TWO films by the highly regarded Polish artist Miroslaw Balka are on display among the permanent Lake District Holocaust Project’s exhibition From Auschwitz to Ambleside at Windermere Library.

The acclaimed international sculptor and video maker apparently visited the exhibition a few weeks ago and asked for his work to be viewed alongside the story of the child holocaust survivors, who came to Troutbeck Bridge in August 1945.

As a child, despite visiting concentration and death camps near to where he lived on the outskirts of Warsaw, Miroslaw was never told that Jewish people had been killed in the camps and had grown up just two streets away from the border of the ghetto. A total of 8,000 Jews from his home town were taken to Treblinka in 1942 as part of the Nazi Final Solution. He said for him "the soil was full of pain.”

According to Trevor Avery, LDHP director, Miroslaw - on hearing of the child survivors story and the energy and vitality that they have demonstrated in their lives since - decided to base his second piece on the light emanating from the basement of the library building. Darkness and light are ever present in his work questioning which is real, which mirror danger and which reflect reason.

Trevor added: "Miroslaw stands out in the international art scene, both in terms of his quality, and also because of his social conscience. That is not always the case in the contemporary art world and this is why he fits so well within our project at Windermere."

Miroslaw exhibited at the Tate Modern in 2009/2010 as part of the Unilever Series How It Is. His giant grey steel structure with a vast dark chamber, which hovered somewhere between sculpture and architecture, was on show in the echoing space of the Turbine Hall.

Meanwhile, in the adjacent gallery at Windermere Library, the Flowers of Auschwitz exhibition features the work of Rosemary Smith who, together with Trevor, was the first British artist to gain access to a vast complex of greenhouses that Jewish prisoners, imprisoned some two miles away at Auschwitz Birkenau, built and worked in.

Trevor’s plinths in the garden outside were based on the greenhouses bench supports and Rosemary’s film Greenhouses at Raisko gives an insight into the buildings, unused since 1945. The framed photograms were initially hand developed by contact with wildflowers collected from the former Calgarth Estate at Troutbeck Bridge, at Theresienstadt and in the hinterlands of Osweicim between Auschwitz and Birkenau. These were printed onto wood and encased in limed wood glass frames to echo the greenhouses.

Both exhibitions run until October 31.