Bath | Forced Walks

Esther Brunstein

admin on January 19, 2017

Esther at 70

Esther Brunstein, the Esther we honour in this project and series of walks, the Esther who has been our inspiration throughout, died earlier this week.

The closing exhibition of the Honouring Esther project is deliberately timed around the Holocaust Memorial Day events. One of the objectives was to explore how we might find new ways of working with survivor testimony in the sure knowledge that they wouldn’t be with us for much longer. Esther is no longer with us.

Esther Brunstein was one of the key figures in the campaign for a Holocaust Memorial Day. She became active as a public speaker challenging Holocaust deniers during the period covered by the forthcoming film ‘Denial’ speaking at major public events and schools colleges and universities up and down the country. As a child Esther was immersed in the philosophy of the Bund, the Jewish workers socialist movement and the vibrant Yiddish culture of pre WW2 Europe, she was a passionate internationalist and human rights activist. She spoke at the United Nations on the 50th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Esther’s is one of the voices you will hear if you visit the Holocaust gallery at the Imperial War Museum. She touched thousands of lives including that of a school boy now a doctor who cared for her in her last days. He remembered her speaking at his school when he was a sixth former.

We pay our respects, celebrate her life and continue in that spirit of love and intenationalism. The exhibition will run, 26-29 Jan as advertised in Bath at 44AD Gallery.

Exhibition in Bath

admin on July 16, 2015

The exhibition of work from the Somerset walk is currently up and running in central Bath. In the first exhibition room we have curated a series of 10 panels using research and documentation from the walk. In the glass box there are ‘relics’ gathered by the walkers and in the alcove, the notebooks they kept on the walk.

The second room show a series of floor pieces. Each room has its own looped audio ambience forming a randomised mix of bird song, trudging feet and comments recorded on the walk. These sounds mix with the voices of tourists and their guides, buskers, abbey bells and city seagulls calls filtering in the open door. A unique audio experience in each room. Every hour on the hour the exhibition sound is silenced by the call of the shofar and the sound of one of the interventions is played as a memorial candle burns momentarily. At the end of the intervention the sounds return and the air is briefly tainted with the smell of burning.

An orchid blooms in the darkness, a resonance of the orchid farm supposedly operating from the site of the Waldeslust slave labour camp.

The light from the projection reflects into the installation room. A series of short films representing the experience of the walk are projected across the hall disappearing along the wall out to the door. Sometimes it seems like a walker has dissolved out of the film and into the world and sometimes it seems that an exhibition visitor disappears into the film. Across the digital divide.

On the corner of Abbey Street we look out on the Abbey, the Roman Baths and the ceaseless ebb and flow of tourists. This week is Bath Spa University Graduation week, students in gowns and proud parents getting their souvenir shots in front of Bath’s historic architecture. Strange and powerful juxtapositions.

The exhibition runs at 44 AD Gallery, Abbey Street, Bath until Sunday 19 July at 16.00

Getting involved

admin on March 31, 2015

Walker registration is now closed but there are still many ways in which you can support the project:

Tuesday 14 April 0930. Come and see us off from the Cheese and Grain in Frome

Wednesday 15 April 13.30 Join us for a short walk from the paupers field at Odd Down, Bath, along footpaths to meet the main walk at Combe Down.
Wednesday 15 April 15.45 Join us for the closing of the walk at the old Jewish Burial Ground at Combe Down, Bath.

Be a driver..we are still short of support drivers
Be a steward.. help steward a section of the walk or one of the stops
Join us online and help spread the word

If you can help please contact us using the form on the front page of the website

….and yes we are still short of cash…..

Walker Registration closing

admin on March 30, 2015

We are on target for recruiting our team of walkers by the end of March. Walker registration closes at the end of the day today. Watch this space for details of a supporting short walk-in-witness for the liberation of Belsen and all victims of genocide and slavery in Bath during the afternoon of Wednesday 15 April.

We still are still looking for stewards, drivers with cars and are desperately short of cash.

Briefing for supporters in Bath, 25 March

admin on March 9, 2015

The project was launched in Bath at a briefing for artist associates at the 44AD Gallery in Bath. We return to update supporters and brief walkers on Wednesday March 25 at 6.30.

Join us on

Wednesday March 25 at 6.30

44AD Gallery, Abbey Street, Bath

Find out the latest on the project from the artists leading it.

3000 unmarked graves …. in Bath

admin on February 27, 2015

As we develop the walk new local resonances are surfacing. Historian John Payne tells of the unmarked graves near Bath’s old work house. Discarded people dumped, buried and forgotten in a field. Could these sunset shadowed undulations be the remains of Bath’s poor. Another guilty secret?

Or was I looking the wrong way?

We are still researching and developing content for the walk, keen to hear and share local resonances.

British Co-Presents and the Holocaust

admin on February 10, 2015

British Co-Presents and the Holocaust :

exploring the changing nature of war memory and Holocaust memory, especially in relation to notions of Britishness

Bath Spa University public lecture at the Holburne Museum, Bath start at 6pm Wednesday 13 May approx 1 hour, followed by questions / discussion.

Prof. Tony Kushner (Professor of History and Director of the Parkes Institute for the study of Jewish/non-Jewish relations, University of Southampton)

and

Dr Aimee Bunting (Honorary Fellow of the Parkes Institute and teacher at Godolphin and Latymer School, London) Title: British Co-Presents and the Holocaust

Abstract: We will examine how in the latter stages of the Second World War, British and Commonwealth soldiers became co-presents to the Holocaust. These were the 1500 British prisoners of war who were sent to a sub-camp of the Auschwitz complex from late 1943, and those who were involved in the liberation of Bergen Belsen in April 1945. By focusing on some key individuals, including the actor Dirk Bogarde, we will analyse how they wrote and re-wrote their traumatic experiences of these infamous camps. It is a paper that explores the changing nature of war memory and Holocaust memory, especially in relation to notions of Britishness.

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.