Estelle Laughlin was born in Warsaw, Poland, on July 9, 1929 to Michla and Samek Wakszlak. Estelle also had an older sister, Freda, who was born in January 1928. Michla tended to the home and children while Samek ran a jewelry shop. Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. The siege on Warsaw began a week after German forces invaded Poland. On September 29, shortly after Poland’s surrender, German forces entered Warsaw. In October 1940 German forces decreed the establishment of a ghetto. The Wakszlak family and more than 400,000 Jews from the city and surrounding areas were forced to live in a 1.3 square mile area and to wear a white armband with a blue Star of David. From July to September 1942, 300,000 ghetto residents were deported to Treblinka II, an extermination camp. During this time Estelle and her family hid in a secret room to escape the deportations. In April 1943 German forces made one last push to liquidate the remaining 55,000-60,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to work or death camps. Samek, who helped to organize the resistance movement, built a bunker in which he and his family could hide during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. As SS and police units began roundups they were met with artillery fire from resistance fighters. In retaliation, the SS began razing the ghetto, block by block. The bunker where Estelle and her family were hiding, which was in the basement of a house, was exposed by a bomb. Everyone was dragged out onto the street. The Wakszlak family was marched to the umschlagplatz (concentration point), forced to board freight train cars, and transported to Majdanek. Upon arrival at Majdanek the women and men were separated. Estelle, Michla, and Freda were chosen for forced labor but Samek was sent to the gas chamber. The women moved turf from one place outside the camp to another. At one point Freda was badly beaten by a German guard and could not work. She hid in the barracks, but was discovered. Her name was put on what she thought was a gas chamber list. Estelle and Michla switched places with two women who were on the same list, thus believing that the remaining Wakszlak family members could die together. Michla, Estelle, and Freda were, instead, sent to the Skarzysko concentration camp to work in a munitions factory. Later, they were sent to the Czestochowa concentration camp to work in a different munitions factory. Soviet forces liberated Czestochowa in January of 1945. To escape pogroms in Poland the three women moved to Bavaria in August 1945 and lived there until 1947, when they moved to the United States to join Michla’s two sisters and brother in New York City.
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BILL BENSON:
Good afternoon and welcome to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. My name is Bill Benson and I am the host of the Museum’s public program, First Person. Thank you for joining us. We are in our 11th year of the First Person program. Our first person today is Mrs. Estelle Laughlin and we shall meet Mrs. Laughlin shortly.
This 2010 season of First Person is made possible by the generosity of the Louis and Dora Smith Foundation, to whom we are grateful for again sponsoring First Person. I am pleased to let you know that Mr. Louis Smith is with us today. [Applause]
First Person is a series of weekly conversations with survivors of the Holocaust share with us their first-hand accounts of their experience during the Holocaust. Each guest serves as a volunteer here at the Museum. We will have a First Person program each Wednesday through the rest of August. The Museum’s website at www.ushmm.org provides information about each of our upcoming First Person guests.
Excerpts from First Person programs are made available as podcasts on the Museum’s website. They are also available through iTunes. Estelle’s podcast from last year is currently available and will be updated with today’s program in the very near future.
Estelle Laughlin will share with us her first person account of her experience during the Holocaust and as a survivor for about 45 minutes. If time allows we will follow that with an opportunity for you to ask Estelle a few questions.
We ask that you stay in your seats throughout our one hour program, that way we minimize any disruptions for Estelle as she speaks. I’d like to let those of you who may have passes to the Permanent Exhibition today know that they are good for the time printed on your ticket and any time after that, so you can comfortably stay with us until we finish right around 2 o’clock.
The Holocaust was the state-sponsored, systematic persecution and annihilation of European Jewry by Nazi Germany and its collaborators between 1933 and 1945. Jews were the primary victims–six million were murdered. Roma and Sinti or Gypsies, people with mental and physical disabilities, and Poles were also targeted for destruction or decimation for racial, ethnic, or national reasons. Millions more, including homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Soviet Prisoners of war, and political dissidents also suffered grievous oppression and death under Nazi Germany.
The life stories of Holocaust survivors transcend the decades. What you are about to hear from Estelle is one individual’s account of the Holocaust. We have prepared a brief slide presentation to help with her introduction.
Estelle Laughlin was born in Warsaw, Poland on July 9, 1929. She was the younger of two sisters. In addition to her parents, the family included many aunts, uncles, and cousins. The arrow on this map of Europe in 1933 points to Poland and the arrow on this map of Poland indicates the location of Warsaw.
