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

In After the Girls Club: How Teenaged Holocaust Survivors Built New Lives in America, Carole Bell Ford highlights the experiences of eight female Holocaust survivors whose lives intersected at the Girls Club in Brooklyn, New York, in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Through them she attempts to tell a larger story of both the wartime and postwar experiences of Holocaust survivors. As she writes, the book’s “purpose is to tell the life histories of young women who survived, as all survivors did, against almost insuperable odds: women whose life choices were subsequently informed, if not defined, by the common macabre backdrop of the Holocaust.” Ford continues, “this book presents more than a collective, personal history. Because the women exemplify the broad range of experiences that Jews suffered, during and after the Holocaust, their stories—elaborated with relevant information about places, people, events, and issues—are also stories of tens of thousands of child survivors” (2). This is an ambitious projection based on a small sample of only eight, especially one that is exclusively comprised of women. Moreover, the author acknowledges at the outset that several of the former Girls Club residents declined to speak with her.

The strength of Ford’s work is the interweaving of the individual women’s rich voices and the exploration of how their lives touched one another’s, beginning, in some cases, even before their arrival in Brooklyn and continuing for years after. This is a gem of an idea, an intriguing springboard from which to probe further, which the author does, albeit unevenly.

Ford draws from several disciplines as she traces the women’s stories, casting a wide net, which yields varying results. At the start of her study, the author relies on history, while the later chapters fuse psychology and contemporary research on gerontology. Though the book is subtitled “How Teenaged Survivors Built New Lives in America,” nearly half of the volume is devoted to prewar and wartime years. While the overarching path is a chronological one, and some of the chapters lead quite seamlessly into the next, others do not unfold smoothly. In one chapter, for example, Ford gives special attention to two of the eight women and how their lives took different paths, but the rationale for this focus is unclear.

To her credit, Ford works toward presenting an analysis that does not idealize survivors’ early years in the United States. She points out that most of the young women had difficulties with their American relatives and offers an insightful, though brief, discussion of this dynamic. Nor does she shy away from discussion of the story of Sonia, one of the eight Girls Club women, who most likely killed herself in 1969. Unfortunately, in analyzing the woman’s suicide, she uses language that should be avoided at all costs, noting that “painful as Sonia’s Holocaust experiences were, objectively, they were not worse than many other suffered and better than some” (97).

In the final chapter of After the Girls Club, “Child Survivors in Old Age: The Aging Women,” the author evaluates how the women perceive their lives now that they are in their eighties and older. Using Vaillant’s longitudinal study of aging, Ford suggests that survivors, compared to the greater population, are aging well. At times this assessment resonates with the women’s own reflections. At other times, however, the interviewees’ comments seem somewhat forced into a mold not of their own making in what feels like an attempt to put a rosy spin on survivors and the aging process. Ford writes, “Holocaust survivors, such as the women of the Girls Club, confirm Vaillant’s conclusion: Adverse experiences do not necessarily lead to permanent damage to the personality.” She does go on to qualify somewhat by noting “the women of the Girls Club whose stories are told here are aging well” (146). However, with a limited sample of, by the...