Transcending Darkness: A Girl's Journey Out of the Holocaust

"Please, Mama, I don't want to live like this," pleaded twelve-year-old Estelle Glaser's older sister as they watched the bodies of friends dangle from the gibbet in the center of the appelplatz of the Madjanek concentration camp. "I cannot take the indignities and brutalities. Let's step forward and make them kill us now." But Estelle's mother fiercely responded to her two daughters: No Life is sacred. It is noble to fight to stay alive. Their mother's indomitable will was a major factor in the trio's survival in the face of brutal odds. But Estelle recognized other heroes in the ghetto and camps as well, righteous individuals who stood out like beacons and kept their spirits alive. Their father was one, as were hungry teachers in dim, cold rooms who risked their lives to secretly teach imprisoned children. Estelle herself learned to draw on a joyful past, and to bring her own light into the void. Estelle's memoir, published sixty-four years after her liberation from the Nazis, is a narrative of fear and hope and resiliency. While it is a harrowing tale of destruction and loss, it is also a story of the goodness that still exists in a dark world, of survival and renewal. Also 04 Activeable in e-book formats, 978-0-89672-800-4

Author: Estelle Glaser Laughlin
Publisher: Texas Tech University Press
Published: 11/15/2012
Pages: 248
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.10h x 6.20w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780896727670


Review Citation(s):
Kirkus Reviews 09/15/2012

About the Author
Estelle Glaser Laughlin, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Uprising, and concentration camps, immigrated to America at eighteen. With only three years of public school education, she earned a master's degree in education. After retirement from a long career in teaching in Maryland, she has continued to write and lecture widely about her experience and survival.