remember Bronna Gora – Andrea Simon keeps Jewish history alive through storytelling

remember Bronna Gora – Andrea Simon keeps Jewish history alive through storytelling

By Tasha Ackerman

Author Andrea Simon began writing her novel, Esfir Is Alive with three main intentions: to include characters that represented her relatives from Volchin, to help readers understand the rich Jewish life in Poland and Belarus before the Holocaust, and to share the history of Bronna Góra.

Esfir Is Alive shares a coming-of-age story of a Jewish girl whose adolescence coincides with the beginning years of the Holocaust. At just seven years old when the novel begins, Esfir’s life unfolds between her home village of Kobrin and Brest, where she stays in her aunt’s boarding house for young women. As Esfir grows up, the world around her continues to fall apart, as she loses family members and liberties. She grows up understanding the prejudices against Jewish people as her experiences become more dangerous. Through a child’s eyes, the reader witnesses the growing hatred toward Jews, starting with small injustices like being banned from singing Christian songs at school. This hatred escalates to organised violence, including pogroms, forced relocations to ghettos, and, ultimately, the horror of transportation to the massacre site of Bronna Góra. Over 50,000 Jews were transported from surrounding ghettos to a forested region between Brest and Minsk and brought to this rail stop surrounded by barbed wire where they were shot and killed in pits. 

Andrea’s personal connection to the events brings a compassionate and curious approach to history covered in Esfir Is Alive. Andrea’s mother, Norma, often visited Volchin, a small village in modern-day Belarus near Brest where her grandmother Masha’s family was from. Masha emigrated to the United States with Andrea’s mother and other siblings in the 1920s, before the Holocaust, but many family members stayed behind in Volchin and surrounding areas. After the war, Andrea’s family in America never learned what happened to those relatives.

Andrea grew up in New York, hearing Yiddish spoken amongst elder family members at home and with the older generations on summer vacations to the Catskills, a resort area in Southeastern New York that was especially popular with Jewish vacationers. She grew up hearing her grandmother Masha’s stories, ranging from her extraordinary life in America and abroad as well as the challenging years in Volchin. Andrea loved hearing her stories, even the hard ones. For example, Masha had explained that since she was so beautiful, she needed to make herself appear unattractive to Russian soldiers that would come to the village and were known to rape women. Masha told a story that she once covered herself with flour to make her appear older and escaped the soldiers by jumping out of a window. Even though they left before the Holocaust, these traumatic experiences of the pogroms remain a part of her family story. Andrea was always fascinated by her grandmother’s stories and intentionally interviewed her several times. However, by the time Andrea had become serious about writing her family’s story, Masha had Alzheimer’s disease, leaving Andrea with questions she was unable to answer at home. When Andrea heard that a friend was leading a Jewish heritage group to Eastern Europe, including Brest, she knew it was her opportunity to uncover the rest of the story. 

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Read about the adventures of a Jewish teenager in 1955 through Simon’s novel-in-stories: Floating in the Neversink

Andrea attributes her career as a writer to her grandmother’s storytelling. Inspired by Masha’s resilience and the gaps in her family history, Andrea sought to uncover more about her ancestors. Her journey took her to Belarus, where she stood at a memorial in Brest and unexpectedly met a man from her grandmother’s village. This encounter, which Andrea calls bashert (Yiddish for “destiny”), set her on a path of genealogical discovery and historical research, which she documented in her memoir, Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest. He later introduced her to another Volchiner, Hanna Kremer, who also happened to live in New York and turned out to have been best friends with Andrea’s Volchin cousin, another bashert. Interviewing Ms. Kremer was just part of the extensive research that Andrea put into her project to properly understand what life was like for Jews in Belarus and Poland, and these details are crafted into both her fiction and nonfiction books. 

