Holocaust Memoir Ghostwriter
By Karen S. Cole – who spent three days in a concentration camp
Simon Says by Simon Lewenberg
A GREAT BOOK for which I did the original ghostwriting, editing, formatting; I also arranged the video production, national book and film tour through Ghost Writer, Inc.’s partners. Hire a Holocaust memoir ghostwriter at GWI. Karen S. Cole ghostwrote the original work for Mr. Lewenberg’s manuscript, also locating the commercial publishing company and the video/film production company.
Owner and Founder of GWI, Karen S. Cole would love to work on your Holocaust or Shoah-era book! More knowledge needs to be circulated about those horrible events and their aftermath. As a Holocaust book editor, ghostwriter and publishing assistant, I have had many such projects come my way. One by a Nazi who only fought with the Russians (and wasn’t in the Shoah at all), another by a Jewish and Catholic lady who was six years old when she was put into the camp system. She lived to tell her tale “by avoiding all the worst places.” I would be deeply honored to work on another such Holocaust | Shoah story. If you’re interested in hiring me or someone else at Ghost Writer, Inc. for your Holocaust memoir, please read the below:
EXCERPT OF THE ORIGINAL VERSION OF “SIMON SAYS”
From the Holocaust memoir ghostwriter of a ten-camp survivor, a Polish and Jewish gentleman with a background in slavery.
Introduction: Simon Lewenberg
By the book’s author, survivor of ten different internment camps:
It was not easy for me to write this book, because it brought back those unpleasant, painful memories I have been trying to erase from my thoughts all these years. But it is hard for me to do that, because it is embedded in my soul forever. A lifetime of deep sorrow and pain cannot be easily erased.
I don’t know the reason for my survival, but in a way I’m glad that I survived, in order to tell my true story and the many stories of these people, my family and the other ones who were silenced and cannot speak. Some of them died right in front of me. And to this day, I am haunted by recurring dreams of flight.
I awake screaming, my face wet with tears. Once again, I fly like a bird – only one without wings – trying to escape. As I look down, I clearly see the entire concentration camp, surrounded by a wire fence, and the SS guards are shooting at me. I’m trying to avoid the bullets that are whizzing by me. I fly quite a distance and fast, straining to land softly on my feet.
Again, as many times before, I am disappointed. There are none whom I hoped would be there – my family. Those flying dreams are no longer occurring. They are replaced by walking. I can’t find the people I am aiming to get to. I ask folks in the street to help me, but nobody is able to help. I am disappointed again, but this time the journey and hopeful feeling lasts me longer.
The slave labor camp diet was mostly bread and soup. In my subconscious mind now, I must have plenty of the same in my house. I always have an anxious feeling that I might run out of bread and soup. I find all kinds of excuses to go to the grocery store and buy vegetables, and I cannot avoid the bakery section, where I linger for awhile, looking at the bountiful baked goods.
Of course, bread finds its way into my basket. Then I cannot wait to get home, chop up the veggies and start cooking. I truly enjoy that. I no longer have to rely on the meager handouts of the Nazis. It is strange even to me to this day that I don’t put meat into my soup. The reason I guess is that in the slave labor camps, it was very seldom included in our daily diet – we only got a little meat from friendly Germans.
My fridge and freezer are always full of bread and soup. I do give containers of soup to my friends and neighbors, but I cannot wait to replenish it, though I will not stop giving it out. This practice really gives me pleasure – to do that, sharing with these kind and gentle folks. No one who has not experienced hunger can imagine the hurt and pain that hunger brings.
It can bend a thoughtful, normal human being into animalistic behavior. The Nazis starved us for days, weeks, months and years, and whenever we misbehaved as we stood in line for our daily bowl of soup, they beat us severely. They treated us inhumanely, but demanded from us humane behavior at every turn.
Every time when I eat my soup now, I cannot help but think of the occasion when I worked in the ghetto kitchen and got an extra bowl of soup for my work. I gave my father some of it, but could not wait for him to give it back. All the time when I start eating now, I feel guilty and imagine giving my father all the soup I have – to erase that uneasy, guilty feeling that is always with me.
So how can I forget the insane things that were done to me, not accidentally, but willingly and without regret? I cannot, and can only attempt to go on living, helping my family in America, trying to make our lives better than mine was.
