Lisbon, Portugal (July 19, 2020) - Translation of article by Patricia Carvalho in Público
Irene was one of the children in Bergen-Belsen. But she says, “Being a victim at a certain point in your life does not mean that you have to be a victim all your life.”
Irene Butter spent decades without talking about her experience as a Jewish child in occupied Amsterdam and her deportation to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. But, after starting to relive those memories, she couldn't stop. The book that tells the story of how she, her mother and her brother managed to survive the Holocaust – and how their father, who was most important in accomplishing this feat, died at the gates of freedom – will be published this Tuesday in Portugal
It took a long time, several decades, in fact, for Irene Butter to start talking about what had happened to her as a child. And a few more years to transform the memories of her life during World War II, as a German Jewish child, into a book. Published in America in 2018, “Shores Beyond Shores” has now been released in Portugal with the title “The Girl who Believed in Miracles” (Casa das Letras, 2020). A few months before turning 90, the author thinks for a second when asked if this is a good definition of the young woman she was. "I don't know if I thought they were miracles at the time, but in hindsight, I feel that they are," she says.
The conversation takes place on the phone, after an attempt to establish a video connection ends up undone on technical issues that Irene Butter is unable to unravel. She’s usually able to overcome such problems, however. From her home in Ann Arbor, Michigan (United States) this woman with glorious light blue eyes has had several online conversations to talk about the story she kept in silence for much of her life. The explanation for this, if it were that simple to explain, is contained in a paragraph that now appears on the Portuguese edition of her book: “When I got off the ship that brought me to the United States in 1945, the American relatives who asked me to forget everything that had happened to my family - and me - in the Holocaust. I was told to never think or talk about it again. I was fifteen, they were adults, and I listened to them.”
The story of the girl born on December 11, 1930, in Berlin, Germany, would therefore have to wait until she became an octogenarian, to fill the pages of a book. And, when it is the author herself who recognizes, in the same paragraph in which she explains the silence, that she never felt “truly free” until she started telling what happened to her as a child, it is inevitable to question her about whether she now feels any regret for having waited so long time. Again, there is only a very short pause before the answer. “I don't know if I'm sorry. What I regret is that I didn't talk to my mother and brother about this period before they died, because when I started writing the book a great many questions arose that I would love to have shared with them. Because they had their own memories of what happened.”
The story that Irene Butter finally decided to tell, begins with “happy childhood”, which extended beyond the beginning of the war. The Hasenberg family (Butter is the author's married name) lived “in a big, bright apartment in Berlin”, shared by Irene with her parents, John and Gertrude, her two-year-old brother Werner and her maternal grandparents, Julius and Pauline Mayer. “I was a lucky child,” is the first line of the book.
Irene's grandfather owned a bank, of which the girl's father was a partner. And in the midst of memories that include a red tricycle, visits to the zoo or a small plot where the family grew vegetables, the first disruption in the peace of the “wonderful experience” of being a child in Berlin came with the loss of family business at the hands of the Nazis.
The sudden disappearance of the family's livelihood led to the first major change in Irene's small universe. In the spring of 1937, her father left for Holland, following the path of many other German Jews who sought in the neighboring country to return to some normality that they felt to be increasingly absent. And to find the means to be able to support their families.
In Germany, the rest of the family was waiting for directions to join Irene’s father, as everything around them was changing. At the age of seven, Irene protested against difficulties that she didn’t entirely understand. A classmate's birthday party to which all classmates were invited, except for her and another Jewish girl. The increasingly worrisome appearance in public space of the white, red and black flags, with their “zigzags” - the child's name for swastikas. There was also contact with the Hitler youth, resulting in the decision that she would go to school always in the company of an adult. Then December 1937 came and there was a second, definitive, family break.
It was in that month that Irene discovered that the “special documents” that allowed the family to join John in Amsterdam did not include grandparents. The two of them would be left behind. Years later, when the whole family was in the Westerbork transit camp in northern Holland, they discovered that the couple had been deported to the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the Czech Republic. Julius and Pauline Mayer died there.
