Childhoods lost: Two to share Holocaust Memorial stories
By: Betty Nelander
Palm Beach Daily News
Sunday,May 11, 2014
Estelle Laughlin is pictured with her father Samek and sister Fredka in Warsaw, 1938. |
A Tribute to courage and resistance will highlight Holocaust Memorial Evening May 22.
The Palm Beach Torah Institute of Chabad of Northern Palm Beach Island is presenting the event at The Chesterfield, which will feature childhood survivors.
At the evening, “Choose One of My Children to Live?” is the story of the survival of Edith Kahn Rhodes, 79, of Palm Beach. Her story, which will be shared by Rabbi Zalman Levitin, is her chapter in the book Childhood Lost by The Child Survivors/Hidden Children of the Holocaust, Palm Beach County, edited by Zelda Marbell Fuksman, Judith Evan Goldstein and Frieda Jeffe. Afterward, Edith will answer questions.
Growing up in Latvia, Edith and her country experienced persecutions, theft and killings of Jews after the Germans invaded in 1941. In the Riga Ghetto where her family ended up, life was “full of deprivation and fear of being killed.” Her five aunts and their husbands and her cousins were victims of mass killings.
Soldiers were rounding up all children for deportation. One day her father’s friend noticed the number of children scheduled to be picked up was one less than the actual number of children. Her father, Sol Kahn, realizing he could save a child, picked “one who was old enough to hide but not to cry.”
In a harrowing move, Edith, then 8, was hidden in an industrial-size clothes dryer in a workshop. The other children, including her sister, Aga, and her aunt’s children, were torn from their family’s clutches.
The horror did not end, as the family was taken by boat to a concentration camp near Danzig, Germany. She recalls her Aunt Riva saving her life by pulling her into her group when the Nazis could not decide whether she should go with the laborers or into a group that would be killed. Their next stop was the notorious concentration camp Stutthof, where her mother Paula became ill with typhoid, and was too weak to walk. More than 85,000 people were killed, including her mother.
A 10-day death march followed and amazingly they were liberated by Russian soldiers. At that time she was miraculously reunited with her father who was separated from them in the camps. Fluent in Russian and German, he became a translator for the Russians but was advised to move to the American side of Berlin or risk being labeled a spy. In 1950, they arrived in the United States, thanks to the sponsorship of a friend’s relative. Today she lives in Palm Beach with her husband of 56 years, Jess Rhodes, a retired psychiatrist.
In spite of her lost childhood, she said “we need to remain good human beings and show a better way through our contributions to others.”
Warsaw Uprising
Meanwhile, Estelle Glaser Laughlin, a child survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, its uprising, and concentration camps, will share a story of love and courage when she discusses her book,Transcending Darkness: A Girl’s Journey Out of the Holocaust, following a video presentation.
“I think that love kept us alive because we had one another,” she said of her family in the ghetto, where some 300,000 people were eventually killed or deported in 1942.
Ninety-nine percent of the children disappeared from the camp — those under 14 were deported. Estelle survived: She was 13.
“A handful of freedom fighters poorly led, poorly fed and poorly armed confronted a 20th-century army that had tanks, armored cars, trucks and bomber planes,” Estelle said of the uprising. “They fought longer than it took for France or Poland to capitulate.”
The family hid in bunkers built by the resistance fighters, which waged the largest single revolt by Jews during the war. Her father Samek Wakszlak was among the organizers.
After the uprising, there was mass deportation. Estelle was in several camps and worked as a slave laborer in an ammunition factory. Her father died in Majdanek concentration camp.
She was 15 when she, her mom and sister Fredka were liberated by the Russians. “We looked like death walking,” she said, “and there is no home to come back to.”
The family smuggled out of Poland and traveled to Czechoslovakia and eventually Germany before coming to the U.S. At 18, she started a new life in New York. Despite very little formal education, she went on to become a teacher and reading specialist in Maryland; his sister a professor.
“The inspiration to achieve came from the very darkest places during the Warsaw uprising, where we lived in the netherworld. There was no sky, no sun, no connection with the outside universe.”
She began her book to answer questions: “How did we survive with compassion, humanity, love for humanity and joy for life?
“These questions kept occurring in my mind. Seeing the child through the eyes of the old woman I am now, I got many wonderful answers: that young people are resilient, that young people are wise, that young people know right from wrong.”
To RSVP for the evening, see palmbeachjewish.com/torah, facebook or call 659-3884. The cost is $36, which includes a buffet. Estelle will sign her book.