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

Crowd funding campaign launched, invitations to walk open

admin on November 11, 2015

Today launched the crowd funding campaign to a tremendous early response. With a small fund rolling over from the first phase Richard and Lorna are confident that the walk itself is secured are now offer invitation to join and participate in the final phase of the project.

Check out the crowd funding campaign here….. 28 days to raise £3000!

Forced Walks: Honouring Esther. Germany. 2016

Please share the link widely.

If you are thinking about joining the walk check out the details here and please get in touch on the contact form at the bottom of the page. Please like the facebook page and join the twitter stream…see the column to your right.

Good contact are being made in Germany, Richard and Lorna are especially keen to engage with walkers, artists, those working with refugees and anyone wishing to share second and third generation experiences. The contemporary resonances are poignant and powerful.

” We walk inspired by Esther’s spirit of internationalism and humanitarianism”

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

 

A walk in Canada

admin on April 13, 2015

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.

I feel almost guilty at how pleasant a walk it was. I started from my house and walked four km west and then four back. It is a very nice day and I live in a very nice part of town.  I have good shoes and comfortable clothes. I started off properly nourished. It took me under two hours and I felt good when I got home and got to sit down.

 
Then when I came home I picked up Dad’s memoirs and read about April 10/45 and his walk. Thousands of prisoners walking the same distance, but under guard by the Nazi guards. He doesn’t mention dogs but as I put my own images to his words the guards have vicious dogs to control the marchers. The stragglers are being shot. They are being forced to walk because the railway siding has been destroyed and I imagine signs of destruction all around them. And at the end their destination was the boxcars – the trains of Hell.
 
So I’m not sure that I really commemorated the event. But thanks to you I took a moment to think about it.
 
Philip

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.

Frome briefings, new stories

admin on March 19, 2015

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.

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.

Esther’s Walk transposed to Switzerland

admin on October 10, 2014

We have had a request to provide the line of Esther’s walk to a colleague visiting Switzerland during the time that the project will be taking place. Here is the ‘line on the map’ with a destination yet to be finalised.
[googlemaps https://www.google.com/maps/d/embed?mid=zG0FerrHE65o.kGgIneoaR1Io&w=640&h=480]