Forced Walks: Honouring Esther was launched as part of the Holocaust Memorial Day programme in Bath and Bristol.
In April 2015 on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp at Bergen-Belsen, Honouring Esther was a walk on paths as close as possible to the transposed route of a Nazi Death March. 25 walkers joined the two day walk-in-witness from Frome to Bath generating local and contemporary human rights resonances, sharing stories and bearing witness. The walk was distributed live on social media and documented in an exhibition in July 2015.
In February 2016 on the 71st anniversary of the actual death march, artists Richard White and Lorna Brunstein will lead a walk following the route from a slave labour camp near Hanover to the Belsen death camp. An intimate, participatory and performative walk following the model established in Somerset, pausing to reflect, bear witness and share. This closing phase of the project reaches out to second and third generation survivors, liberators, perpetrators and witnesses as well as those more recently exiled and dispossessed by war and prejudice. Given the welcome extended by Germany to refugees these resonances will be strong.
Your support will help promote and facilitate the walk:
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enable other walkers to participate,
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help with costs for documentation activity, including a live social media stream for display on the BSU Commons mediawall,
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help outreach activity with civic and education organisations.
"A walk about time and the land, exile and belonging, the drift of memory and forgetting, memorialising in an era dense with anniversaries."