Honouring Esther Bristol presentation Thursday 25 January

Thursday 25 January City Hall Bristol. 7.30-9.00 pm

Presentation on the Forced Walks project: Honouring Esther. Short films and sounds from the walks in Somerset and Germany retracing the route of a Nazi Death march. Survivor testimony and contemporary resonance. Love. Internationalism. Solidarity.

Talk from artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein.

Holocaust Memorial Day event hosted by Bristol Hannover Council. All welcome.

Cut Flowers

exhibit wide3Cut Flowers at the Beaumont Gallery, Mere currently features work from the Forced Walks: Honouring Esther collection. Cut Flowers runs until Sunday April 23.

B Gal remnants

image courtesy Beaumont Gallery

BGal portraitsJPG

image courtesy Beaumont Gallery

B Gal soilIn addition to work from Lorna’s practice exploring inherited trauma, the exhibition includes the Honouring Esther soil installation with sounds from the walk assembled by Richard White. On the opening night of Cut Flowers Richard created a ‘pop up installation’ of the films he had made from the walks projected over a tea service in a shed in the foyer of the Beaumont Gallery.

shedprojection2

shedprojection tea

BGal proj

Image courtesy Beaumont Gallery

This is a joint show with Andrew Walworth who also curated the exhibition: “This exhibition comes from a need to articulate what a refugee from a foreign state means to a person living well away from the actuality of war, how refugees are perceived in the modern world – their almost universal no-status – and the way in which they are treated. I invited Lorna to exhibit as she has personal knowledge of the worst aspects of war and the subsequent fallout. Her works also act as a prompt, a historical reminder for us to think about when reading opinions about current wars and refugees.”

Click to view youtube clip of installation

Honouring Esther: End of Project Exhibition

Richard White and Lorna Brunstein present documentation and new work from two walks hosted by the artists in Germany and England

  • Frome to Bath 2015 on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Belsen
  • Ovelgonne to Belsen 2016 on the 71st anniversary of a Nazi Death March

Wednesday 25 January – Sunday 29 January 2017

Thursday to Saturday 10.00-18.00. Sunday 11.00-16.00

Click to book with Bath Spa Live for these free evening events:

Logo finalPreview

Wednesday January 25 18.00-20.00

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Logo final“those we met along the way”

Absence, presence and resonances on a death march transposed to Somerset and returned: a conversation about the work and the walk.

Thursday 26 January 18.00-20.00

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Logo final Holocaust Memorial Day

view the exhibition and  reflect on the themes of the day

Friday January 18.00-20.00

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viewranger-feb16

screen grab from Viewranger click to interactive view

After the Walk: Visiting Esther

notes from Lorna Brunstein:

We returned from Germany and even though I was aware I was coming down with a cold and was also completely exhausted by the trip, I  knew I had to visit mum as soon as possible. So I went to London the following day to see her.

We had done a Skype call with her in Belsen on completion of the walk, and even though we had some difficulty with communication – mum’s hearing is poor and the signal was breaking up, it was nevertheless really heartwarming to see her. She was in good spirits and excited to see us and clearly very impressed by the technology that enabled our contact to happen – her wonderful words off camera at the end of the skype…. “now that’s what I call magic!”

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photo by Julia Simmons

I visited with my daughter (Esther’s Granddaughter), Alicia. I had with me an orchid flower that Annette, our wonderful host, historian and friend in Hannover, had given us to take to mum. She had taken one flower from the orchid that we had given her as a gift, which was bought from the garden centre at Ovelgonne, very close to the site of Camp Waldeslust. Annette was very keen that mum should have this flower so we needed to get it to her as soon as possible.

 

Mum wanted a blow-by-blow account of our week there and I showed her all the photos we had taken on the ipad.  We talked to her about the Hohn camp which served as a makeshift hospital after liberation for those who were recovering from typhus, and when I told her that the hospital was in the ‘Roundhouse’ a former ballroom, she became quite animated and said that she was certainly there in a bed recovering but not in the ballroom as it was too crowded – she distinctly remembers being accommodated in one of the corridors. I shall take her a picture of the ballroom next time I go. belsen-roundhouse-windows_24415680529_o

We also talked about where the womens’ barracks in Belsen were to try to ascertain if she had any memory of where in Belsen she was, and when I asked her if she remembered any trees, she said very quickly that she did. Bernd Hostmann had asked me to ask her, as he felt sure that she would have been in the womens’ barracks which were in an area surrounded by trees. Her immediate affirmative response to that question confirmed for us that the place where we had left our stones and had played the kaddish was indeed the right place.