The Nazis invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939 and Estelle’s formal education was stopped. Soon after the invasion Estelle and her family were forced to move into the Warsaw ghetto. Here we see an historical photograph of German troops parading through Warsaw after the surrender of Poland at the end of September 1939.
In 1943, the family went into hiding in a bunker in the ghetto. The Warsaw ghetto uprising began on April 19, 1943 and continued until the final liquidation of the ghetto on May 16, 1943. Jewish fighters faced overwhelmingly superior forces of the Germans, but were able to hold them off for a month. The Germans began burning the ghetto building by building in order to force the remaining Jews out of hiding.
Estelle and her family were hiding in the bunker during the uprising and were among those who were discovered and forced out of hiding. Here we see an historical photograph of German soldiers leading Jews captured during the Warsaw ghetto uprising to the assembly point for deportation in May 1943.
After they were discovered, Estelle and her family were deported to the Majdanek concentration camp where Estelle's father was killed. On this map of extermination camps in Poland, Majdanek is indicated with the arrow. Estelle, her mother and sister endured forced labor in two more concentration camps, Skarzysko and Czestochowa. They were eventually liberated by the Russians. Estelle, her mother and sister emigrated to the United States in 1947 on the ship Marine Flasher. We close with Estelle's immigration certificate, which was issued in July of 1947.
When Estelle, her sister, and her mother arrived in New York in 1947 they had $30 between them. Estelle and her sister went to work in the garment district. Estelle met her husband who is a survivor from Berlin, in New York. After marrying they moved to Cleveland where her husband was a labor organizer.
After the birth of her first son, Estelle began attending college in Cleveland and finished after they moved to Washington D.C. in 1961, where her husband joined the Kennedy Administration. They would have 3 sons. Estelle became a teacher in Montgomery County, Maryland, earned a Masters Degree, and became a Reading Specialist and retired in 1992.
Estelle’s 3 sons, one a professor of Geology, another a Psychologist and another with a senior corporate position have given her 7 grandchildren. One for each day of the week as Estelle says. She volunteers with the Museum’s Speakers Bureau. Estelle is also a member of the survivor’s writing group and is a contributor to the Museum’s publication Echoes of Memory. She has also written a book about her and her family’s experience entitled No Place for Children. She hopes to have it published in the very near future.
Following today’s program Estelle will be available to sign copies of Echoes of Memory Volume 5, which includes her contribution Tata’s Last Word. With that I’d like to ask you to join me in welcoming our first person, Mrs. Estelle Laughlin. [Applause]
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, thank you so much for joining us. I mentioned to Estelle before that we really could spend the rest of the afternoon with you, there is so much to hear so we need to get started right away. Estelle, you were just 10 in Warsaw, Poland when World War II began with Germany’s invasion of Poland in September, 1939. Before we turn to all that would happen once the Germans came and the war was on, let’s begin first though with you telling us a little bit about you, your family, your life before the war began.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
I was born in the center in the heart of the Jewish community in Warsaw. Our streets had tall buildings with wrought iron balconies and it was a buzz with people. Although antisemitism and hooliganism against Jewish people was not uncommon in Poland before the war, still Warsaw glows in my selective memory in gold and radiance of lilac trees against open blue skies. Air filled with fragrance, rich sounds of good neighbors, joyous play and faith, kindness, and faith, and love, magic train rides to the countryside, coziness of home were emblazoned in my memory and remained shelters during the time when the world was crumbling around me and served as reminders of good, and kind, and love.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, from what you have told me plus what I have read in your book, you were very, very attached to your father. Will you tell us about him?
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
My father was very special. I think all fathers are special to us. He was a, had a very strong obligation and responsibility towards the community. He was an example to me of goodness, and kindness, and dignity, and wisdom. He was my inspiration and he was, his memory saved my soul and kept my soul alive during the time when the world stood on its head and a cruel people ran the world and whom can you trust if you cannot trust adults around you?
BILL BENSON:
Your mother had fled violence and antisemitism in her native Russia. Tell us a bit too about her.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well, you know of the Jewish history is full of persecutions. 2,000 years of being treated as strangers in different countries. In my mind Poland was my country. The trees were my trees. The sky was my sky. This was my world. This was the center of my universe. But, I remember as a child being reminded hearing chants, “Jews to Palestine!” But, my mother was born in a small town in a shtetl in Russia and she was chased out by wild Cossacks. Amazingly my mother left without bitterness, with hurt, with loss, and pain, but I remember her saying to us when we were little children that the Russian people were a suffering people.
