Holocaust Survivor Speaks of Survival And Dignity

BRISTOL, Tenn. – Estelle Laughlin was just 10 years old when she hid in a room, trembling, while Nazi “destroyers” whipped Polish Jews to death in a Warsaw ghetto courtyard.

Seventy years later, the 79-year-old Holocaust survivor spoke with composure and eloquence, riveting about 200 people Monday during a lecture at King College’s Memorial Chapel. From time to time, many of those in her audience slowly shook their heads in disbelief.

“I feel compelled to apologize for bringing the darkness of my story to such a bright day,” she began as she told the story of Germany’s attack on Poland.

“I remember the lilac trees, sounds of good neighbors and magical train rides in the summer. When you lose everything, memories become your most cherished possession.”

When Germany attacked Poland in 1939, Warsaw, her birthplace, turned into a “mountain of ruins” after four weeks of bombardment, she said.

“Immediately, life changed,” she said quietly, gracefully, her head held high. “Germans were walking around with whips and chains, walking into our homes and taking anything they wanted.”

Her parents and sister were with her, blacking out the windows of their house at night, completely cut off from the world with no ammunition but their dignity.

They were made to wear the Star of David around their arms, banned from reading books – which they managed to do late at night – and instructed that the consequence for disobeying orders was death. 

“The streets were littered with dead people, and they blamed us for the war,” she said. “We hid in a room until the destroyers had moved out of the courtyard. When people went out to see what was there, they found a dead pregnant woman whose stomach had been slashed open. There was always blood all over the walls.”

It was at this point that Laughlin took a moment to address the students at the college. She told them that as long as they hold on to the knowledge that “good and right will prevail, everything will work out fine.”

Laughlin then fell silent, slowly looked around the chapel and said, “I have lived in freedom for a long time now, but there’s never a time that I enter a room and don’t look for a place to hide.”

The Nazis started deporting Polish Jews out of the ghetto in 1942, and those found in the streets were picked up and taken to the train station, she said.
“People were promised if they went peacefully, they would be taken to war camps and fed,” she said. “But we already knew better. We had gotten reports of the death camps. We children, we all knew it.”

And they were right.

The family was sent to Majdanek concentration camp on the outskirts of Lublin, Poland, where her father was eventually killed. The Nazis executed her “Tata,” Polish for father, at Majdanek because he was sick with tuberculosis.

“Tata was ill,” Laughlin wrote in “Echoes of Memory,” a compilation of memoirs available to the public at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. “He had a high fever and shivered with a chill …
“I broke loose from the group of women and dashed across the field that separated us from Tata. He motioned me back, his faced contorted with fear for my safety. I reached him and knelt down on the ground in front of him. ‘Please Tata,’ I said. ‘You need not worry about me. They will not get me.’
“I flipped the lapel of my coat and showed him the tiny vial of cyanide sewn to the lining. We all had it to use as a last resort. ‘They will never get me, Tata. Remember, I have cyanide.’”

Laughlin said her aim at that moment was to reassure, and she did more of the same 70 years later in Bristol, Tenn.

“Remember, you can still fight for your dignity, even if you don’t have weapons,” she told the crowd. 

Together with her sister and mother, she endured two years of forced labor at Skarzysko and Czestochowa camps in Poland, where Laughlin recalls people “being put in the ovens” and burned to death.

After the war, Laughlin fled Poland with her relatives, and eventually settled in New York City, where she worked in the garment industry, married and started a family.

Today, she lives in Maryland, where she taught the sixth grade before retiring. She has been a volunteer at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum since 2007.

As Laughlin’s story reached its conclusion, students, faculty and visitors of all ages shot astonished looks at each other. Some grabbed their foreheads and rubbed back and forth as if trying to take in what they’d just heard.

Laura Boggan, King College associate director of communications, said “it was if a projector came on when she [Laughlin] started talking about it. I could see it.”

Julie Roberson, of Bristol, Tenn., had this to say: “This is the first time I’ve heard a Holocaust survivor speak. It’s incredible to hear someone who has suffered so much be able to speak about hope and still have faith in humanity.”

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