Belsen behind the barbed wire

admin on February 3, 2016

Belsen Roundhouse windowserased
Its about layers and what we tell ourselves and are told about each one. What happens when you dig through them and question through. Lorna took her first soil sample from the yard of a house built within the barbed wire perimeter of the Waldeslust camp. A pile of earth pushed aside from the building work, dark and sandy. Perhaps Esther trod on that earth. New house, white walls, shoes outside on the porch, dog barking and as I stood guard on that strange and rather furtive new ritual the central heating kicked in. Only steam from the chimney. Mix of guilt and catharsis, maybe they were just ignoring us.
Waldeslust soil1

We  recce the arrival at Belsen discussing dilemmas and legacies with the archivist Bernd Horstmann. We visit the rest of the Belsen story still held behind barbed wire. Deep in the Nazi built military camp occupied by the victorious British and now returned to the Germans we saw buildings where survivors of Belsen were cared for and where some died and were buried. We saw their meeting places and heard echoes of their stories. Into the vast Round House once a concert hall, once makeshift hospital, now echoing, empty and cavernous. Full of ghosts. The British military have handed it over in full working order. Along with the site and buildings including churches and shops and cookhouses, a new built secondary school for 500 children, also stands empty. Cold War front line spaces idle and silent. Meanwhile refugees trudge their way to makeshift camps. History knocks on the door.
Belsen Roundhouse interior1
At last walking through the ghost gates of Belsen as Esther did when it was hard real and deathly 71 years ago. The landscaping tells its story, the horror is not concealed.  I hear Esther retold talking about the shakey sensation of early fever, the creeping awareness of death approaching, saying to to herself and to her dead mother that she had done her best, she had tried to make it, to tell the story but that she feared she would not be able to carry on. Thanks to the soldiers she did, we will be there on Friday ensuring that the story continues to be told.

Preparing the way

admin on February 2, 2016

First days in Germany

Celle childhood installation

A teddy bear in a museum/gallery in Celle Synagogue reduces me to tears. A childhood under the shadow of the swastika. An empty room with a tin bath and a teddy. A child’s toy bears witness. The bear materialised my tears. The squalid last days of the war, one town helped death marchers escape and hid them, in another, coerced or complicit, locasl people chased down and shot or captured escaped prisoners. The Celle Hare Hunt. The rounded up survivors were death marched to Belsen perhaps along the same route we had driven.
Celle stolpersteine2
The Celle Synagogue: it survived Nazi thug axes and was never put to flame as it would have set the town alight. Here new life and recovery began as Belsen survivors reclaimed the building in 1946. In the street outside polished by snow grip grit, rain and foot fall, my first Stolpersteine, ‘stumbling stones’  peoples remembering places for the people that once lived there, old people who fled to Holland but were brought back to Auschwitz to be killed, others disappeared and one my mothers age dead before she could be a mother. Here remembered.
Hambuhren Tiger Orchid4
This afternoon we are seated in the Zuhlke garden centre alongside Hambuhren Tiger orchids. Here we meet with Julius Krizsan our local fixer and former Green Party MP, as avuncular and no nonsense as I had expected from our email exchanges, local historian Irmlinde Florian, eye witness Hans Ovelmann and Herr Zuhlke, owner of the garden centre that sits at the edge of the Waldeslust site. The walk was toasted with light bulb glasses of Irmlinde’s red home brew. Prost.

Later we tour the perimeter of the site and view the remains of Waldeslust, what horrors and squalor has that building seen. We see some things that Esther may have seen and we look on. Try to imagine and can’t. The tall trees are recent, the big one perhaps a sapling 71 years ago. A Narnia lamp in a thawed landscape, darkening trees and evergreens, the absence of snow adding to the macabre.
Waldeslust remains 3
We are overwhelmed already, immersed. Tomorrow checking day two of the walk, the long haul through the woods to Belsen.