My mother had a wonderful voice, a soprano coloratura. She often sang lullabies to us and she would remember the beautiful meadows, the songs of the peasants, and so I think that it is inspiring to recognize that sometimes suffering can ennoble us.
BILL BENSON:
Germany invaded Poland on September 1st, 1939 launching World War II. Your city of Warsaw was attached immediately, on that very day. Tell us what you recall both about the German attack and then the siege of Warsaw that followed.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well, there was talk about war and Warsaw had the flags and signs saying “United, Ready, Not Afraid!” So there was, we heard about what was happening in Germany. We heard about the invasion of Sudetenland, but we didn’t believe. Somehow the war seemed so distant. There were air raids during the day but we got so used to it that we just didn’t pay attention. Then one very serene morning my father left to go to town. My father was a jeweler and he went to the center of the city to meet with some business people and when he was gone suddenly there was an explosion, a tremendous explosion and then silence, and then the screeching of the sirens. My mother turned on the radio and we heard that a bomb was dropped on the center of Warsaw and some buildings were demolished.
My father came home and I remember running to the door and saying, “Tata what happened? Was it a real bomb?” And he said, “Yes it was a real bomb.” And he described what he witnessed and how he rushed home to us to be with us.
BILL BENSON:
You wrote in your book, “In an instant I at the age of 10…”, and Fredka, your sister 11 and a half, “…stopped being carefree children. We began to carry the tragic burdens of life.” Will you say a bit more about that?
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well, I am aware that there are a lot of young people here. I am a grandmother and a retired teacher and children are very important and very dear to me. So, if I some of the story, some of the things that I’ll be sharing will be quiet shocking but I want you to be aware that I survived with love and compassion and joy for life and life should be led joyfully. I want to tell you that young people are very resilient, very wise. They know right from wrong and they make choices. As long as you will hold on, as long as you’ll make a distinction, and hold on to that which is right and good, you’ll no matter what will happen to you, you’ll be always alright. So don’t be afraid of suffering. Suffering is part of life, misery is a choice. And I forgot the question. [Laughter]
BILL BENSON:
I think you answered it, actually. Warsaw held out for a month following the German invasion of Poland. You again in your book, you wrote that after the German Army marched into Warsaw on October 1st 1939, “Immediately my life changed beyond imagination.” Tell us what those immediate changes were.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Yes. Immediately my once peaceful streets were patrolled by soldiers with guns, and whips, and boots, and helmets. And you know I am generalizing because when I think of American soldiers I think of angels who saved us. But, these soldiers were different soldiers. They were soldiers of destruction. They walked into our homes. They said the Jewish people were greedy but they walked into my home. They helped themselves to whatever they wanted to like common thieves.
Immediately they cut off the electric power, they rationed food, books were forbidden, schools were closed, newspapers were stopped, radios were confiscated the same day. We were so completely cut off from the rest of the world, not knowing what was happening to it. We had no telephones. We couldn’t reach anyone in an emergency. We had to wear an armband with a Jewish star as though my religion was a disgrace. I think that’s the essential…
BILL BENSON:
And many other things changed as well. Tell us about Mr. Frenkel.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well, Mr. Frenkel, the Frenkel family were our neighbors. They were a people who were chased out of Germany because they were Jewish. They were a wonderful family, a very pious family. I remember their house on Friday evenings guests were, poor people were always invited to sit at their table. I remember when I was visiting their house I was so impressed by the nobility and by the charity, by the kindness of this family and particularly Mr. Frenkel.
Well one day there was a hush in the building and I went to the window and I looked out and I saw that people were staring down at the courtyard and I looked down at the courtyard too and I saw Mr. Frenkel with half of his beard ripped off his face. I felt like I was drowning. I felt like, I felt such indignation. I felt such, such indignation as though all dignity of the world was just being torn to shreds.
BILL BENSON:
You had some cousins who fled to Russia. Will you tell us a little bit about them?