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photo by Julia Simmons

I talked about the little building that Irmlinde showed us – the outside toilet block and only remaining structure of Waldeslust.  Mum did remember and I will take her the photo of it when I visit the end of this week, as she very much wants to see it. Waldeslust remains 3

I am always concerned and mindful of not wanting to churn up painful and distressing memories for mum but she says each time that it is helpful and healing for her to know that we have been to the exact place where it all happened.

She says those thoughts are with her all the time – how could they not be? Talking and sharing them for her, affirms and validates her and what she went through. It was right we went – it was our way of bearing witness.

She said again to me that she wished she could have come and walked with us and is cross with herself that she could not!

I never ever cease to be amazed by my mother’s spirit and strength. I am truly humbled by this amazing woman.

Extinct orchids

Last day in Germany we returned to the garden centre on the edge of the slave labour camp, Waldeslust. Somehow seemed appropriate to make the full circle and to buy an orchid grown on the site. orchid wrapper

It was as if a thousand years had passed as we stepped out of the car onto the sandy soil that had once been the far corner of the Officers enclosure at Waldeslust. I did not feel as if I was the same person who had left on foot two days before.

Lorna and I walked into the garden centre and in the great swathe of strange fleshy flowers we spotted the Hambuhren orchid. Or so we thought. The orchid was to be a gift to our hosts in Hannover and the idea was to get a latin name and then perhaps to track it down in England. After much translation, phone calls, garbled yiddish and german, we came to the view that this was not the one despite its confident identification 4 days earlier.

The Hambuhren Tiger Orchid had been a local speciality but was, we were, told extinct. The image we were shown on the garden centre desktop was the same garish bloom we had seen months ago and discarded as a walk icon. The orchid shown on Monday and in our hands on Saturday with its blood stained white petals told a more intricate story. We kept that one and mused on the extinction of a flower and further ironies of Waldeslust.Zuhlke carpark

Walk Day 2: Winsen to Belsen

thoughts and comments from Richard White:

Indifference is granular, as we walk deeper into all this, into ourselves, history and the terrain we find fewer explanations and more to make sense of. The heroic carpenter of Winsen who hid the French death march escapees is memorialised as a local hero but in his time he was shunned and considered to be a shitinthenester. Julius’s work has recently surfaced this local memory and proudly told local story, but why so late to memorialise him and why so few did not seize the moment to do the right thing. Silence of shame perhaps. Silence of consent. Silence of complicity…… What do you tell your children, what do the grandchildren ask of their grandparents. I was told stories of heroism and the Blitz. Harder to surface the small acts of resistance.

road sign Belsen3

Winsen: we gathered in the morning at the memorial stone joined by Annete Wienecke and a student, local walker Dieter from the day before and were met again by Julius. Julius set the challenge of further researching the story of the escapees, finding the military records. The Mayor came out of the townhall greeted us again and saw us off.

Walking out through the town passing perhaps the same red rooted houses Esther recalled. Who looked out those windows? What did they see?

littlredhouses wndow

A clump of trees close to the site of a shooting of a death marcher, perhaps collapsed or walking too slowly. The trees, maybe saplings then, representing the moment, perhaps embodying it. Later a more recent roadside shrine, the tree scarred, bark viciously torn, bearing witness to car crash and lives destroyed in that recent brief moment of terror. Walking on into the rain. Cold wet penetrating rain. Wind driven cold. Stinging our faces.

walk solitary towards1

We, kitted up for all weathers, stayed dry. Looking out from under hats and hoods and umbrellas. Listening intently to the sounds of the forest. Listening closely to Esther’s recorded testimony  and the words of the poets spoken by our children.

