Clara Kramer

Clara Kramer, née Schwarz, was a teenager in Zolkiew, Poland, where her Polish Jewish family owned a factory, when the Soviets occupied Galicia, her part of the country, in 1939. They killed or deported to forced labor some of her friends and family members. The Nazis invaded in World War II in 1942 and forced the Jewish residents into a ghetto. Clara's family and their friends decided to go into hiding.With the help of Valentin Beck, an ethnic German, Clara, her family and others (up to 18 people) are hidden in an underground bunker under a house in the town of Zhovkva. Her mother urged her to keep a diary so that if they did not survive the war, there would be a record of what had happened to them. All but one of those in the bunker survived to be liberated by the Red Army. After the war, Clara spent four years in a displaced persons camp, where she met her future husband, Sol Kramer. They married and moved to Israel, where their two sons were born. In 1957, the family emigrated to the USA, settling in Brooklyn, New York and then Elizabeth, New Jersey. She became a founder of the Holocaust Resource Center at Kean University. Her memoir based on the diary, written with Stephen Glantz, Clara's War: One Girl's Story of Survival, was published in 2009.