Honouring Esther: Walking back to the Holocaust in Bristol and Bath

An extraordinary event will take place on April 14-15 2015 here in the tranquil and peaceful settings of Somerset. A forced walk will take place to mark the 70^th anniversary of the liberation of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany. The walk from Frome in Somerset to Bath has been meticulously designed to mirror the route that Esther Brunstein was forced to march from Hambuhren-Ovelgonne to Bergen Belsen, Germany.

Esther Brunstein survived the death march and the horrors of life in the concentration camps. After liberation, she came to England and gave birth to Lorna Brunstein, now an artist and creator of this memorial project along with Richard White, a walking digital artist.

It is hard to imagine the hardships and life changing traumatic experience that plagued those who experienced the holocaust first hand. Few survivors remain today, but the memories and lessons of one of humanity’s greatest failures must be remembered, lest we forget and history ever repeats itself.

“The line of a Nazi Death March to Belsen transposed to Somerset. A 2 day walk as close as possible to that line. Where the walk intersects the line, interventions. An intimate performative walk-in-witness exploring resonances from the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Belsen.

A walk about time and the land, exile and belonging, the drift of memory and forgetting, memorialising in an era dense with anniversaries.“

The Bergen Belsen death camp (previously a German prisoner of war camp before being coverted into a concentration camp to exterminate minorities) saw mass killings of Jews and other targeted minorities by the NAZI regime. For many, execution was a relief from the murderous breakouts of typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever, dysentery and starvation. Amongst those who died at Belsen was Anne Frank. She met her death just two weeks before British and Canadian soldiers liberated the camp. Find out more about Belsen here.

Bristol Holocaust Memorial Day is proud to support the Forced Walk honouring Esther. For more information about Bristol HMD, please click here.