Transcending Darkness

“Please, Mama, I don’t want to live like this,” pleaded thirteen-year-old Estelle Glaser’s older sister as they watched the bodies of friends dangle from the gibbet in the centre of the appelplatz of the Madjanek concentration camp. “I cannot take the indignities and brutalities. Let’s step forward and make them kill us now.” But Estelle’s mother fiercely responded to her two daughters: No! Life is sacred. It is noble to fight to stay alive. Their mother’s indomitable will was a major factor in the trio’s survival in the face of brutal odds. But Estelle recognised other heroes in the ghetto and camps as well, righteous individuals who stood out like beacons and kept their spirits alive. Their father was one, as were hungry teachers in dim, cold rooms who risked their lives to secretly teach imprisoned children. Estelle herself learned to draw on a joyful past, and to bring her own light into the void. Estelle’s memoir, published sixty-four years after her liberation from the Nazis, is a narrative of fear and hope and resiliency. While it is a harrowing tale of destruction and loss, it is also a story of the goodness that still exists in a dark world, of survival and renewal.

Estelle Glaser Laughlin, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Uprising, and concentration camps, immigrated to America at eighteen. With only three years of public school education, she earned a master’s degree in education. After retirement from a long career in teaching in Maryland, she has continued to write and lecture widely about her experience and survival.