Arts & Entertainment
Author, Teacher and Holocaust Survivor Dies at 95. Estelle Glaser Laughlin Found Light in Darkest Days
Estelle Glaser Laughlin died at the age of 95. (Courtesy of the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center)
She carried a lifelong message of optimism despite coming of age during a terrible time in history.
Estelle Glaser Laughlin died this week at the age of 95, according to a statement released by the Illinois Holocaust Museum & Education Center in Skokie.
She recounted her life story in the memoir “Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust,” an unforgettable account of perseverance in the face of hopelessness.
In April 2013, WTTW News interviewed her at her home in Lincolnshire. She had grown up in the Warsaw ghetto with death all around her; in person, she was luminous and vital.
“When we see cruelty and darkness,” Glaser Laughlin said, “hopefully we recognize and revere life.”
A gifted communicator, she was a frequent speaker at the Illinois Holocaust Museum. She wrote two books and spoke eloquently about her life.
Remembering Poland before the invasion, she told WTTW News, “It glows in my selective memory — gold and radiant, lilac trees against open blue skies, with sounds of good neighbors, kindness, faith and love. All of these things became shelters for me later in a world that crumbled around me. When you lose everything, your memories become your possessions.”
Video: “Chicago Tonight” interviews Estelle Glaser Laughlin in her home in April 2013.
Born Estelle Wakszlak in 1929, she grew up in a middle-class family in Warsaw, “the center of my universe.” She was 10 years old when Germany invaded. Jews were forced into a ghetto where books were illegal and communication with the outside world was non-existent.
Still, when her father read to them from his hidden library, she recalled, “my family was like a capsule of paradise. In a way it transported me out of this horrible underworld that we were in.”
He also took his children to see theater and music performances, which were banned in the ghetto. He told them: Talent touches that which is best in us, and we have to support it.
After three years in the ghetto, she and her mother and sister were moved to concentration camps and then labor camps. They never saw her father again.
She recalled those grim days: “We hardly ever saw daylight. I don’t remember seeing a butterfly or a flower. We were so isolated. We might as well have been on another planet. I couldn’t imagine that only a few rabbit hops away from where we were, there were people sailing on silver lakes, and there were children who were sitting with their families around tables.”
Against seemingly impossible odds, Glaser Laughlin survived the war. She immigrated to the United States in 1947, earned a master’s degree in education and had a long career as a public school teacher in Maryland. After retiring, she moved to the Chicago area to be closer to her grandchildren.
“Writing the book was seeing the child that I was through the eyes of the old woman I am now,” she told WTTW News in 2013. “What motivated me to write the book was the question: How did we survive? How did my mother and sister survive? How did we survive whole? With compassion, with joy for life, with reverence for life? I think that I am very fortunate to be an optimist.”
Glaser Laughlin is survived by three children, seven grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. Funeral services will be held Friday at Shalom Memorial Park in Arlington Heights.