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well, as the cruelties and the hardships continued a lot of people tried to flee and the only place to flee, the only…there weren’t many places where Jewish people could flee. There weren’t many people who opened their doors to Jewish people. Ironically, Russia did so many people fled to Russia. Two of my cousins fled to Russia too. We never heard from them. I remember visiting my aunt’s house and it was heartbreaking to see how sad she was, how a home that was always so cheerful, so full of song and love, was so forlorn and she found out that most likely…she never…many of the people who fled to Russia returned. Most of the people you know, anything that belonged to Jewish people was free for all so a lot, the people were robbed by non-Jewish people and so some of the people did return and my, we never learned what happened to my cousins and I believe that, we never heard from them.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, it wouldn’t be long before all the Jews in Warsaw would be forced into what is known as the Warsaw ghetto and you would spend the next 3 years there. I know you can’t even in our remaining time do justice to that but tell us a little about what life was like in the ghetto where you would spend 3 years.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Right. In the spring of 1940 the Warsaw ghetto…Judenrat, the Jewish community center was forced to erect a wall around the Warsaw ghetto and that was a problem for the Jews. It was a problem for the Christians because only a certain area, a very, very tiny area was designated as the ghetto so the Christians who lived in the streets that were designated as the ghetto had to leave churches, and homes, and schools and then the Jewish people were gathered in the ghetto.
I was wondering what is a ghetto? Am I going to be imprisoned? And I was. They gathered people, drove out people from surrounding areas outside Warsaw and gathered them into the ghetto. There was not enough housing. There was not enough food. People were, the people who were chased out often came without shoes, on foot, little tots no older than 4 stood on streets and begged and yammered. The streets were littered with dead people, with dead children, children dying on the stoops, people covered the children’s dead bodies with posters and wrote on it. Our children must live, children are the holiest thing.
In this hell, in this hell immediately the Jewish people organized themselves into self help organizations and everybody helped their starving neighbors. The lowest rung of that organization was a kitchen in each building to feed the starving neighbors. Books were forbidden, yet so often people ask why we didn’t fight back. But, we fought back so hard with every fiber that was in us. We could not fight physically because if we did we would be shot, our neighbors would be shot, our parents, and our neighbors would be dragged out in the street and be shot. We fought morally. Like I was saying books were forbidden. It was capital punishment, a capital crime to own a book, off with your head if you owned a book.
Yet, my father had a stash of books that he pulled out every evening, windows blinded to keep out existence secret. My father would pull out the books by Jewish writers, particularly in Yiddish by Shalom Aleichem, and by Shalom Asch, and by Peretz. A tiny carbide lamp in the room was flickering. My father’s voice would flow and bring back to us remote worlds of how [the] world used to be. Our room was like a paradise, like a tiny capsule of paradise and outside there was silence because there was curfew.
Guns hovered over our heads. It was forbidden to celebrate holidays but on Passover every building had matzoh. Enemies made laws and we disobeyed them. We had secret schools where, in tiny rooms, where hungry teachers and hungry students and parents who traded their ration bread to pay for tutors. We children hid our books under our clothes and marched in front of soldiers knowing that we could be killed, knowing that the people we loved could be killed for it. You know, we didn’t think that we did anything brave. It just seemed like the right thing to do. Only now do I recognize that it was an act of courage and an assertion of human dignity. You know there is something so magical about children. We children later on held on to our inner selves. We always played and made believe and when we watch…we even played in the courtyards but we were always very good sentries. When we saw a Nazi soldier in the distance we would quickly dash home and help our parents hide contraband, like bread, and pencils, and paper.
There were theaters that were sponsored by the Judenrat. Imagine theaters when there was no bread. We, authors wrote in cold rooms were writing secretly. There was one very famous historian in the Warsaw ghetto, Chaim Kaplan and he said, “It’s strange, when we have no bread that we need poetry more than we need bread.” And that is true. I did not understand it then, but I know that I lived by it. The theater was across the street from our house and my parents used to take us there. I don’t remember the plays and I doubt that I understood the complexity of the plays, but the magic that was created by the actors on the stage illuminated by a yellow carbide light still lives with me. I was too young when I was eleven or twelve, to appreciate it then, but I know now that we, that memory is a very important thing that we hold on to.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, you had written in your book that it was a “mitzvah” or a good deed to dance in defiance to Nazi brutality.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Yes we did…
BILL BENSON:
I just…that sticks with me along with many things that you wrote. Your father thought participation in the arts was important but you said that your mother focused on practical ways to survive.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Yeah.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us what she was focused on.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well my mother was pounding the pillows and airing out the blankets and making sure that the house is very clean because there was a rampant epidemic of typhoid and all kinds of illnesses. She made sure that I remember when…there were lots of very talented musicians who were playing in the streets for alms and there was a young boy who was my age and he was so talented. I remember him playing Mendelssohn’s violin concerto and every time I passed him by I would share my, I would leave my sandwich with him and I would come home and I would be very hungry and my mother would say, “Well why are you so hungry?” And I’d say well, “I gave my sandwich away.” And she would say to me, “Well you know you need to take care of yourself because tomorrow there might be no food.”