Out of the trees into flat open fields wooded paths off to right and left. Dark mud scraped off crop remnants. Piles of mechanically crushed building….what stories in the crushed concrete and bricks. Fabric almost erased and recycled for new purposes. We walk on in the cold and wind whipped drizzle. Across the fields, darkly edged with trees, in the shadows hidden and revealed by its movement, a deer.

Walk without words, thinking about exile and belonging. The rain intensifies, we become aware of our bodies. Feeling the cold, imagining the cold. The need to urinate intensifies,  death marchers forced to walk on. I stop to piss in the woods. Such a stop would have cost me my life. Looking out deep into the forest I think of escapees, hunter and hunted and those who stumbled their last and fell and were shot…

The endless road… they would not have known how far it was to go. I thought of refugee children walking with their parents today, what I would say to the question “ Are we nearly there?” Just keep walking. The rain became mist in the distance and the walkers disappeared into it. Cars hissed past. Discarded bones by the road. Walking into our bodies, the terrain walking itself. My attention is drawn to a discarded boot. Tall trees swaying, the roar and hiss of fast passing trucks and buses, a huge tractor towing logs. Pine trees, wind blown aroma. Sounds of the working forest and from the military zone tanks accumulated distant engine roar. A woodpecker ratatat sound like gunshot and I imagine an abandoned body in concentration camp stripes, exhausted, shot dead, slumped in the ditch. Discarded. Straight black wet path, ditch drain alongside. Today only discarded plastic.

At last we stop for hope, we remember Anne Frank and I hear my daughter’s voice, we think about the ideals and principles that sustained Esther. The Bund. Internationalism. In cold drizzle we listen to Paul Robeson signing The Partisans Song  and I for one was warmed. With our art we act in solidarity, this 71st anniversary is a platform to connect, as well as feel, now. I tweet and record sound and images. I read that the walk is live on the map. Connections made, resonating….

group in wood wet

Into the brooding mist of the dark forest to the historic entrance to the Bergen Belsen camp. A dash across the busy modern road that separates us. Disorderly to the stone that marks the site of the gates.  We make our last public intervention, the 10th station, Liberation. Our voices for those silenced. Here Lorna takes a soil sample.

wet path empty

…and that is how the group of walkers entered the Bergen Belsen Memorial, the site of the former death camp. Overwhelming. Looking for remains, for some sense of hard bricks and mortar truth. Out of the huge open space of mass graves and into the woods, here there are the remains of levelled foundations, preserved as clearings, the site of huts. Bernd Horstmann thinks that it is most likely that Esther was taken here, the women’s camp. Here too when she arrived somewhere, barely alive in the cold and the stink and the squalor was Anne Frank and her sister. In memory of Anne Frank and all the others here and world wide who did not make it, we stood in silence and listened to a dear friend and ‘Uncle’  Meyer Bogdanski speak the Kaddish. My sister, Julia,  produces a yellow stone from Burton beach, in memory of Pat our mother who died just after Christmas. I sob big body wrenching cries.Belsen womens camppath2

Returning to the main field undulating strangely, unnaturally, with what is buried beneath. Concealed. Thousands of bodies and the ashes of more. Sandy soil scooped up to cover and define burial sites but also to bury the remaining watchtowers and barbed wire. As if the buried remains were forcing themselves to the surface. The forest returns with wild boar and wolves, trees planted and self seeded, permitted, managed.

Finally as the light began to fail we were welcomed in to the education centre by Stephanie and Bernd.  Welcomed with food and drink. Sharing the story again, exchanging gifts. The book of names from Bernd…only a third of the victims have been named, Esther is there, he showed us and we now play our part in networking the search for names. 100,000 victims still to be named. And at last we connect with Esther via Skype. Mother sees daughter from Belsen 71 years later. A surreal encounter concludes with Esther looking out of the screen, her care home iPad showing only the top of her head and the ceiling of the care home, projected onto the Belsen class room wall. Off camera Esther’s closing remark: “Now thats what I call magic”, reduces the room to uproar, laughter and applause.

