In April 1943, German forces made one last push to deport the remaining 55,000-60,000 Jews from the Warsaw ghetto to forced labor sites or killing centers. Samek, who helped organize the resistance movement, built a bunker in which he and his family could hide during the Warsaw ghetto uprising. As SS and police units began roundups, resistance fighters met them with artillery fire from resistance fighters. In retaliation, the SS began razing the ghetto, block by block. The bunker where Estelle and her family were hiding, which was in the basement of a house, was exposed by a bomb. The Germans dragged the Wakszlak family out onto the street, marched them to a central gathering point, forced them to board freight train cars, and transported them to the Lublin-Majdanek concentration camp.
Upon arrival at Majdanek, the SS separated the women and men. Estelle, Michla, and Freda were chosen for forced labor, but Samek was murdered in the gas chamber. The women moved soil from one place outside the camp to another. At one point, Freda was badly beaten by a German guard and could not work. She hid in the barracks, but was discovered. The Germans put her name on what she suspected was a gas chamber list. To stay together, even if it meant they would die, Estelle and Michla switched places with two women who were on the same list. Michla, Estelle, and Freda were instead sent to the Skarżysko concentration camp to work in a munitions factory, and were later transferred to another weapons factory at the Czestochowa concentration camp.
Soviet forces liberated Czestochowa in January of 1945. To escape pogroms in Poland, the three women moved to Allied-occupied Germany in August 1945 and lived there until 1947, when they moved to the United States to join Michla’s two sisters and brother in New York City.