Helmbrechts Walk, 1998-2003
Helmbrechts Walk is a memorial testament to the forced march of 580 female Jewish prisoners during the closing days of the World War II. This work is a visual representation of the 225-mile route from Helmbrechts, a small satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp, into the occupied portion of Czechoslovakia, then known as the Sudetenland. On the 53rd anniversary of the march, Susan Silas set out on foot to retrace the path of these women—walking for 22 days in Germany and the Czech Republic. The work was first presented in the format of an unbound book, accompanied by a slide presentation. In that form the work was exhibited in the United States and in Europe in the early aughts.
This book contains: the documentation of the original artwork, Helmbrechts Walk, 1998–2003, the images of the headstones of the 95 women who perished and were buried in Volary, originally shown as a slide projection, the transcript of an interview she conducted with a survivor of the march, Halina Kleiner (who was also interviewed by the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C.), an essay in both English and German, written by noted Holocaust historian Brett Ashley Kaplan (author of Unwanted Beauty and Landscapes of Holocaust Postmemory), an excerpt from the trial transcript of Alois Dörr, the commandant of the march, who was tried in The Federal Republic of Germany in July of 1969, reports from the National Archives in Washington D.C., and a series of Silas’s own writings.
The history of the Holocaust, as it was received in the West, was written primarily by Western European men. With a few notable exceptions: Charlotte Delbo, Ida Fink and of course Anne Frank, the entire understanding of the Holocaust reflected little about the experiences of women. The degree to which women are absent in the telling of the Holocaust cannot be overstated. This project was motivated by the desire to give voice to the experiences of women, and by the artist’s own personal history as the child of Holocaust survivors. Her father endured a forced march during the war.