HMD North Somerset Volunteers with the event organiser holding her book ‘Survival - Holocaust Survivors Tell Their Story’ which includes her mother’s experience.   

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On Holocaust Memorial Day in Pill Library, Lorna Brunstein, daughter of Holocaust Survivor Esther Brunstein read a piece of her mother’s writings detailing her story of survival.  Esther was born in Lodz, the second largest city in Poland with the second largest Jewish population after Warsaw.  She was just 11 years old at the start of the war and spent five years in the infamous Lodz Ghetto. She was deported to Auschwitz with her mother in August 1944 where they were separated - her mother at age 44 was deemed too old and sick for work and was murdered in the gas chambers.  Esther was 16 years old when her mother was taken from her.  Esther was then consigned to 6 months hard labour in a camp near Hannover in Germany. When the camp was liquidated in February 1945, she was forced on a death march to Bergen-Belsen where she remained until liberation in April 1945.

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Esther came to London in 1947 where she lived until her death in 2017.  Esther and one of her brothers were the only members of their large family to survive.  Esther became a prominent public speaker in her later years using her experiences to raise awareness of the dangers of Holocaust denial and how prejudice and discrimination, if not challenged, can lead to the rise of Fascism.  She spoke at the United Nations in New York on the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Human Rights, and shared a platform with the Queen at the opening of the first permanent Holocaust Exhibition in The Imperial War Museum London.  She was passionate about the value of education and considered her most important work was speaking in primary and secondary schools up and down the country.

 

Lorna moved to Pill, North Somerset 4 years ago and is an artist.  She makes artwork that draws from her family history and its impact on the second generation. She believes that she has a duty to share her family history (both her parents were survivors of the Holocaust) as an act of remembrance and also to make the connections between then and now and how important it is to learn the lessons of the past and the resonances for today.

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