 

The walk online

admin on January 30, 2016

How to follow and join the walk. 

live.

without walking!

logosmall-with-border.jpg

  1. if you have a twitter account log in… if not,no worries!
  2. go to Social Hiking  http://www.shareyouradventure.com/
  3. Social Hiking will ask you to log in in via twitter so click the log in with twitter button. …. thats all you have to do, if you dont have a twitter account it still looks the same but you wont be able to interact so easily:
  4. you will see 3 columns
  5. on the left column, Latest Maps, when the walk is live on 4 and 5 Feb, you will see the current walk with the WalkNow icon and the word LIVE on it, probably at the top of the column
  6. click on the name of the walk and you will see a new green screen showing the line of the walk with little blue icons if you click on them they will show tweets and links to other social media!
  7. Logged into Viewranger via twitter, the map will update and you will see the walk grow over each day, it may do that without being logged in. It will appear as two separate maps, day 1 and day 2. There will be peaks of activity mainly in the mornings, see times below. Please tweet/retweet/comment and encourage others to do so!
  8.  Check out this direct link to the walk on Thursday and this one for Friday

We will be using @walknowlive and @forcedwalks for the main twitter feed

Facebook: forcedwalks

other social media links will be bounced through twitter and facebook

please follow/share/like etc,

use and check out the following #tags  #honouringesther #walknow

you can also follow the walk by following me on Viewranger http://my.viewranger.com/user/details/277417

draft route map:  http://my.viewranger.com/route/details/ODAwODI=

Honouring Esther. Making connections … thoughts

admin on November 13, 2015

The walk in Germany will remind us that a refugee’s journey continues until they find safety and a welcome and a sense of belonging. For many it is a life long search. In the end we are all migrants and we all need safety, security, love and friendship.

For those on the move today their journey continues from terror and persecution trudging across inhospitable lands and  surviving perilous sea journeys. Here in our relative comfort we need to make that slogan ‘refugees welcome’ real right to our doors. It is not essential for all of us to go in person to the beaches of the greek islands or the refugee camps on the borders, we can give money, food and clothing. But more than that we can work to greet the refugees that arrive in our country to support them and make them feel safe and welcome….and continue to do so. Its a long journey.

For Esther it took two years before she managed to get into Britain even though her only surviving close family member was already in the country and the rest of her family killed by the Nazis. Even after that the welcome was uncertain and her story difficult to tell.

We have much to learn from Esther, we feel out project is timely.

Please help us get this last phase funded, click the link below:

Forced Walks: Honouring Esther. Germany. 2016

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.

Rm1 entry wide

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.

rm2 done 5

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

rm2 done

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.

projection walk down

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

 

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.

Remembering the march to Belsen

admin on February 16, 2015

The March from Waldeslust to Bergen-Belsen

Esther remembers….

We were told that the camp would be disbanded. And we marched. I don’t know whether anyone knew, maybe some, but the destination was Bergen-Belsen. But I remember, during that march, and even during times when I was taken out to work, and seeing little houses, and especially on that march, you know, red-roofed, pretty little houses, it was a very pretty little area where we were. And curtains, windows, lace curtained windows, and people peering out and staring.

And I often wondered what went on in their minds when they saw these so-called people were being marched in their concentration garb, and to me, I remember thinking, my this…the world like that exists? There is another world. That I used to be quite incensed when told after the war that the majority did not know what was going on. I don’t know. I just knew that people looked at us. Maybe they were not aware of everything that went on, but we were certainly in their midst.

I don’t know exactly how long the march lasted. But it was not one of the worst marches, because it did not take weeks. Hanover is quite near Bergen-Belsen.

…from Esther Brunstein’s testimony held at the Imperial War Museum

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 project live

admin on February 1, 2015

Forced Walks Honouring Esther project was launched as part of a range of commemorative and remembrance activity at Bristol’s M-Shed on Tuesday 27 January the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz death camp, Holocaust Memorial Day. Victims of genocide from Europe to Cambodia from Rwanda to Darfur were remembered. The event was particularly poignant for artist Lorna Brunstein whose mother and father survived the Holocaust and came as refugees to London. The line of the death march Lorna’s mother, Esther, survived is at the core of this project. Lorna is one of the group of second generation survivors lighting the Holocaust memorial candle at the M-Shed.

lighting memorial candles

The harbourside in Bristol was an appropriate place to remember this appalling chapter in the abuse of human rights and vow to continue the long struggle. A plaque on the wall of the M-Shed:

Plaque on M Shed