FOR many people who are marking Holocaust Memorial Day today the stories of that terrible episode are just that – stories.

The tales of persecution and execution, evil acts and chilling indifference are increasingly distilled into stark old photographs or an ever-growing pool of films and books.

But for artist Lorna Brunstein the holocaust comes much closer to home.

Her mother Esther survived years in Lodz ghetto, in Auschwitz and Belsen, the last by the finest of threads – being unconscious from typhus on the day of liberation and a whisper away from death.

And her father Stanislaw suffered 14 months’ solitary confinement in prison before being sent to a Siberian labour camp.

The fact that they survived, got to England, met, married and had a family astonishes Lorna.

But the shadow of the Holocaust stretches on into her generation too with troubling memories and harrowing accounts to weave into the Brunstein family history. She remembers the way her father always pulled a jacket over his head to doze on the sofa – because it was the only way he could sleep in a cell where a light burned 24 hours a day every day.

And she has absorbed the sufferings of her mother, now 80 and just 11 when the Germans marched into her town.

Ms Brunstein, 58, has returned to Bridport where she worked for several years to present an installation that features many of her artist father’s paintings in a multi-media work called How Did I Come To Be Here?

The title is based on a line from his writings that trace the mental agony of imprisonment.

It is her parents’ experiences as Jews that shape her life as an artist – a blossoming that began at the age of 50 when she returned to Lodz in Poland with her mother to visit the family home.

Stanislaw Brunstein died in 1994, aged 80. Her mother lives in London.

Ms Brunstein, who lived in Weymouth for many years and worked at Weymouth College, said: “This installation explores our father- daughter relationship.

“He was an artist and so am I. But when he went to art lectures before the war he had to stand – he was not allowed to sit like other students because he was a Jew.”

She added: “The holocaust had a huge impact on my sister and me. Everyone carries it in subtle ways from past generations – it’s like an inherited trauma.

“For me it was the elephant in the room and I didn’t do anything about it till I was 50.”

Ms Brunstein now lives in Bath. But she has always kept links with Dorset and was pleased to return to Bridport to stage her latest artwork.

She said: “I think of the wider issues of Holocaust Day and the genocides that have happened since. We must never forget and this is a day when we can all connect in some way and remember.”

Her installation opens today, Holocaust Memorial Day, and continues until February 21.

Bridport-based Electric Backroom artists David Rogers and Nigel Slight are also showing their collaborative multi-media work Connected, inspired by Kristallnacht, until the same date.