But, my father would stress on the other hand that it is alright to be hungry for the sake of helping somebody else. He taught me, well my mother too was very romantic and very charitable, but my father symbolized to me in his examples more-that one has to nourish one’s soul and charity.
BILL BENSON:
You wrote that and you talked about that smuggling became very important because you still had to manage to eat and in effect make ends meet. Tells us about the smuggling.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well there was a black market and Polish and German soldiers lined their pockets with, they were involved with the smuggling too. Young children were particularly good in digging their, way tunneling their way under the wall to get to the Christian side and bring food. Of course, the walls were also marked with red stains of the kids and people, the smugglers who were shot.
BILL BENSON:
And your father, how was he able to make ends meet in that time?
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well, you know during the war jewelry and things like jewelry and gold becomes a most reliable currency and my father was a jeweler and the greatest advantage that we had was that our house was in the ghetto, our apartment was in the ghetto so if you had your home you had everything. If you didn’t have your home, if you lost your home you had nothing.
BILL BENSON:
The Nazis started deporting large numbers of Jews out of Warsaw to both death and concentration camps in 1942 and for a substantial period of time your family was able to avoid deportation. Tell us how your family managed to do that. How did you survive to that point?
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
In the summer of 1942, on my thir…month of my thirteenth birthday the infamous deportations of the Warsaw ghetto began. At first we had no idea what was happening to the people who were deported. Some people were forced to write false papers that they were sent to camps where they were fed and clothed. So, as a result some famished miserable, cold, starved people marched to Umschlagplatz to the deportation place voluntarily, not knowing that they would be killed.
The deportations were conducted with 20th Century know how and Stone Age values. Suddenly with planned suddenness brigades of soldiers would stomp into blocks of streets and you could hear the pounding of the boots, the rattling of the guns, and they would just round up anybody they would see on the street, load them onto carts, then they would stomp into the courtyard and just search every apartment and pull out every man, woman, and child they could find.
Now most people, I said some people marched because they didn’t know and because they were destitute, marched voluntarily. But, most of the people defied. Most of the people hid. We hid in drawers. We hid in cupboards. We hid in closets. We hid in every nook and cranny we could find and disappear from the face of the earth. We happen, our family hid behind, Anne Frank style, behind we pulled a wardrobe in front of a door to obscure one room.
Well, when we heard the brigades of soldiers, when we heard the shooting, the shouting, and when they were near we bolted into our room and pulled, closed the door and pulled the wardrobe close. While we were in the room we could hear the shooting, the slapping, the shouting, the yammering, the screams. We could hear the pounding of the boots. You can imagine what it felt like when we heard them in the adjacent room, when they came closer, when they opened the closet, when they pulled the drawers out in order to plunder. We thought any minute they would be upon us, the screaming, the crying, and then after awhile when silence fell and we gathered enough courage and we could begin to trust the silence we would pull, like in a nightmare, we would pull open the door, pull the wardrobe out, go and look into the windows of our neighbors. If we saw animation we knew that maybe there was still life, but in most there was so…the windows were like blind, dead, no movement behind them. Then slowly we would go out into the courtyard that was stained with blood and corpses and we just counted the neighbors that were still alive.
My friend Lusia had a little dog whom she adored and the dog adored her. Well, apparently when the German forces were leaving the courtyard the dog ran after one soldier and was nipping at his boots and barking. The soldier followed the dog through the courtyard, up the steps, into the room where my friend was hiding between the mattress and the box spring and pulled her out. That was the end of her. And there were numerous stories like that.
Well, we didn’t know what happened to the people, but eventually some of the people came back and I kind of run maybe ahead of myself, but children under fourteen were not allowed, were contraband. I was thirteen. Between July 1942 and September 1942, 99 percent of the Jewish children in the Warsaw ghetto were sent out, never to be seen again. I was among the one percent of children still alive. My sister was a year and a half older than I and…I asked my father, “What would happen if they found out that I am only thirteen?” My father said, “Oh I will burn their eyes out with acid. I’ll never let them take you, take you away from me.” I believed him, that I was safe if only in his love.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, when you said that children under fourteen were decreed to be contraband and that was based on their notion that if you were under fourteen you were useless.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Because, yeah…
BILL BENSON:
You were useless to them. You survived that and at the beginning of 1943 you would go to work in a slave labor in a factory. Tell us about that.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well, when the people were sent away we didn’t know where they went, but some people somehow found their way back, hiding under corpses somehow at night they found their way back to the Warsaw ghetto and they told us that the people who were loaded onto the freight trains were sent to a place called Treblinka. That they were given a bar of soap and that they were told that they were going to take a shower of course the bar of soap was to fool them into not fighting although I think they probably would not have fought anyway simply because even a child knows that the time to fight is before you are defeated and because one wants to save their dignity and not go to death screaming and crying.
