Helmbrechts Walk, 1998?2003

A record of multimedia artist Susan Silas’s work Helmbrechts Walk, 1998­–2003, in which she retraced the forced march of 580 female Jewish prisoners from Germany to occupied Czechoslovakia.

Helmbrechts Walk, 1998–2003 is a memorial testament to the forced march of 580 female Jewish prisoners at the end of World War II. The march began on April 13, 1945, in order to evacuate Helmbrechts, a small satellite camp of the Flossenbürg concentration camp. 

This work by multimedia artist Susan Silas is a visual representation of the 225 miles the prisoners were forced to march from the camp in Germany into the occupied portion of Czechoslovakia, then known as the Sudetenland. Silas set out to retrace the path of these women by spending twenty-two days on foot in Germany and the Czech Republic on the fifty-third anniversary of the march. Silas’s documentation of this journey on video, in still images, and in writings is published for the first time in this book, which contains the original artwork of forty-eight archival color plates.

The images are contextualized by a diary of Silas’s journey juxtaposed with news clips drawn from the front pages of The New York Times from the same days in 1998―thus drawing a connection between the violent events of the past and those being witnessed in the present. In addition to the originally unbound artwork, this book includes a survivor interview with Halina Kleiner, a preface by the Holocaust scholar Brett Ashley Kaplan, and a remembrance of the women who died during this march.

Susan Silas is an artist working in photography, video, and sculpture. She is a dual Hungarian and American national living and working in Brooklyn, New York.