Further thoughts from Simon Lewenberg:
You know, too many others don’t believe our WWII Holocaust stories, especially regarding the bad events happening to the Jewish people. But they did occur, in spite of the lies and the deceits. These non-believers are not only the warlike Moslem neighbors of Israel, but also many other kinds of anti-Semites, such as the Neo-Nazis. These people claim that nobody Jewish died under Hitler and that what I’m telling you is a pack of outright lies. But it is all the truth!
According to the latest findings by accredited scholars and researchers, eleven to seventeen million people died in the Holocaust, also called the Shoah or Ha-Shoah in Hebrew. Over six million of them were Jews, more than two-thirds of Europe’s Jewish population. In Poland, 3.5 million Jews were reduced down to barely 45,000 people. Meanwhile, 220,000 to 1.5 million victims of the Holocaust/Shoah were Romani/Roma/Sinti or Gypsies, who died in the Porajmos or Romani Holocaust, and 1.5 million among the counted dead were children – 1.2 million of them having been Jewish.
And there were also Hitler’s scores of forgotten victims, from whom everyone turned away. This includes an untold number of Negroes, Black German citizens who actually voted for the ungrateful dictator. These people were then sterilized, rendered powerless – and heartlessly slain in unknown numbers. They weren’t even granted the privilege of photography in most cases, and they have not received any war reparations, as their German citizenships were all unfairly revoked.
While over six million Polish citizens died, more than three million of them were Jews. The other half mainly consisted of Polish Gentiles, most of whom were Catholics. You can thus see by the above statistics that we Jews were not the only ones. Poland actually lost one-fifth of her entire population via the Holocaust/Shoah, as our country was the main focus for the Nazis’ Endlösung der Judenfrage, or “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.”
German private companies greedily bid for contracts to build crematoria in concentration camps of the General Government and other regions of Poland, with the idea being total extermination of Polish Jews – and though the Nazis had Polish sympathizers, decimation of the entire population of Poland.
These were ordinary Polish citizens, not just dissidents or important political figures. Also, the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau complex was located in Oświęcim, Poland, where at least 1.3 million people died in the gas chambers. Over 1.1 million of them were Jews, the rest consisting mainly of Poles, Gypsies, Soviet POWs and other countries’ war prisoners.
But some scholars state that two to four million people were cruelly slaughtered in Auschwitz, while Russia claims that half of the six million Jews dying in the Holocaust/Shoah were at one time Soviet citizens. Such figures vary from concern to concern, but most of these statistics are reliable, with better research on them coming as more major evidence accumulates over time.
Poles were also executed for trying to aid, house or rescue Jews, as the Nazis’ laws regarding this were particularly harsh in our country. Some 5,500 Polish Gentiles did whatever they could to save Jewish lives, and were duly awarded “Righteous among the Nations” status. This was done by Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Martyrs’ and Heroes’ Remembrance Authority, which keeps a central database of Shoah victims’ names – where I was able to eventually derive information on the final fates of my own family.
The “righteous” Poles, some of them members of the Polish Council for Aid to Jews, were true heroes, risking their lives to help us in the face of attempted genocide of our entire country. Under Hitler’s “Master Plan,” Poles were regarded as untermenschen, German for subhuman, and Hitler intended our land to provide Germany with lebensraum, “living room” or expansion. It is said that Poland was the only country during the Nazi occupation where the penalty for helping anybody Jewish was always summarily death.
Meanwhile, in addition to attempting Jewish extermination, the Nazis also set out to slaughter homosexuals, communists, German political dissidents, Russians, the Slavs, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Protestant pastors and Catholic priests (among other Catholics), black and brown people, the mentally and physically disabled, and countless others of many nations. But our country of Poland was definitely one of the hardest hit, having the highest ratio-to-population of losses for any country in Western or Eastern Europe during WWII.
Right before 1939’s Polish invasion, Hitler screamed: “The destruction of Poland is our primary task!” He commanded, “Kill without pity or mercy all men, women, and children of Polish descent or language! Only in this way can we obtain the living space we need!” Our country was the planet’s worst Holocaust/Shoah survivor, having been utterly decimated and nearly destroyed.
Historian Richard C. Lukas, author of “The Forgotten Holocaust,” stated, “So many Poles were sent to concentration camps that virtually every Polish family had someone close to them who had been tortured or murdered there.” This included two Prime Ministers of Poland, a Polish Premier and Polish President Lech Wałęsa. In fact, these people were mainly Catholics, not Jews.