Well, the showers of course did not squirt water but gas. Well, when we the people, the remainder of the people because by then the ghetto was so silent. The buildings were so vacant. The silence was so palpable that you could feel it crawl. So when the people, the remainder of the people learned what happened to the people, the Jewish people began to organize themselves into an armed resistance. They started to build bunkers as I pointed out the buildings were practically vacant so whoever most of the people moved to the ground floor. The resistance fighters started to build bunkers in the basements. My father was a member of the underground and we had a bunker too.
The floor in our powder room, the whole floor lifted commode and all and then you’d step down in, down a flimsy little ladder and you were out of sight. Well, the resistance fighters built a network of bunkers and they dug tunnels so that they can move from bunker to bunker and tunnels underneath the wall to get to the other side to the Christian side and hopefully obtain ammunition and arms from the Christian underground and should I now describe how…
BILL BENSON:
Yes, please.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well a few skirmishes occurred between resistance fighters and the Nazi forces. As a punishment Himmler promised to liquidate the rest of Warsaw starting April 19 and complete the mission in three days in time of Hitler’s birthday to present him with a ghetto cleansed of Jews. Well, the real fighting began when the armored cars, tanks, brigades of soldiers, bomber planes, trucks with loud speakers, announcing, “You better all report or else we’ll kill you.” And of course we did not obey, we bolted into our bunker and you can imagine when we pulled the trap door closed and we stepped into this damp, darkness the ceiling closed in on us. The walls pressed me and the few people who were with me in the bunker were my whole nation. The flickering of the carbide light was the substitute for the sun. The ticking of the clock was our only connection with the universe outside, that’s how we knew when morning was rising, when the sun was setting. How abandoned I felt. How I craved for the open horizons, for the crispness, blue crispness of day.
While we were in this bunker the freedom fighters confronted a 20th Century army. Just a small group of poorly clad, poorly fed, poorly armed of freedom fighters climbing up on rooftops, meeting the tanks on street corners, standing in front of open windows and lobbing Molotov cocktails and whatever explosives they could find. They fought so bravely, they fought for four weeks, even after the ghetto was declared cleansed of Jews the Jewish fighters were still fighting. It is really noteworthy that the Jewish resistance fighters in the Warsaw ghetto fought longer than it took for France or for Poland to capitulate. I think that is remarkable.
Well, “Boom!” there was this horrendous explosion. I thought that my head was blown off. Dust was flying, splinters were flying around me. In one instant our hiding place was invaded by a bunch of barbarians and they chased us out of the bunker. At that point there was not even a corner that we could hide in. We could not even, we didn’t even have the freedom to fall to our knees and form fists and smash the earth. We were marched through the streets. The ground beneath us trembled. The air thundered with detonations. The buildings crumbled to our feet. The flames, the flames were enormous, enormous tongues of flames licked the sky and painted it in other worldly colors of iridescence. The smoke, towers of smoke. People lying in congealed blood. I tried to turn my face away not to see it. I couldn’t understand what death meant. All I hoped for is that I meet it with my mother, and sister, and my father. But I couldn’t turn my face away from the people who I cannot forget and they marched us onto Umschlagplatz onto freight trains, crowded like sardines.
People ask me sometimes, “How could one person do it?” And I shared with Bill, when I volunteer here at the Museum a very young man and his father were sitting there and the boy asked, “How could one person have done it?” And I said, “Indeed, how could one person have done it?” So he said, “Oh I understand. Hitler couldn’t have done it by himself.” Because one person does not win a game, it takes a whole team to win a game and so he understood that it takes more than one person to let things like that happen.
