Work in progress briefing to members of the Bristol Hannover Association. Open Meeting
Thursday April 7 19.30
Rm C117
Commons
Bath Spa University. Newton Park Campus
A chance to meet the artists and review the walk in Germany, discuss resonances form the project and hear about developing work and plans for documentation exhibition.
44AD Gallery, Bath BA1 1NN
24-29 January 2017
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!”
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. 
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.
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. 
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Winter closes in on refugees crossing Europe, tragic events in Paris and under reported terror attacks elsewhere force us to think about the world we live in and the world we want to live in. In making this walk and sharing it with the world we want to contribute to reversing the spiral of fear and hate. Our energies focus on making the walk in Germany and the resonances we want to generate.
Lorna Brunstein and I met with Peter Jackson who has been doing some advance research ahead of the walk in Germany in February. Peter was a soldier on National Service in the area in the 1950’s when the area was receiving refugees displaced from parts of Germany whilst there he came across stories of the forced labour camps and specifically the Jewish womens camp at Ovelgonne, so ironically named ‘Walsdeslust’.
Peter showed us photographs of some surviving physical remains of the slave labour camp Waldeslust where Esther was held and from where the death march she survived started.
More than a shadow on the map now an old shed shrouded in weeds makes it more real. He met with an old man who as a boy remembers the inmates and guards with guns. Layer upon layer of memory and history: Peter saw a memorial to the refugees from parts of Germany that became Poland who had made their homes locally.
The memorial record the places left behind when new lines were drawn on the map. German speaking people living in what became Poland after the war became refugees and headed west.The layers are tangled and messy but there is a shared experience of exile from which empathy emerges. Second generation and third generation refugees from this time are supporting the walk and sharing their experience.
On the site of the slave labour camp there is indeed a Garden Centre and it does indeed grow orchids. There is even a Hambuhren orchid. These tiger orchids were shown to Peter with pride. Somewhere in that there is a motif and metaphor as powerful as the lion and the beehive on the Tate and Lyle’s Golden Syrup tin. Two stories of subjugation and appropriation: out of strength a certain sweetness, out of death a strange beauty.
We learn more about the weather. By the winter of 1944/5 Anne Frank and her sister Margot had arrived at Belsen, at that time there was no shelter other than tents for the inmates. The tents were blown away in one winter storm. Like the thousands of Russian prisoners of war who died there in appalling conditions in 1942, in February/March 1945 Anne and Margot’s lives were ended. Along with tens of thousands of others. As Esther and a group of women were being marched to that horror from Ovelgonne in that weather.
So perhaps we will walk in a winter storm..
The difference is that we will be healthy, well fed, wrapped up warm and connected to the world. We will be walking of our own freewill towards a museum that holds the evidence in memory of those who died and those who survived. We walk and network with second and third generation refugees, survivors, perpetrators, witnesses and liberators, we walk in witness to the past and in solidarity with the present.
In the face of blood and fear and bullets this is the time to be making gestures of love and solidarity; reminding ourselves of the values of internationalism and human rights. If we can do nothing else we can walk in witness. With your help that is what our walk will communicate.
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
Here is the day 1 walk as seen from Richard White’s phone and tablet and from his Flicks account, so this pics are not always taken by him
Via Viewranger:
http://my.viewranger.com/track/widget/1582249?locale=en&m=miles
and via Social Hiking
this hooks up with a number of other walkers twitter feed and shows some of the tweets retweeted
We invited others to take up the model and walk-in-witness with us.
Here an email from Canada, reproduced with permission, from Esther’s nephew Phillip. Esther and her brother Perec were the only two members of their family to survive the Holocaust. Her oldest brother and her father joined the resistance but did not survive. Her mother was killed at Auschwitz. At the weekend Phillip walked the length of the death march Perec was taken on in April 1945.
Interview with her great granddaughter, Rebecca, at the Brutal Exposure exhibition in the International Slavery Museum, Liverpool
[vimeo 85248277 w=500 h=375]
Rebecca Seeley Harris from National Museums Liverpool on Vimeo.
This haunting exhibition presents what was probably the first photographic campaign in support of human rights. It documents the exploitation and brutality experienced by Congolese people under the control of Leopold II of Belgium in the 1900s.
Alice Seeley Harris lived much of her life in Frome. We will remember her work in bring slavery and genocide to the attention of world when we are walking on Tuesday. A local resonance.
The exhibition in Liverpool runs until June 7
http://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/ism/exhibitions/brutal-exposure/index.aspx
Frome Town Council today confirmed support for the project, amongst other things this will fund local briefings in Frome and a workshop for young people at Frome College.
The briefing for project supporters, prospective walkers and anyone interested in finding out more about the project will be on
Tuesday 17 March at the Cheese and Grain in Frome
Meeting Room 1: 4.00pm
and again
Meeting Room 1 at 6.30pm
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.
