A native of Warsaw, Poland, Estelle Glaser Laughlin can describe the moment when residents in her home country resisted Nazi Germany and when many were forced to work in labor camps during World War II.
That’s because Laughlin, now a Lincolnshire resident, experienced it firsthand.
“Warsaw was the center of my universe,” Laughlin said. “Don’t let anyone ever tell you that we didn’t fight back. We fought back with every fiber.”
On Aug. 10 in Glencoe, Laughlin recounted her experiences during the Holocaust and World War II to numerous supporters of the United States Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. Laughlin is one of the first people to give videotaped interviews maintained by the museum, and she also published a book in 2012 called “Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust.”
As a young teenager in Warsaw in 1943, Laughlin and her family witnessed the Warsaw ghetto uprising, a resistance effort led by an outnumbered group of Jewish residents in a German-controlled ghetto in Warsaw, she told the audience.
She also described escalating chaos in her home country at the time, recalling how children died, and how members of her family eventually were forced into freight cars and transported to labor camps.
“We had no idea that deportations meant death,” Laughlin said.
By January 1945, Laughlin worked inside a labor camp at an ammunition factory surrounded by electric barbed wire, she said. Laughlin and her family members ultimately regained their freedom and made their way to the United States.
“We came to this blessed land,” she said.
Laughlin later worked in a garment factory near New York. She became a teacher and reading specialist.
Her sister became a professor, she said.
During the event in Glencoe, Matthew Friend, an 18-year-old Chicago resident, and his grandmother Elaine Levinson, of Glencoe, talked with Laughlin during the question-and-answer session.
“My generation is the last to hear these stories in person and to meet people who actually lived this atrocity,” Friend said. “We have to keep carrying on this message, so that this never happens again.”
Karie Angell Luc is a freelance photographer and reporter for Pioneer Press.
