Harvey Brownstone Interviews Andrea Simon, Author, “Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest”

Harvey Brownstone conducts an in-depth Interview with Andrea Simon, Author, “Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest”

About Harvey's guest:

Today’s guest, Andrea Simon, is a multi-award winning writer from York City, whose captivating and historically important book entitled “Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest” moved me so much that I just had to invite her on our show. In this engrossing book, she tells of her search for her roots, which began in Voŭčyn, a town in Belarus, where her beloved grandmother came from, before creating a new life in America. 

Through interviews, personal testimonies, historical accounts, archival documents and family anecdotes, the book reveals the unprecedented barbarism of the Nazis, and the brutal reality of the massacres of the Jews who were living in Soviet territory occupied by the Germans after June of 1941, and before the Nazis came up with the “final solution” in 1942. 

Although most people think of concentration camps and gas chambers when they think of the Holocaust, the fact is that between 40 and 50 percent of the Jews killed during the Holocaust, were killed by methods other than by being gassed. We’re talking about savagely horrific mass murders, exterminating the Jewish populations of dozens of cities, towns and villages, by being shot in the head and then piled in mass graves in the forest. In particular, our guest uncovered the facts surrounding the massacre on September 22, 1942, of 500 Jews from the town of Voŭčyn, where her family came from, AND the even more shocking and barbaric massacre of 50,000 Jews including 9,000 children, in Bronna Gora, located in a forest between Brest and Minsk.  

The book also deals with the refusal of the Soviets, after the war, to recognize and commemorate the Jewish genocide that took place on their territory.  In 2021 the book was ranked at number one on the Book Authority’s list of the “Best Holocaust Biography Books of All Time,” and in 2023, the book received Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Award in the category of Legacy Nonfiction. 

Our guest has also written several other books, including “Esfir Is Alive” and “Floating in the Neversink”, both of which received numerous prestigious awards.  Our guest has published numerous stories and essays, and she’s received many prestigious literary honors, including the Ernest Hemingway First Novel Contest, two Dortort Creative Writing Awards, the Stark Short Fiction Prize, the Short Story Society Award, and the Authors in the Park Short Story Writing Contest.  

Our guest holds a Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Writing from the City College of New York where she has taught creative writing courses.  She’s also taught courses on “How to Write About Your Family — and Still Talk to Them Afterwards”, and she’s even taught a course on how to write about your mother without guilt. That course led to an anthology published last year called “Here’s the Story … Nine Women Write Their Lives”.

For more interviews and podcasts go to:

https://www.harveybrownstoneinterviews.com/

To learn more about Andrea Simon, go to:

https://www.andreasimon.net/

https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100005598465031

https://www.instagram.com/andrea.p.simon/

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