08-29-24  – We mourn the passing of Holocaust survivor Estelle Glaser Laughlin. Estelle Laughlin was an extraordinary educator of great human depth. Her active personal witness as a teacher and active resource for insight expressed itself in her speaking and writing; most notably in Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust.

I am entrusted with telling her life story to the Polish-speaking world, a task I am most committed to, for the sake of Polish and Jewish identity – for the sake of our common humanity.

I had the privilege of interviewing Estelle on Zoom as part of my work as a translator and interpreter. The meaning of her life intersects with mine as a Polish Jew born after World War II, living in Poland, and as a leader of the Progressive Jewish community in Poland, Beit Polska.

Estelle’s teaching and significance will continue in Poland because the nature of the memory of what happened here to 3 million Polish Jews and the few thousand survivors is not settled in the Polish national consciousness. The dual language (Polish-English) Freighted Legacies program is our contribution toward helping Jews and Poles understand that past.

Catholic thinker Bogdan Bialek noted in our Freighted Legacies interview that many Polish Jews felt that Poland had repudiated her Jewish citizens in the hour of their need only to reclaim them in the Polish nationalistic search for a “bigger” sense of victimhood.

Estelle famously said: “Revenge or guilt is not the issue. Responsibility is an obligation, and we are left with a legacy to know and understand if civilization is to progress.” 

The significance of Estelle’s story is hardly known in Poland because it is overshadowed by a national educational ideology that appropriated and obscured the story of Jewish survivors to invent a history of Polish national innocence. In the week of Estelle’s passing, the essay Whitewash: Poland and the Jews by noted historian Jan Zbigniew Grabowski has appeared. The sad passing is a reminder to complete the translation and to thus pursue the larger vision that transpires through the teachings of Estelle’s life. 

Estelle was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1929. Estelle’s parents and older sister Freda were sequestered in the Warsaw ghetto in October 1940. Her father managed to sustain the family by obtaining food through the black market; he was active in the resistance and ultimately built a hiding place that sheltered the family through the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. (The existence of such hideouts has only recently become the subject of historical attention.) Eventually, the hiding place was smashed by a bomb, and Estelle and her family were transported to Majdanek near Lublin, and from Majdanek’s forced labor to a slave labor camp near Czestochowa.

Estelle, her mother, and her sister were liberated from the Czestochowa camp by Soviet forces in January 1945. They moved to Allied-occupied Germany in August 1945 and remained there until 1947, when they moved to New York City to join family members. A lifelong commitment to hope, understanding and growth sustained Estelle as she raised three children, acquired a new language and professional credentials, became an author, and rebuilt her life.

May her example continue as a blessing.

Marek S. Jezowski
Beit Polska Chair 2012-2022