Irene's happy memories extend beyond those early years in her home country. In Amsterdam, she learned the language easily, made friends, and, surrounded by almost the whole family, she felt "truly at home". Had it not been for her grandparents, Germany would have been easily forgotten, thanks to the “peaceful and harmonious” life that the Hasenbergs found in their new country. But times were anything but peaceful and harmonious and in 1940, when the German invasion took place and bombs began falling over Amsterdam.
For the Jews who had sought refuge there, the whole process of loss which had led them to flee to the Dutch capital was repeated. Included in this process was another family that Irene Butter introduces into the story with a simple sentence: “And there were other German emigrants in our neighborhood, including a family nicknamed Frank.” Anne Frank, author of the most famous diary in history, who was to die in Bergen-Belsen – after the family was discovered in hiding and deported to Auschwitz – was older than Irene, but the two crossed paths, sometimes in games on the street. They were never close, not really friends, but they knew each other, and when the Frank family disappeared, it never occurred to Irene that they were hiding in a secret apartment right there in Amsterdam. “What was said is that the family had gone to Switzerland. When I read her book, there was a completely different description of what really happened,” she says. In between, there was a sad and momentary reunion between the two, but in 1940, that was still five years away.
Impossible not to know
The Nazis' entry into Amsterdam made it impossible even for a ten-year-old child, to remain on the sidelines. Irene’s perception of what was going on might not have been very clear, but ignoring the approaching disaster was becoming increasingly difficult. “We couldn't help but be aware. We were in the Netherlands for two years before the Nazis invaded the country. And what was happening was obvious, because many friends left Germany and passed through Amsterdam on the way to other places, and they told us what was going on. People were in transition. And as soon as the country was occupied, it was full of Nazis. They took over the government, imposed a set of restrictions, and, of course, our world got narrower and narrower. We couldn't go anywhere, we had to wear a star on our clothes, a curfew was imposed on us and then our bikes were taken away. We were limited to a very small area and, of course, seeing people being deported, losing friends and family, before it was our turn to leave too ... It was impossible not to know what was happening ”, she says.
In the book, Irene remembers how the freedom she had felt became increasingly limited: how she was forced to change schools, to one attended only by Jewish children; how she had to hand in her beloved bicycle; how the parks and lakes she used to play in became suddenly forbidden to Jews; how she was never able to go to the movies again after seeing “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”. In the book, she calls them “the final times” and the list includes the last time her brother played ball with his friends, because “he was never again allowed to be part of any team”.
But it also tells how some friends never abandoned them and risked their lives for things as simple as ensuring that the Hasenbergs had access to enough food, since Jews could only shop between three and five in the afternoon and at that hour “There wasn't much left on the shelves”. Some of these friends hid family belongings when she was sent to Westerbork and, thanks to that, after the war, Irene managed to recover valuable keepsakes, such as her photographs and her Memento Book - a common gift for children at that time, who filled the pages with dedications written by family and friends, as well as drawings and stickers.
The “miracles” to which Irene refers, and which led to the choice of the title in the Portuguese edition, were about to happen. Because the most terrible period of Hasenberg life was about to come...
The start of this period took place in March of 1943 when Irene was dragged from her new school, put in a van, and taken, along with her brother, to the Hollandsche Schowburg, a theater in the city where the Jews who were about to be sent to Westerbork were being gathered. There, the two siblings met their parents. Without the 12-year-old Irene knowing how, her father managed to save them from that first moment of departure and, after an uncomfortable night at the theater, the family managed to return home.
Although the Hasenbergs' trip to Westerbork was postponed for only a few months, those were times when even a few days or hours could mean the difference between life and death. In June of that year the inevitable finally happened and the four were sent to the camp where an empty train arrived every week and left, several days later, loaded with people headed for Auschwitz.
