering point for the young refugees at Calgarth.
Thoughts whilst being coerced to walk.
Trees and memory. Trees and meeting places. Old trees.
Reflecting on friendship/community/family/ the Bund, renewed connections.
The bonds formed in knowledge shared.
In North Somerset we visit a grand old Beech tree, a meeting point and resting place and think of other trees that sheltered conversations and gatherings.
We reflect on the wave of support and solidarity going out to refugees from Ukraine and the continuing difficulties for refugees from other countries to find routes of exile from oppressive regimes and wars. The failure to provide safe routes for unaccompanied children and to reunite families continues, pushing child refugees towards human traffickers and worse. The ongoing failure to resolve asylum claims in a timely way continues the misery of separation.
Bristol. City of Sanctuary is part of a network of Cities of Sanctuary across the UK, holding out a vision that our nations can be welcoming places of safety for all, offering sanctuary to all who need it. We are so proud of Bristol, and the way that local people come together to create a better and more welcoming city. Here is a list of organisations that offer support, solidarity and advice to people seeking sanctuary in the city.
Esther and Perec had grown up in a secular Jewish household, both parents were activists in The General Jewish Labour Bund in Poland . The Bund was a powerful Jewish trade union, cultural and political organisation in Poland when the Nazis invaded in 1939. Bundist activists were the first to be targeted, their father and older brother, David, managed to escape to fight with the resistance; Esther and Perec reconnected through the Bundist network.
Esther and Perec’s parents, Philip (Fishel) and Sara were prominent in the Bundist party in Lodz with Fishel playing a leading role and Sara as an active member of the party’s progressive Women’s movement. There were children’s and youth movements which both Perec and Esther belonged to attending many summer camps and clubs and activities. It was a secular movement but very grounded in Jewish culture and education in literature, drama, music and Yiddish was the language that was spoken and read.
Perec: “I did find among those Yiddish speaking journalists a man who was like an angel to me. His name was Lucjan Blit. He was from Warsaw. His name was already known to me from prewar days. He was the general secretary of the “Tsukunft” (Future). That was before the war, the well known Bundist youth movement. They numbered in the thousands across Poland. My brother David was a member in the Tsukunft. Of course I immediately made my way to meet him. I found in him a wonderful friend and good conduit to the scattered Bundist activists the world over.“
The family was steeped in the Bund, whose values of equality, and social justice informed both Perec and Esther as young children, and which they both held dear to all their life. The Bund was not just a political party and Trade Union, it was a whole way of life. Internationalist in its outlook, it fought for Jewish workers rights and all workers rights. It was anti Zionist, arguing against the idea of a nation state for Jews, but for the right of Jews to live wherever they wanted free from discrimination and persecution. Bundists were key activists in the resistance movement during the war and played a very active part in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and others.
4. Forced Migration
Where the route in the present follows a modern fence to get back to the transposed route. Looking through the fence to a place where the route from selection point to gas chamber at Auschwitz crosses an old track, Broadfield Road
Thoughts whilst being coerced to walk.
What the journeying body knows. Messages to a former self.
How to share this. Belonging. Yearning.
Seeing oneself from a distance.
“Have things changed for the better? Is life made any easier for refugees and asylum seekers? Does our behaviour today, fifty years on, reflect insights gained and lessons learned from the horrors of the past? We must not remain silent or indifferent to people’s suffering as they flee from oppressive regimes, often with the threat of death over their heads.”
Excerpt from speech given by Esther Brunstein at the United Nations in New York on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Dec 10 1998
5. Resistance/Dignity
Where the route from selection point to gas chamber at Auschwitz crosses an old track that still exists and existed long before the Calgarth Estate was built.
Thoughts whilst being coerced to walk.
Resistance of the soul, resistance of the will, rediscovery of self.
A future is possible.
I refuse to give consent to my own oppression.
Yiddish language and culture
“Yiddish and I are absolutely inseparable. Yiddish has been part of me – in the very depth of my being, which goes back as far as my memory reaches.