The above facts clearly show you that the Jews, though we’ve been touted as Hitler’s main target for mass extermination, weren’t the only victims of the Holocaust/Shoah. Some have said that far more Catholics or Christians than Jews were victimized – and it’s at least true that if six million Jews were killed out of seventeen million victims, Jews were barely one-third of the total people who died in it! How can you say that we Jews were the only ones, or that somehow these victims “deserved” their ignoble fates, given this?
Therefore, those who deny the Holocaust/Shoah should now be aware that when anti-Semitism is used as an excuse to kill people, Jews absolutely won’t be the only ones to suffer. Millions of German citizens, non-Jews themselves, died due to the actions taken by Hitler and the Nazis, getting shipped away to Russian slave labor camps after the war; and an unknown number of Muslims died in the Holocaust/Shoah – it is not true that they did not suffer with us!
Mohammed Salim Abdullah of the Islamic Archives Foundation of Germany has stated that Holocaust/Shoah denial is “an offense against Muslims.” Abdullah said that in the “gypsy camp,” a segregated section in Auschwitz, 200,000 Roma Muslims from South-East Europe were brutally slaughtered, along with many Arabs who originally traveled from North Africa to Germany. Clearly, the Nazis were out to annihilate everyone whatsoever who didn’t meet their absurd, ridiculous Nazi/Christian “ideals” of perfect all-white Aryanism.
So you should NOT believe that we Jews suffered alone in the Holocaust/Shoah, which actually killed many different types of people. And in addition to the deaths in the camps, there were mass graves in the countries surrounding them, multiple killings on the streets, mass group shootings such as the one at Babyn Yar in the Ukraine (100,000 Jewish and Christian civilians were slaughtered), and thousands of other war-related crimes and inconceivable atrocities.
It’s the Nazis, the war criminals, who committed those crimes! They’re the ones who carry the fault of what happened to the Jewish people. What I encountered in that first year at Lübbenau Slave Labor Camp, with the German people and our engineer Franz Hipping, was unusually easy. I was fortunate, receiving many acts of kindness from them, as I gladly talk about later in this book.
Like I said, there were multiple Gentile families in Poland who risked their lives to save their Jewish neighbors. And I met a number of kindly Germans as well. So my story has a conflicting view. For example, there were Germans who disagreed with the Nazi regime, but kept quiet for fear of concentration camps.
I can forgive those people. They were often generous to me. But I can never forget the brutal atrocities committed by the Nazis! At the end, the fault lies at the doorstep of the German nation. They invaded our country in 1939 without mercy, and slowly but surely destroyed my family and friends.
Nobody believed me at first when I told them what went on in the camps. They were shocked. They weren’t well-informed, especially the German farmers. They didn’t know. Many of them were good-natured, as demonstrated by the fair treatment they gave me. But in most Nazi camps, there was no such kindness. I was lucky, and that must be why I survived, being young and willing to “bend” sometimes, when people were nice – which was pretty seldom.
I can’t understand – how can you forget the Holocaust/Shoah’s inhumanity? I was sentenced for life by the horrible images, senseless acts of violence and murder, all of it perpetrated by the Nazis. The painful trials I was forced to endure in the camps left me with many, many psychological and physical scars that I must carry with me the rest of my life. But I also recollect the individual person, the good-hearted Germans, and those other bravely benevolent souls.
There was the one who said that hunger hurts, and the one who – upon hearing of the conditions and brutality in the camps – turned away and cried. There was the one who arranged for me and my friend to have Sunday dinner with his family. And there was even the one whom for his loving kindness toward us was sent to a slave labor camp as his unjust punishment…yes, and so on.
Well, across the wide world, atrocities and cruelties continue, many sadly inspired by the doings of Adolf Hitler. This puzzles me, and it also disturbs me very much: how can soldiers chop off children’s limbs and murder anyone randomly, indiscriminately? When will the human race come to its senses? It doesn’t seem like it ever will; we can only hope for it someday.
There is no absolute, all-encompassing explanation for this wildly differing variety of human behavior. I have met people with hearts of gold, and people with frozen souls of cold lead. The thrust is that it is forever in the hands of the chooser, to figure out the difference between good and evil.
If there was a Godly power creating us, it would’ve been wiser not to have added “free will” to the human brain, as complicated as it already is.
Simon Says – Full Documentary on Imdb
