My Name is Sara

My name is Sara began with the discovery of a family album of photographs and some handwritten notes in German that had never been translated. These tell the story of the German-Jewish side of my family – one that my father Manfred was unable to relate.

Manfred, and his sister Susi, survived the Holocaust by escaping from Nazi Berlin on the Kindertransport, arriving in Britain in 1939 at the respective ages of 14 and 17.

Manfred’s experiences growing up in Berlin, the traumatic events that occurred before he was evacuated, the family members who were murdered, and his evacuation formed a chapter of his life that was too painful to revisit and so I was oblivious to my father’s experiences until long after his death.

The photo album was assembled and carefully annotated by my aunt Susi. Early photographs show a family life of seaside holidays, weddings and outings in Berlin with aunts, uncles and cousins – family members I had never known existed. Realising that many of these people did not reappear in the photographs taken after World War II, I began to search for traces of their lives.

Through my research, and with the help of the Wiener Library in London and the Arolsen Archives in Germany, I uncovered over 130 pages of Nazi and official documents that revealed that family members were deported to, and murdered, in concentration camps at Auschwitz and Theresienstadt. Others survived by escaping to Shanghai, France and Israel, and by living hidden in Berlin with false documents.

At the same time – parallel - to making these discoveries, I used photography and video to make artworks with the material I was discovering. These works utilise both reproductions of images from the album and the archival documentation to reveal the personal stories of family members and the effects of that history upon myself and my family in the present - as the reverberations from trauma echo through the generations.

The first exhibition of this project was curated by Katy Barron. It was held at Four Corners Gallery, London E2 0QN in 2021.

The project was supported by a three-year Philip Leverhulme Prize awarded by the Leverhulme Foundation.

Click on the images below to see each individual series