The Windermere Children: From Nazi Camps to the Lake District
Trevor Avery
Date: Tuesday 8th November 2022
Venue: Cumbria’s Museum of Military Life (in Carlisle Castle)
Doors: 5:30pm for a 6:00pm start
Trevor Avery is an artist, curator, historian, and a director of Another Space, an education charity that initiated and now produces the Lake District Holocaust Project in Windermere UK.
He has been involved since 2005 in tthe ongoing project looking at the connections and legacy of the story of the 300 child survivors of the Holocaust who came to the Lake District of England in 1945 directly after liberation from the concentration camps of Nazi Occupied Europe.
Numerous exhibitions and projects have been produced alongside the growing archive and permanent exhibition.
“Flowers of Auschwitz” in 2015 related to the book of drawings of children liberated from Auschwitz in 1945 by the Soviet soldier artist Zinovii Tolkatchev.
“Auschwitz Dandelion”, an exhibition project in 2017, looked at the Auschwitz sub camp of Raisko. The project investigated the history of experiments to use Russian Dandelion sap in the global manufacture of rubber, especially motor tyres.
From 2016 to 2017 he curated “Holocaust and Memory Reframed” in the Lake District. Supported by Arts Council England, the two-year programme began with an exhibition of The Memory Quilt, a large-scale project made in 2015 by 45 Aid Society. Other artists commissioned to produce work over the two years included Ian Walton, Heather Belcher and Miroslaw Balka.
“The Auschwitz Album” exhibition from Yad Vashem was exhibited in Windermere in 2018.
In 2019, he began work with Professor Caroline Sturdy Colls and Staffordshire University on the National Lottery Heritage Fund project From Troutbeck Bridge to Treblinka an archaeological survey of the “lost” wartime village of Calgarth Estate that stood near Windermere between 1942 and around circa 1964.
The archaeology project coincided with a two year programme of Arts Council England contemporary art exhibitions in Windermere curated by Another Space/LDHP titled “Above and Below the Holocaust Landscape” and involving artists Richard Kolker, Richard White, Lorna Brunstein.
He continues to be an advisor to the BBC on TV programmes and has written for Third Text magazine, and in the past curated exhibitions including leading Aboriginal Australian artist Dr Pam Johnston, Tanzanian artist Everlyn Nicodemus and American artists Linda Lomahaftewa (Choctaw-Hopi) and Jimmie Durham.
In 2018 he advised and featured in the BAFTA award winning Who Do You Think You Are BBC One programme that followed Rob Rinder in the footsteps of his grandfather.
He was an advisor on “The Windermere Children”, a major television film drama produced by BBC, Wall to Wall, Warner Bros and ZDF, and involving the Lake District Holocaust Project, was broadcast in 2020 to coincide with the seventy fifth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and also the arrival in the Lake District of the three hundred child Holocaust Survivors.
“The Windermere Children – In Their Own Words” was a documentary for BBC that was commissioned to accompany the film dramatisation. It includes reflections by a number of the Holocaust survivors who were in the Lake District in 1945, and also a personal appearance by Trevor Avery.
In 2021 he gave a presentation to the United Nations and appeared on television broadcasts in the US.
In 2016 he was awarded the BEM for Services to Heritage in the Lake District.
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