After the Girls Club : How Teenaged Holocaust Survivors Built New Lives in America

"Carole Ford's sensitive profile of young Holocaust survivors whose lives intertwine at the Girls Club in Brooklyn sheds light on the challenges of forging a new life alone. The Club gave them opportunities for friendship and education. and enabled them to rebuild their lives. Theirs are compelling narratives, told with compassion and grace. As we get to know them, we also find that we like them and celebrate their joys as they become wives and mothers, homemakers, students, professionals, community volunteers, and very doting grandmothers. Despite their horrific experiences in Nazi-occupied Poland, most of them refused to he victimized further and instead overcame the odds and led fulfilling and happy lives.-Myrna Goldenberg, Ph.D., coeditor of Testimony, Tensions, and Tikkun: Teaching, the Holocaust in Colleges and Universities

"Carole Bell. Ford gets at and renders with clarity and sensitivity the life histories of a fascinating group of young female Holocaust survivors. These histories are complex. filled with irony. ambiguity. and compassionùin short, humanity. Without extraneous academic apparatus, and without falling into the trap of seeing horrific experience as somehow making its victims 'better for it: Ford and her interlocutors tell us something very important, and yes. even hopeful about human resilience."-Gerald Sorin. Distinguished Professor of Jewish and American Studies, State University of New York at New Paltz

After World War II, the Girls Club of Brooklyn, New York, became both home and safe haven to orphaned female teenagers who were Holocaust survivors. They are a small group, but taken together these women's stories represent the broad range of experiences that most Jews suffered during and after the Holocaust. Some endured the ghettos and comps. Some survived in hiding, with partisans, or in the remote far-eastern reaches of the Soviet Union. Consequently, this collective, personal history-enriched with relevant information about places, people, events, and issues-tells not only their story, but also the story of tens of thousands of child survivors.

The work of scholars from various disciplines and genres provides background information and historical detail as this book traces the women's experiences from their childhood days in prewar Europe to the present. Contrary to what early literature on child survivors predicted, they built successful lives in America.