The inspiration for Esfir Is Alive stemmed from Andrea’s research for her first book into Bronna Góra and a harrowing testimony from The Black Book, a historical collection of accounts documenting Nazi atrocities against Jewish people in the Soviet Union. The Black Book featured eyewitness testimonies, many of which were suppressed by Soviet authorities for decades. One testimony that haunted Andrea was from a 12-and-a-half-year-old girl named Esfir Manevich who had survived the mass execution at Bronna Góra, crawling out of a pit of bodies after pretending to be dead. Her story stayed with Andrea, compelling her to write a novel imagining Esfir’s life before, during, and after the Holocaust. She dedicates the book “To the real Esfir Manevich, wherever she may be.” Andrea has tried relentlessly to locate the real Esfir or her relatives, but to this day is uncertain of her fate post-war. 

Andrea’s work to capture the horrors of Bronna Góra involved reconstructing the events based on testimonies from railroad workers who had detailed records of the train transports, including the origins of the victims. Her research shed light on the logistical operations of the “Holocaust by Bullets,” the mass shooting campaign to exterminate the Jews in Eastern Europe, which differs from the experience of concentration camps that is typically the focus of Holocaust education. Andrea’s research hopes to fill a gap in Holocaust history. Her investigation also touched on the fate of her own family, the Midler family, whom she writes as characters in Esfir Is Alive. They were believed to have fled their village, but their ultimate fate remains unknown, both in the book and in real life.

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Andrea’s journey discovering her family’s history is interwoven with historical research in her memoir Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest. 

Andrea believes that an important way to combat prejudice is through knowledge and compassion. Esfir Is Alive is written about a young person for both young people and adults. Simon crafts Esfir’s word through that of a child, she relates to the people around her through her relationship with them, not simply as Jews, Poles, or Belarusians. Esfir Is Alive broadens the scope, showing how tragedy affects everyone, and it’s never so simple to write history as if there were good guys and bad guys. For example, Esfir befriends a Catholic girl, Ania, who remains a devoted friend before, during, and after the war, even when we learn that her brother had been among a group of boys throwing rocks and shouting Jewish slurs at Esfir and her Jewish friend, Ida, while they had been studying Hebrew in the park. We see the complexity of individuals even within families. Andrea explained: “Through the history, I’m hoping that people come away with an appreciation of not just what people did, but how they breathed, how they spoke, how they went to school… how they loved each other.” 

Beyond the process of writing these stories, the response has also been impactful. As Andrea continues to share her story, she hopes that her books will reach more people. Several people have contacted her after reading Bashert who were inspired to take heritage trips to understand their own family histories or who were able to learn about what happened within their families through the detailed history of Bronna Góra in her books. And still, Andrea is looking for answers: “What happened to the real Esfir?” and “What happened to her family in Volchin?”

Andrea’s goal is to get Esfir Is Alive into the school system; she wants young people to read about this history. In this particular moment, when antisemitism has tripled in the year following Hamas’s October 7th attack on Israel, with over 10,000 antisemitic incidents reported from October 2023-September 2024 in the United States, stories that teach about the history of pogroms and the Holocaust in a way that humanises Jewish people are crucial. While Andrea has spoken with many adult groups about her books, across the Jewish community and notable associations such as the 92nd Street Y in New York City, one of the most profound experiences she has had was speaking about Esfir Is Alive with a group of middle school students. The teacher wanted Andrea to read the massacre scene at Bronna Góra, which led to a classroom discussion where students identified parallels between the polarisation they noticed in 2016 America and Esfir’s experiences in Brest and surrounding areas in the 1940s. 

Andrea writes with the spirit of a quote from Polish writer I.L. Peretz from his book, My Memoirs: “I’ll make you listen to me. You will have to hear me,” which she includes in the dedication of Esfir Is Alive. Through her books, Andrea shares Jewish stories that help people know what happened and encourage them to learn. It is through these personal stories, both fiction and nonfiction, that we can understand history on a human level: helping us truly see and understand one another.  

Andrea’s books Esfir Is Alive and Bashert: A Granddaughter’s Holocaust Quest both explore Jewish life, the Holocaust, and the area that is now Belarus. Her other books, published work, and photography encapture a sense of truth through an artistic style that is relatable and simply put, profoundly human. Learn more about her books and projects at her website: https://www.andreasimon.net/ 

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