Well, they loaded us onto the trains and during the night just for the sport of it, I guess this was part of the team that took joy in shooting and killing people. At daybreak we arrived at Majdanek, an extermination camp.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us what happened when you got to Majdanek.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
When we got into Majdanek lots of horrible things happened but I will try to be very brief. Men, women, and children, the few children that were still remaining, were wrenched apart. My father was sitting with a group of men on the muddy ground. My mother, sister, and I were sitting on the muddy ground, excuse me, across from him. My father was ill. He had a fever. His spittle was crimson. I was so used to look into his eyes for comfort, for reassurance, for steadiness. He looked so miserable. He looked so pathetic. I couldn’t bear it. I looked around and when the soldiers moved, were sort of out of place, I dashed across the field and I knelt in front of my father and I said, “Tata, don’t worry. They won’t get me.” And I turned the lapel of my coat and I said, “Remember, Tata, I have cyanide.” Most of us had pellets of cyanide sewed into our lapels. My father looked at me, his eyes burned with love, and a fever and he said, “No. Don’t do that. You must live.” And that was the last words that I heard from my father.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, after you lost your father, you had a photograph if I remember of your father, but that would be taken from you too.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
We were marched to showers. Well, the word showers you can imagine the fear that arose in us. I want you to know that while we were marching we were not marching like a horde of sheep. Nor did we march like a swarm of people without souls. We were people with names. There were mothers and fathers who were holding the hands of the little children that they wanted to take home and tuck into their beds. There were people who just held guns only an hour or so before.
Well, when we were in Majdanek and they were marching us to the shower I hid my father’s photograph under the lining, the inside lining of the shoe. A husky German soldier stopped me and said, “What are you hiding? Are you hiding anything?” And I said, “Well you took everything away. I don’t have anything.” He says, “Well I don’t believe you. You must have something else you are hiding.” Well I thought that maybe my best chance of saving, of holding onto my father’s photograph would be to be truthful and I took the photograph out and I said, “That’s all I have and you have no use for it. Can I hold it?” And he said, “Oh you dirty Jew!” He snapped it away and that was the last possession that I, that was taken away from me.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, we are unfortunately getting close to the end of our time and so much happened to you at Majdanek and then of course you would go on from there to two other concentration camps before you would be liberated. Tell us a little bit more at Majdanek at some point you knew they weren’t going to kill you outright, that you would be forced to do some very heavy, meaningless labor.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Right.
BILL BENSON:
Tell us about that and if you would tell us about a particularly brutal experience that your sister had. She was close to giving up at some point.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Right. Well, they could not, the gas chambers could not accommodate fast enough the extermination of the people that were in Majdanek so my father was among the first ones to be gassed. Where we were in Majdanek the crematorium wasn’t within sight. There was also a gallow right in the middle of Majdanek from which our people, our friends dangled. That was to remind us to be even more fearful and not dare to be disobedient. The air stank of human flesh and the useless work that we were forced to do was to dig up turf from one place to another place and then.
BILL BENSON:
To re-plant it somewhere else, and dig it up and move it over?
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
To re-plant it yeah, it was just useless work. Well, one day my sister and I were ordered to go to a ditch that was filled with personal human possessions like pictures, and crowns of teeth, and wedding bands, and watches, and to sort them and suddenly a overseer Brigitta, she was by the way tried after the war, appeared at the edge of the ditch and she pointed at my sister, a beautiful thin little fourteen, gentle girl and she said, “I saw what you were doing! You were look at the picture.” And my sister was trying to say, “Well how could I sort if I don’t look?” But she jumped at my sister and she beat her to pieces. She beat her so terribly that on the way back when we were marched back to the camp-the work was done outside the camp. The camp was surrounded by an electrified barbed wire fence and then there was a no man’s land and then there was the forest and that was the end of my horizon.
So she beat my sister so badly that when we marched back she leaned on my shoulder and another woman’s shoulder and the other women tried to form a circle to hide my sister because if you were weak you were the first. They always took the weakest first to exterminate or to shoot. So the following day we managed to get her past the guard and into the camp, but the following day my sister could not get up to go to work so we hid my sister under the bunker. The following day when we came back from, I mean when my mother and I went to work and when we came back from work my sister ran up to us and she said, “Thank God it is over!”
Now my sister always pleaded with my mother and me she said, “I cannot live in such indignity. We have only one way of controlling our lives. If they want to kill us, let them kill us.” She pleaded every day, “I don’t want to live another day like that. Let them kill us.” So when she saw she said, “Thank goodness it’s over. While you were gone some Nazi soldiers came and listed everyone they found and the camp. The assumption was that they were going to be sent to the gas chambers.