For months it had been circulating among the Jewish community that the Nazis had set up labor camps in the east, where they were being be forced to go. In 1943, the rumors had grown even more common and the name of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration and extermination camp installed in occupied Poland, left no one indifferent, as Irene Butter reminds us: “It was not entirely clear what was happening there but the train from Auschwitz to Westerbork every week had to be cleaned and people found little notes hidden there. We had no details, but it was clear that those who left Auschwitz were being murdered, so when we had to say goodbye to family and friends it was very tragic, since we suspected that we would never see them again.”
Those chosen to leave were informed the night before when a list was read containing the names of those who’d been selected. Irene's school friend Rudi, whom she hoped to meet in Westerbork, had already been included in one of those lists before the Hesenbergs arrived at the transit camp. The girl's uncles, who were also there, were included in a list shortly after Irene's family arrived and, she later discovered, would die shortly thereafter in the Sobibor extermination camp, also in Poland.
For the Hasenbergs, despite the tragedies that followed, the time for miracles was not yet over. The second occurred when the names of the four were removed from one of the transport lists for Auschwitz, thanks to the intervention of a friend of John Hasenberg, Leo Buschoff, who recognized John’s name, but who would not be able to save himself and who would eventually be deported with his wife to the camp, where they both died in 1944.
The third and final battle for life that the family fought daily came in the form of a package…
John Hasenberg had never given up trying to save his family and, before deportation to the transit camp, he had tried to obtain false passports, with a nationality that would allow them to become "exchange Jews". “Many thousands of Jews from all over Europe had these passports because consuls in several countries had issued them, thinking that they could save Jews, but you never knew. And very few people were exchanged.” In the case of the Hasenbergs, the passports were issued by an Ecuadorian consul named Manuel Muñoz Borrero, who was responsible for saving about 100 Jews and would be stripped of his duties because of that effort. Like the Portuguese diplomat Aristides de Sousa Mendes, the Ecuadorian consul was distinguished by Yad Vashem as one of the “Just Among Nations” (2011) and Irene was one of the people who testified that the passport issued by the consul was essential to saving her life. That the Hasenbergs were some of the few Jews saved by these documents is another "miracle" in the young woman's life, she assures us.
The package, originating from the Ecuadorian Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, had been sent to the family's home in Amsterdam, but had been mysteriously forwarded to Westerbork. Inside, fake passports assured the family that, from that moment on, they had some value for the Nazis, as they resorted to passport holders like them as bargaining chips for German citizens in enemy countries or for German prisoners of war.
These passports permanently prevented the family from being sent to Auschwitz, but the hope that they would be taken to a better place, where they would be treated well until the moment of exchange, ended as soon as they reached the last destination shared by the whole family: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany, where more than 52,000 people died. It was February 1944.
“Bergen-Belsen was terrible and it got worse and worse during the time we were there, which was almost a year,” she recalls. More than 75 years after that experience, there are things that Irene Butter still cannot explain - many things - and one of them is the way in which “exchange Jews” were treated in that place and which hardly differed from the way other prisoners were treated. “For me, it is still a contradiction. Because the Germans had this exchange policy, right? That's why we were a kind of human capital. But if they really wanted to get back their prisoners and citizens, why did they treat us as they did at a time when the Jews of Bergen-Belsen were dying? Many died who had passports and were among the “exchange Jews.” It is a contradiction, thought that isn’t surprising. There are many contradictions, even now in our world,” she observes.
At the age of 14, Irene, who was given the duty of caring for the children in the part of the country where she found herself, witnessed the physical degradation of her father, mother and brother, who left every day to work and returned increasingly thin, weak and sick. She saw the bodies scattered on the ground – those who succumbed to hunger and disease. Food, which had already become a constant topic of conversation among prisoners - especially in the stories of everything that they were going to eat when the war was over - became increasingly scarce. Thefts became more common, with each person behaving as they wanted in order to survive. But not the Hasenbergs, Irene says, because her father never permitted it.