…It was with a Yiddish lullaby that my parents rocked and lulled me to sleep. It was in Yiddish that I first heard and understood the tender words of love. It was in Yiddish that I first expressed words of childish delights and uttered whimperingly words of disappointment. And it was with Yiddish on their lips that the majority of our 6 million martyrs went to their death in the dark years of the Holocaust. So I have great respect for the language and it’s very important to me and very dear to my heart.“
Esther Brunstein
“Never say this is the final road for you”
The Partisan Song sung by Paul Robeson
The rallying cry of the Bundist resistance in Poland during the Second World War, still sung by Holocaust survivors, their supporters and descendants to this day. Inspired by the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, the lyrics were written by Hirsh Glik in the Vilnius Ghetto in 1943 in his mother tongue, Yiddish.
Robeson performed the song in 1949 for a live transmission on Moscow Radio, transmitting across the Soviet Union. It is said that he was so concerned about the fate of Jewish socialist comrades and sang in Yiddish so as to send out a message of solidarity. The story goes that the live transmission plug was pulled but this legendary recording survives….
6. Custodians of Memory
Where the Auschwitz gas chambers of the transposed route overlap a bronze age burial mound, overlooking the lake, once a picnic site for the young refugees.
Today the site is wooded, the view to the lake obscured, the estate almost erased
Thoughts of arrival, sanctuary and exile
Traces and legacies.
Responsibilities of the next generations, respect to ancestors
Discovering response-ability.
Sites of memory.
“I can only be at peace with my conscience if I am true to the oath I made after Belsen: that I will never be indifferent to human suffering. As I remember my struggle to survive and the time that I spent as a refugee in a new and strange land I will speak out whenever I am able for those whose journey is known to me.”
Excerpt from speech given by Esther Brunstein at the United Nations in New York on the occasion of the 50th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Dec 10 1998
Alicia White shares a memory from a visit to Auschwitz with her mother, Lorna Brunstein (2017):
“The very last memory I have of Auschwitz 1, were the gas chambers. As we approached them I grabbed my mum and I said ‘I don’t think I can do this’. She assured me that if I didn’t want to then that was fine, but another part of me felt like I needed to see the inside, even if it was very quickly. To know and bear witness to what so many other people were forced to see. I walked inside behind mum, it was dark, dank, and unbelievably scary and suddenly for the first time I cried. It was uncontrollable and consuming, and again I said to my mum ‘I can’t do this’. Gently, I heard my mum’s voice in the darkness say ‘go outside and wait for us’. I walked out quickly, past the others behind me and sobbed. It was a relief. The air felt fresh and cold on my face. I breathed in deeply and walked around the back of the chamber. I picked up a stone and put it on the grassy slope which led up to the roof.“
“The following day, our last day in Krakow, Mum and David Rosenberg spoke about Grandma (Esther Brunstein) and her life, before and after the war. How she was an inspiration and fought for the rights of all oppressed peoples, but also how she was someone who loved, laughed and more than anything wanted happiness for her family.”
Read more of Alicia White’s diary from her visit to Auschwitz here
Lorna Brunstein (2013)
Sara’s Last Steps
Artists statement: Negotiating present day interruptions and scattered relics of other times, the walk will takes place over the 120 minutes of real time between selection and death. As survivor memories fade, the walk seeks a pathway through the entangled layers of experiences of the ‘Windermere Children’, and the residents of the wartime seaplane factory community on the shore of Lake Windermere who hosted them, generating contemporary resonances. A slow walk making the return on a site where memory, matter, nostalgia and trauma has been churned, buried and obscured. A participatory performative experience recalling past injustices and acts of empathy, generating questions about exile and sanctuary today.
The walk follows the transposed route from the selection point to the gas chambers at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. This transposed route was that of Esther and Perec’s mother, Sara, Lorna’s grandmother.
This project is dedicated to the memory of Esther Brunstein (nee Zylberberg) 1928-2017, Perec Zylberberg 1924-2007, their brother David and their parents, Sara and Fishel.
In the coming months the artists are walking with others developing content clustering around these ‘stations’, extending an invitation to participate online and on foot.