Well my mother, and sister, and I had a pact that if one of us would be sent to be exterminated all three of us would go and so my mother and I traded places with two other women who hoped to see another sunrise. The following day when my sister’s name was called, and the names of the two other women were called, we reported and they loaded us onto the train and we were sure that it was the end but the train took us to a camp, a slave labor camp.
There was a distinction between extermination camps where there were crematoria and forced labor camps, like Skarzysko and Czestochowa where we did slave labor. Essentially there were no crematoria there but the camp was also surrounded with electrified barbed wire fences and sentries with beams of light that followed every step we took. Eventually we were liberated by Russian soldiers. Skarzysko and later Czestochowa were ammunition factories.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, before we close the program and in a few minutes we are going to close the program but if you’ll bear with us for just a few more moments. Your book, your incredible book, originally you had a title that included A Tale of Three Monkeys. You’ve changed the title but at Skarzysko, that’s where the three monkeys came into being.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Yeah.
BILL BENSON:
Share with us that.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
Well my sister came down with typhoid fever and she was put into an infirmary. Well, one morning my sister was just, had such a high fever. She could not move. Well, you can imagine what it felt like for my mother and me to leave my sister. It was as though a limb was cut off me. Well my sister was in the infirmary and my mother in the evening she would bring…the infirmary was horrid. It was a room filled with people who were very sick, covered with lice. Many of them were not conscious and they would climb and fall onto one another and clutch at my sister and my mother would come to the window and call, “Fredziuchna.” She would trade her bread with the people who took care of it hoping that they would be good to my sister.
Well, I was beaten by a Jewish Kapo, a Jewish overseer in the camp. The reason for it was that I poured out urine because we tried to avoid to go to the bathroom at night, which was on the other end of the camp so we would often urinate into the can puszka and pour it out. He beat me so badly that my mother said to him, my mother flung herself to cover me to protect me and she said, “My blood will not rest in my grave and you’ll pay for it.”
Well it so happened that he was not really an indecent person. He was the Commandant, the Nazi overseer of the camp, beat the Jewish Kapos if they did not deliver enough mice and rats that were all over the camp and if there was urine poured out he would be beaten. So, he tried to make an impression. Anyway, that saved my sister’s life in case you wonder how I got from the hospital to my being beaten. That saved my sister’s life because the overseer of the camp, the Nazi overseer of the camp would appear in the camp periodically with his German Sheppard and a gun and he would take the people into…whomever he felt like it, into the woods and shoot them. Well, this Kapo, whenever he saw that the Nazi was roving through the camp, he would run to my sister and tell her to hide in the latrine and so that’s how we saved her life.
BILL BENSON:
Estelle, I am going to, again I will turn back to Estelle to close our program in just a minute. I’ve got just a couple of quick comments to make to you but I would like to share with you something that Estelle wrote in her book and I just think it is just a remarkable statement, “Our survival depended 99% on random luck and 1% on instinct and grit. Without the 1% pluck you were 100% dead.”
I’d like to thank all of you for joining us for our First Person program today. Remind you that we will have two more First Persons, two more Wednesdays in August before we end our program for 2010. Our next program will be next Wednesday, August 18, when our first person will be Mr. Haim Solomon, who is from Romania.
Please remember that you can access podcasts from our programs on the Museum’s website as well as through iTunes and as I noted earlier Estelle will leave the stage and go up where you came in where she will sign copies of Echoes of Memory, which has a contribution from her.
I will tell you that when she gets her book published I think you will want to find it and read it. It is just, I have had the privilege of reading it and it is just beyond powerful. There is just not enough words for it.
With that it’s our tradition at First Person that our first person has the last word. I’d like to turn back to Estelle to close our program today.
ESTELLE LAUGHLIN:
I want to thank everyone for being here and listening. Seldom are people willing to listen and share such experiences because they generate such pain. But, we must be reminded from time to time what can happen to us and to the civilized world when we accommodate ourselves to tyranny, what can happen to the conscience of a nation, what happens to love, and trust. As long as we have Darfurs, Auschwitz and Majdanek are still with us. I also want to express my deep appreciation to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum for making historical facts available to us and for having wonderful educational programs that remind us of the cruelty that human beings are capable of. We have to be reminded of places like Majdanek and Treblinka and Darfur to remember how important compassion is and how important and the role that we all play. Although some people claim cruelly that the Holocaust never happened history remembers and this building is our window and a reminder that what we do or fail to do really matters. I thank you very much.
[Applause]