In January 1945, the last year of the war and almost a year after Irene arrived in Bergen-Belsen, there was an unexpected encounter with a former neighbor of their Amsterdam neighborhood, Anne Frank. "Anne is here, Anne Frank!" That was how another girl from the star camp - the section of Bergen-Belsen where the "exchange Jews" were located - informed Irene about the presence of another person known to them both. By that time, Anne was already very ill and her sister Margot was unable to get up from her bunk.
Since the Franks were in another section of the camp, separated by a fence, Irene's friend had arranged for an evening meeting at which she could bring her something that would help her survive. The two gathered some clothes and when she finally saw Anne, Irene discovered “a shadow of the lively girl” from the times of Amsterdam. “She seemed to be completely enveloped by the blanket” that surrounded her, she describes in the book.
Their package was thrown over the fence, but Anne never picked it up. A woman who was nearby stole it before the girl managed to retrieve it. Irene and her friend promised to return in two nights, but, for the author, that promise could not be fulfilled because the last miracle of this period was about to happen.
Anne Franke and Sister Margot would both die in Bergen-Belsen, very probably during the month of February.
The day after this brief meeting, the head of the block where the family lived shouted out some news that seemed unbelievable: “Whoever has a North American or South American passport must immediately go to the chief physician to determine their readiness for exchang.” The time to be saved had arrived. And yet this would never really come, because by this time, Irene's family members were so ill that they were unlikely to pass the medical exam. Especially her mother, who could not even get up from the bunk bed where she was delirious with fever and pain.
With their father absent for another day at work, the two siblings (Werner had also been in the field, very weak and with a wound on his foot) decided to go alone to the doctor. They passed the exam. When John arrived, it was impossible to get Gertrude to leave her bunk and walk. Irene accompanied her father, to give him support. While being examined by the doctor, he managed to maintain the illusion that he was well enough to survive the trip. And the doctor assumed that the person accompanying him was his wife, failing to recognize the 14-year-old he had seen a few hours earlier. “Your children, Werner and Irene, have already been here. Be ready tomorrow morning, all of you,” recalls the author in the book. The impossible had happened and they were going to leave Bergen-Belsen. Alive. OOO
Death in liberation
Survival, however, would not become a possibility for all of them. During the trip to Switzerland, John Hasenberg died. Another prisoner told the family that he had been violently beaten by the guards the day before he left. The unity that the family had managed to maintain during almost the entire war was thus brutally destroyed. And the cruelty wouldn't stop here.
In Switzerland, a total separation took place: too ill to continue their journey, Gertrude and Werner would be admitted to hospitals. As for Irene, she was forced to join other refugees who were leaving. Alone for the first time, the young woman ended up being sent to the Jeanne d'Arc refugee camp in Algeria, managed by the United Nations Administration for Assistance and Rehabilitation (UNRRA).
There, the young woman regained her health, learned to swim and fell in love. There he discovered that his mother and brother survived and were recovering. And there she discovered that there were relatives available to receive her in the United States, where she would go, still alone. He arrived in the United States on December 25, 1945. He was 15 years old. He would not be reunited with his mother and brother until 1946. For the three of them, the time of silence began about what had happened.
This could be explained only by the advice that Irene received from American relatives, but that was not all, she says. “We needed to speak, especially with our relatives, because we were able to inform them of what had happened to other family members, whose fate they were unaware of. But they couldn't bear to hear. This is one side of the story. The other is that it was so challenging for us to build a new life in America that we focused entirely on it. My mother had never worked, and now we were very poor, we had nothing, the Nazis had taken everything from us. All of our energy was focused on building this new life and taking advantage of the opportunities that America offered us at that time, and that were many ”, he says.
