Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest

by Andrea Simon

Haunted by her grandmother's Old World stories and larger-than-life persona, Andrea Simon undertook a spiritual search for her lost family. Her quest for truth gave tragic answers. Using newly translated archival records, she peeled back layers of clues to confront the mystery. This story of her momentous odyssey reveals the terrible fate of her kin.
From her grandmother's village of Volchin in Belarus, she followed the trail of the death march taken by the village Jews to the place of their slaughter in 1942. During the same period, in Brona Gora forest some 50,000 Jews were shot. Simon was in one of the first American groups to visit this little-publicized site.
Mass shootings of Jews, particularly in the Soviet Union, have not been addressed with the same focus given to concentration camp atrocities. Yet Simon's research reveals that Nazis killed nearly 50 percent of their Jewish victims by means other than gassing. Thus Simon fills a significant gap in Holocaust history by providing the most extensive report yet on the executions at Brona Gora and Volchin.
As she interweaves tragic narrative with evocative family anecdotes, Simon writes a story of life in czarist Russia and of her family's flight from pogroms and persecution. From a unique vantage Simon's memoir discloses her dogged genealogical search, the newly perceived Jewish history she uncovered, and the ramifications of the Holocaust in the postwar generation.

Genres: Holocaust

300 pages, Paperback

First published August 28, 2002

About the author

Andrea Simon is a writer and photographer who lives in New York City. For the past several years, she has devoted her efforts to fiction and literary nonfiction, including her published memoir/history, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest, now in a paperback edition; her award-winning historical novel, Esfir Is Alive; her novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink; and her new novel, Did You Have the Life You Wanted? She is also the editor and a contributor to an anthology called Here's the Story ... Nine Women Write Their Lives. Andrea holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York where she has taught writing.

Reviews

[Hermien · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am interested in this subject and love reading books about research into somebody's family history. I thought the writer at times labours the term Bashert a bit but overall the book held my attention to the end.

[Stephanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andrea Simon has written a deeply personal Holocaust memoir of her search for her family’s lost village of Volchin in Belarus, inspired by stories told by her aging grandmother who had once lived there. A small and vibrant center of Jewish middleclass life in the 1920s, the population of Volchin had been annihilated by the end of the war. Not one Jew remained. After Ms. Simon finally managed to locate it on a map, she joined a group of Jews going to the area to make their own pilgrimage to honor their lost relatives.

These new friends and much research led to valuable, though incomplete archives in several countries and to old people who recalled something of Ms. Simon’s murdered family. Yet information was difficult to find. Everyone who helped or witnessed the murders - the forced stripping of the people and their lying down on other bodies like sardines in a death pit in the earth to be shot - was also executed. Month after month, in interviews and almost illegible archives which had to be translated, and in old photographs of the vibrant living village, details of her family and Volchin grew. There were many other massacres, wiping out of whole communities. In a forest called Brona Gora a journey away, some fifty thousand Jews were shot. When Ms. Simon began her search, some archivists had never even heard of that massacre. I had to put the book down several times, stunned by such brutality and how completely it was covered.

BASHERT is both starkly and lyrically written in its anger and its elegy. I read many passages a few times and marked them. (I am fortunate the copy of the book belongs to me.) The story reads both like a mystery and a personal journey. When the author returns to her home after her pilgrimage to Poland to search for any fragment of her family, she writes, “My body is back, home in New York City…I know it because I see my reflection in the mirror, but I have lost something, something.”

She has lost a world, but what she finds is a story which grows page after page and brings a village and its people to ghostly life again, so much that I felt I had also lived with them there before it was all destroyed. Sacred memory. An important, beautiful, tragic book to own and cherish.

[Linda Aronovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a powerful saga written by a granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, an account of her extended family who, along with tens of thousands of others, was murdered in Belarus by the Nazis, with the help of local citizens, brutally shot into killing pits they had had to dig. The author recounts the extensive research she conducted to discover the truth: digging up documents in myriad languages, interviewing witnesses, studying historical references, and visiting the sites in Belarus on a pilgrimage to tell the story of her grandmother’s village, as well as others. Not all Jews were killed in the well-known concentration camps. Many were shot on the spot, or in these mass killing fields and pits, and there are few documented reports as few survived and witnesses kept their silence. The author left no stone unturned in her research to tell this story. (Note that this was all done the old-fashioned way, pre-Internet.)

This book is also so much more—personal stories about her fascinating grandmother who lived life large in the US and around the world, married to a Berlin club owner with performers in drag (harkens to “Cabaret”), as well as stories of other survivors and people she met during her travels and research.

Reading about the murders was disturbing and painful and heartbreaking, especially for me, a daughter of a Holocaust survivor. At the same time, the writing is so evocative and skillfully written, seamlessly blending personal stories and historical facts, I sometimes stopped to ponder the finely crafted sentences and descriptions.

Highly recommended as a great read, but also as a significant contribution to the Holocaust historical record.

[Elaine Chew · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read up to 54% on my kindle and just didn't want to finish it. She just got so wrapped up into the facts and questioned over and over everyone's stories and remembrances and she never believed what they said. I kept at it trying to find out what it was that she really needed to tell her story but I felt like the last half would have been just like the first. I admire her tenacity in her search and her need to find out the truth and I hope this account has somehow brought her peace.

[Smadar Belkind-Gerson · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read a lot of this genre for my personal research. I admire anyone who shares their survival story and I think Andrea did an excellent. I only gave it three stars, because it's not the best writing in the world, but on the other hand, these kind of books never all. The story is remarkable and well worth the read.