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May 20th, 2021

Family History: Conducting Research the Old-Fashioned Way

by Andrea Simon

The evolution of my memoir, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest, began in an amorphous, serpentine way, taking unexpected twists and turns, propelled by a fierce need to know my family history and how it fit within the context of the Jewish American experience. In the spring of 1997, my friend Miriam, a travel consultant, mentioned that she planned to take yet another group to Europe that June to explore their ancestral pasts and Holocaust ties. My interest intensified when she explained that the organizer of the group was a man originally from Brest in present-day Belarus. A current resident of Arizona and the owner of Payless Shoes, Louis Pozez, longed to find out what happened to members of his large family, most of whom perished in the Holocaust. This would be one of the first organized American groups to explore a former territory of the Soviet Union since its breakup. With my grandmother’s family from the village of Volchin, about 35 kilometers northeast of Brest, I was in.

 “Sign me up,” I said to Miriam. “I will go with you and search for the fate of my family from Volchin.”

 That trip, described in Bashert, was life changing. I made long-lasting friends, including Israelis with ties to Volchin. These people took me to Volchin, where we stood together in front of my family’s home, which had been repossessed by many non-Jews over the years. Perhaps the most significant event of this already significant trip was our visit to the little-known 1942 massacre site of Brona Gora, in the forest between Minsk and Brest, where 50,000 Jews were murdered in giant pits.

At the end of the trip, an official of the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona asked me to work with their videographer on a documentary about our experiences. This led to two visits to Arizona, where I met with Louis Pozez. Unfortunately, they didn’t have enough good footage and ended up abandoning the documentary. Later, Louis sent me a Russian-language document by the State Commission investigating Nazi crimes in the Soviet Union. I had my first serious official source; there was no stopping me.

 Given the nascent nature of the Internet, I was overwhelmed by erroneous references on Volchin. There was nothing on Brona Gora. I wrote letters to international museums and genealogical organizations looking for information about both places. I continued my letter writing, phone calling, sending emails. I pursued every lead.

 The more I learned, the more questions I had. My contributors’ tentacles spread far; bits of statistics came from the dusty shelves of Belarusian, Russian, Israeli, and German repositories. Friends or acquaintances, some of whom were Holocaust survivors or had knowledgeable contacts, sent me letters and documents. I employed translators of German, Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian, Belarusian, and Polish. One of the Israelis I met, a man who left Volchin to join the Red Army, reconstructed the Volchin he remembered in an amazing hand-drawn map with glossary, including a pictorial representation of every Jewish home in the village that once had about 500 Jews. My family home was at its center.

I traveled from my Manhattan apartment to Long Island where I met former Volchiner, Hanna Kremer, who had escaped to Russia where she endured other horrors. She had previously refused all interviews from Shoah organizations. I showed her photos of my murdered Volchin relatives, and she produced photos of hers. Miraculously, and hence the title Bashert, meaning fated, she was the best friend of my cousin, and her uncle appeared in my photos. She agreed for me to interview her because by now I was an unofficial landsman. Finally, she produced a long-sought-after document: the Yizkor book on Volchin. As project coordinator, I had the privilege of helping to produce this document on JewishGen.

 A non-Jewish Volchiner wrote that my family had left before the village massacre in September 1942. Yet I have found no documentation supporting their whereabouts. Their fate remaining unknown. I received contradictory and sketchy statistical and testimonial accounts of Brona Gora from official organizations. Names of perpetrators were missing, had different spellings, or different names. Transliterations often varied, according to the person’s national usage and educational training. Of course, there were the usual deniers of my requests claiming: “I didn’t know,” “I wasn’t there,” “Jews willingly went to their fate,” or the “Poles suffered too.” So many stories motivated by guilt and complicity.

 How was I to weed through this conundrum? How was I to make sense of this information? I wasn’t a historian. Though I had written educational and promotional pieces, I was primarily a literary writer.

 I decided on my book’s structure: to write in a linear fashion, reconstructing the search as it happened, objectively recording the materials I received, complete with inconsistencies, errors, and gaps. I interwove my family’s history as a counterbalance to the unbearable details of the mass murders, and to show the trajectory of one family’s immigrant story.

 When the material about Brona Gora seemed to have no further path, and I did not learn of the final destination of my relatives, I realized an alarming possibility. Evidence suggested that my uncle, aunt, and their three daughters—all or some of them—could have met their fate in those giant pits in the forest.

 My work on these atrocities affected me profoundly. Yet, one Brona Gora story called out to me for years after Bashert was published. It had been revealed in a three-paragraph testimony from the only recorded survivor, a 12-year-old-girl named Esfir Manevich. Naked, Esfir climbed out of the pit of bleeding bodies and escaped into the woods. How could anyone, especially a young girl, survive such an ordeal?

 That question led me to imagine Esfir’s life in Kobrin as a child, her family’s subjugation in the ghetto, and their end at Brona Gora. What happened to Esfir after the war? I got invaluable insight into Jewish life before the Holocaust by reading the Yizkor books on JewishGen. My curiosity persisted, leading me to write and publish the historical novel, Esfir Is Alive.

 Perhaps all writers are propelled by the need to make sense of the nonsensical. Although my next book published in 2019, Floating in the Neversink, was also a historical novel (coming-of-age in the Catskills and Brooklyn in the 1950s), it too was based on recollections and research. By now, I had the Internet as a fully functioning assistant, and my own photos and memories.

But one thing didn’t change: the need to know continues. Through the years, these books have inspired many to repeat my journey, to learn about their loved ones, to find new family connections, to gain a certain solace. This is extremely gratifying.

 Nowadays, when I Google Brona Gora or Bashert, I get myself as a primary reference. The fundamental research hasn’t changed. In 2019, Bashert was reissued in paperback with a new Foreword. I am hoping it will reach new readers. As I have learned repeatedly, I could receive new facts at any time.

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 Andrea Simon is a writer and photographer who lives in New York City. Her published work includes: a memoir/history, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest, now in a paperback edition; an award-winning historical novel, Esfir Is Alive; and her recent novel-in-stories, Floating in the Neversink, the winner of the 2020 New York Indie Author Project. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the City College of New York where she has taught introductory writing and creative writing.