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.
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
Walking into the Commons building at Bath Spa University I was stunned to see the map still showing in satellite view on the MediaWall. 
It was showing the last day of the walk, live as we had left it. My tears were not dry. I am still waking on that endless walk, a whole body anxiety that I might not get there, might not make it in time. Think of Esther and the others. Imagining myself walking. Feeling it shift and blur and decay to damp powder in my memory’s hands, like rotten wood. A flashback shock that burned with me .
The walk had been well watched and as we learned more, we heard of a crowd gathering in front of it watching the dots of the Social Hiking beacon advance and the blue social media markers light up as we made our way live. Conversations resonated from the space. We heard of and later met a former tank driver who had been stationed at the barracks we had visited where Esther had been hospitalised. He had stood and with his work mates watched our path light up. He urgently wanted to share his experience and we stood in front of the track of our walk, looking at the satellite view of our retracing of Esther’s forced march and he identified his places. Told of his sensed echoes of Belsen survivors. Ghost in the camp. The Cold War resonates. In our heads we mapped together.
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. 
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.
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.
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?
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.
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….
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.
…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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
First days in Germany
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.
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.
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.
We are overwhelmed already, immersed. Tomorrow checking day two of the walk, the long haul through the woods to Belsen.
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=
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.
