“Sixty-four years have passed since my liberation from the concentration camp. I no longer can remember where I last put my glasses, yet I remember–clear as light–scenes that turned my sunny childhood into an inferno and killed nearly everyone I loved. I ask myself, How did my mother, my sister, and I survive? How did we survive whole, with love, compassion and joy for life? Without this human core, survival would have little meaning”.
–Estelle Laughlin, Transcending the Darkness: A Girl’s Journey out of the Holocaust
The Wagner College Holocaust Center grieves the passing of Estelle Wakszlak, Laughlin (July 9th, 1929 - Tuesday, August 27th, 2024), a beacon of hope, courage and memory. Beloved Aunt of Fern Aaron Zagor, Chair of our Wagner College Holocaust Center Advisory Board, Estelle survived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and the death and labor camp Majdanek, alongside her sister, Frieda (Fredka) Wakszlak Aaron, and her mother, Michla. Her father, Samek, was murdered hours after arrival at Majdanek. Until the very end of her days, Estelle continued to share her painful memories, determined to educate and enlighten the world about the Holocaust, as a sought-after speaker and an author.
A mesmerizing storyteller, Estelle’s melodic, lilting voice, which still carried a trace of an accent, described her life as an adolescent inside the ghetto and camps. Decades later she brought her bewilderment and sorrow to life in her retelling of the terror and cruelty inside the Nazi machinery of destruction. Yet, equally, Estelle spoke of the courage and warmth of her parents, who protected their daughters as best they could, arranging for clandestine education in the ghetto, reminding them that beyond the walls was a world of beauty and dignity. Estelle spoke of the all-consuming love of her mother and sisterwhile imprisoned in Majdanek, a love that kept all three of them, impossibly, incredibly, alive against all odds. And while she fearlessly recounted the barbarism of many around her, she emphasized the goodness, the small acts of kindness that contributed to her survival.
As the title of her book made clear, Estelle was a person who had transcended darkness, to become a beloved wife, mother, grandmother, great grandmother, writer and educator. She authored her memoirs, Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey out of the Holocaust (Texas Tech University Press, 2012) and wrote an historical novel Hanna I Forgot to Tell You (Texas Tech University, 2020), books that convey with deep intelligence and artistry her harrowing experiences. Her sister, Frieda, went on to receive a Ph.D. in comparative literature and authored one of the most moving and important books on the poetry of the Holocaust, Bearing the Unbearable: Yiddish and Polish Poetry in the Ghettos and Concentration Camps (SUNY Press,1990), translating the texts into the English she had mastered.
Despite all that she lived through, Estelle believed firmly in “Tikkun Olum, the healing of the world” and that “the source of joy is inexhaustible”. Perhaps we can best pay tribute to her by saying about her the beautiful words she whispered at her own mother’s graveside:
You will live in every cloud configuration you taught me to see, in every spring flower and sparrow’s song. You will live in each grass blade and newborn dawn, in the love and generosity you have in your progeny sown.
Estelle and Fredka Wakszlak, Warsaw, Poland