Irene married, had two children and built a career as a public health professor at the University of Michigan, where she founded the Raoul Wallenberg Project, which honors the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Jews, through the award of scholarships and an annual medal that has already distinguished men and women such as the Dalai Lama and Desmond Tutu. During almost all this time, friends, colleagues and neighbors were totally unaware of her past and her link to the Holocaust. Everything changed in the 1980s, when she was invited to speak on a panel that accompanied an itinerant exhibition about Anne Frank that was going to pass through Detroit. “When I started thinking about what I was going to say, it occurred to me that Anne Frank could not speak for herself. She had been silenced forever and I was alive and I felt it was my duty to tell the story, because she could not. A few years later, this feeling was reinforced by a phrase I heard from Eli Wiesel. He said: 'If you were in the fields, if you sniffed the air and heard the silence of the dead, it is your duty to be a witness, to tell the world what happened, to tell the stories'. This made a big impression on me – how important it was to be a witness for those who were there. That is why I have been speaking ever since,” she explains.
Tireless, she repeats her story in all the schools to which she is invited – and there have been many. To the students, she speaks about her experience during the Holocaust, and it was their emotional and enthusiastic reactions that inspired her to write her “painful” book. She worked on it for five years with the indispensable collaborations of John D. Bidwell and Kris Holloway, its co-authors. And she tries to do ever more. She tries to instill in her readers and listeners three messages that she repeats like a mantra, during this part of her life that she refers to as a “second phase”: “Never be a spectator”, she tells me on the phone. And what that means is that, if you see an injustice, do something to end it, don't just watch it. “Refuse to make yourself into an enemy” is the second message that she hopes to leave as an inheritance. She has given it form by participating in the foundation of a group of Jewish and Arab women in her community. It is called Zeitouna and it has met often over the last 20 years. The women learn from one another and try to work for peace.
The third message, which brings us back to the tireless work of her father – some of which will forever remain unknown to her – to keep the family alive and together, is that each person can make a difference. “Don't minimize your ability to change things and do things that matter. When I talk to students, they listen to my story and share theirs. We have an exchange. They have trauma in their lives - it could be a divorce, a parent's illness, abuse, discrimination ... I tell them, don't give up hope. The idea is to triumph over the tragedy. You can be a victim, but being a victim at a certain point in your life does not mean that you have to be a victim all your life. That doesn't have to define how you live your life.”
Irene understood this message when she returned to Bergen-Belsen with her brother, children and grandchildren. She says that she never thought of returning to the place where she saw “the lowest point of humanity – of hatred, cruelty and terror.” But for that very reason, she discovered inside herself the iron will to “fight against evil and injustice”, starting from the unshakable principle "that we are all human beings, made of the same essence". She recalls that she and her brother were “very apprehensive” about returning to what had been their lives during the war but the children insisted on the trip and, all together, ended up visiting Berlin, Amsterdam, Westerbork and Bergen-Belsen . “It was a fantastic experience. We grew very upset because the education center there has footage of the [British] troops liberating the camp and we saw how conditions got even worse after we left, three months earlier. But the other side of the coin is that going to the place where you were expected to die, to be murdered, accompanied by your children and grandchildren, gives you a great feeling of triumph. Here I am. With my family. It was very important to realize that we have this life, these children and that we can go back,” she says.
This year in April, Irene Butter should have returned to Bergen-Belsen again, as a guest for the celebrations of the 75 years of liberation of the concentration camp. The covid-19 pandemic canceled the initiative, however, and she is sorry about that. “What a pity that it wasn’t possible,” she says.
The camp no longer frightens her. What scares her are the injustices that she has continued to observe during almost a century of her life. The history we get used to reading in books hsa been the background of her life - from the American civil rights movement to the Vietnam War, the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Cold War and the presidency of Donald Trump. The time to stop fighting has not yet come for her. “My God ... We have the worst administration in history and it gets worse every day, with this president. We have to do everything we can to prevent him from winning the coming election, but I don't know if we will succeed. He uses so many tricks and manipulates so many forces in society that I don't know what will happen. But we will do everything we can to get a good result. And if he does not win the election, we will need to work very hard for a long time to put this country back on the path of what it should be, to return to its values and traditions. [Trump] has most certainly created an enormous amount of suffering.”