Out into the still, cold, dark, night. Warm hugs and farewells with the Belsen staff team. Returning the way we came, changed, the car headlights only illuminate the edge of the forest. No wolves howl.Woods boot

Walk Day 1 From Ovelgonne to Winsen

It begins again.
At first its a history tour, a site visit then as the conversations begin and the elements take their toll, emotion and contemporary resonances start to manifest themselves. We hear of a phone call, only yesterday, an elderly woman sharing a childhood experience seeing brutal treatment of slave labourers from the Judenlage, ‘Waldeslust’. One woman was bent over and could hardly stand, the guard beat her and when she could not get up he raised his gun and shot her. The guard then looked threateningly at the girl and she ran away.

There is another kind of memory surfacing here, the child witness who was told by parents and officials to say nothing and not question. As they come to the end of their lives the questions remain and the experience re-surface. We hear a story of children who ran up with food to the death marchers passing their homes. Small and incredibly brave acts of kindness. Dangerous to offer, dangerous to accept. A story silenced for a generation. Perhaps we have been, momentarily, a stimulus for the re-surfacing of that story. Indifference is granular and it transforms as we get closer to individual acts of indifference, complicity, courage and resistance….and childhood trauma
Station inheritance family.jpg
At last through the wind and cold, cold rain across the icy river to Winsen. Over the bridge carrying yellow tulips..not sure if this was a symbol but the yellow stood out, the colour of the star they wore. Over the bridge with flowers and ivy…some distant echo of the original meaning of Wandeslust. A group of us, more than we had expected. Older people networked by our respected and connected Julius Krizsan and informed with such sensitive and lyrical German/English by Irmlinde Florian, a community of local remembrance www.ag-bergen-belsen.de is represented and bears witness in the yellow tulips.
Aller bridge tulips.jpg
We walked in the cold and rain, we stopped to share and tell our stories. Revisiting the last remnants of the slave labour camp, trying to imaging 400 starving women being worked close to death and trying to survive in such a place. Beating the bounds of the camp and trying to imagine what ghosts haunt the new houses on the site. We stood at the site of the gate to the compound and listened to Esthers voice.

Against all the odds she had lived to tell the story and we were there to witness and re tell it…this happened here. Her story is ground truthed

It felt like the end of the day when we crossed the bridge carrying the yellow tulips. Passing an old redbrick building with two stars of David in relief……no one knows…. To the memorial stone at Winsen. A memorial to a brave carpenter who with the help of others enabled French prisoner on a later death march to escape, he hid them until the British army arrived. We play Paul Robeson singing The Partisans Song in their honour, for Esther and for all acts and actors of resistance. Julius K told the story and then the Mayor greeted us and invited us in to the town hall.
Winsen stone group1.jpg
A truly humbling experience followed, we were welcomed with food and cakes tea, coffee and sparkling mineral water. The Mayor read a powerful statement in halting but strong English, his daughter, the same age as Esther would have been, had helped him. As we drip dried and warmed up we heard more of the story of the carpenter told in praise of those who seize the moment, do the right thing, take the risk for justice and human rights. What a man, lets have him as our Mayor!

We finished with a resonance bringing us right up to now, meeting Ismail from Iraq, one of 150 refugees currently welcomed into Winsen, and Karina from Azerbaijan, his support worker. Both had survival stories to tell crossing borders with children seeking safety, underlining the real value of organisations such as UNICEF, UNHCR and the Red Cross. Belonging begins with a sense of safety, in Winsen the welcome is warm. Putting us to shame as UK citizens. As Karina said these are world problems, we are all people we have to work together to solve them. We connected past with present, at least now they communicate.

Frome briefings, new stories

Productive planning/briefing meeting in Frome this week. Second generation survivors and liberators met: we heard powerful stories of survival and resistance:

Frome briefing

A walk across Europe escaping the pogroms over a century ago from Oddesa to Palestine.

The retraced steps across Liverpool Street station of a family whose history begins at the arrival of the Kindertransport train.

Reminders on the network of the legendary yiddish advocate, poet and socialist Meyer Bogdanski.

And today a powerful Kurdish woman tells the story of a life in exile.

Join us for more on the walk, share your stories and lets see how this strange journey in the mind and walk on the ground will speak to us.

Remembering the march to Belsen

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

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.