Honouring Esther

This work was part of a larger Forced Walks project which was based on the testimony of Holocaust survivor Esther Brunstein, who passed away during the work's exhibition in 2017. 

A performative walk-in-witness on the original death march route from slave labour camp to death camp. In Germany, 71 years later, to the day. February 2016. 10 interventions at the same ‘stations’ as the Somerset walk. The second phase of the project. Generating resonances. 

The Walks

Richard White, Lorna Brunstein and other walkers followed the exact route of the death march into Bergen-Belsen. Seventy-one years after Esther Brunstein and other survivors of the Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz were marched at gunpoint from the slave labour camp near Hanover to Belsen, their steps were retraced.

The walk followed the same model as the walk in Somerset actively seeking to generate human rights resonances.  For second and third generation survivors, liberators, perpetrators and witnesses as well as those more recently exiled and dispossessed by war and prejudice, the walk offered a space for moments of reconnection, reconciliation, reflection and solidarity.

The first phase in the UK culminated in an exhibition at 44AD Gallery in Bath in July 2015. The second phase was completed with an exhibition in the same gallery, two years after the launch of the project, on Holocaust Memorial Day, January 2017.