Bashert : a granddaughter's Holocaust quest /

Based on interviews, memoirs, historical accounts, archival documents, and family anecdotes, Simon undertook what she describes as a "spiritual search" for her family members killed in the Holocaust. Obsessed by her grandmother's tales of life in the village of Volchin (in what is now Belarus), Simon visited there during a trip to Poland, Belarus, and Russia in 1997. She learned that in 1942, all 395 Jews remaining in Volchin were murdered by two Nazis with the help of the non-Jewish villagers. She learned, too, that 50,000 Jews were killed and buried in eight mass graves in Brona Gora, a forest between Brest and Minsk, from June to November 1942. The author concludes from her research that her relatives were murdered on September 22, 1942, in Volchin, killed "for one reason only--because they were Jewish." Bashert is the Yiddish word for fate. In her quest for the truth, Simon has written a loving eulogy to her lost family. --George Cohen

Self-discovery meets history in this debut memoir. Like many Jews of the post-Holocaust generation, the author grew up listening to stories of family members murdered or disappeared. These reminiscences by those lucky enough to get away mingled fact with error, data with folklore, and when Simon began to look into them more closely, she found that the official record was no better, riddled as it was with omissions, distortions, gaps, and outright lies. Seeking on-the-ground truth, she begins with an account of a tour-group trip to the ruins of death camps and shtetls, her fellow travelers similarly seeking evidence that places like Volchin and Visoke actually existed outside the realm of storytelling. Much of Simon's subsequent narrative centers on her search through archives, interviews, and scholarly literature to discover what might have happened to those long-lost family members who disappeared during the Holocaust. Some, she learns, may have ended their days in places such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, but many Jews, especially in the Ukraine and Belarus, were shot and buried in anonymous mass graves, and postwar Soviet authorities were not eager to determine the victims' identities. Simon's tale begins hesitantly but gathers force as her sense of indignation grows with every obstacle present-day authorities put in her way. "I'm beginning to understand why some people still believe that the Holocaust never happened," she confesses in exasperation. "If history books, tourist guides, and government-sponsored investigative reports show scant or no reference to an entire race of people, then it's safe to deny their presence." Marred only by too-frequent passages on the self-indulgent order of, "What began as a search for missing facts, for missing relatives, ultimately became a search for myself," her narrative is in the main lucid and thoughtful. Decidedly minor work in the larger literature of the Holocaust, but a useful complement to such recent works as John Garrard's The Bones of Berdichev (1996) and Eva Hoffman's Shtetl (1997).