Berlin, Germany (December 5, 2022) - The German podcast featuring Irene Butter was honored as Best Podcast by Reporter: Innen Forum. The podcast, entitled Zeitkapsel: “Irene, wie hast du Den Holocaust überlebt?" (“Irene, how did you survive the Holocaust?”), involves Irene being interviewed by four high school students about her Holocaust experience. In response to the award, Irene said, “This is so exciting. Is this a dream?”
The Birth of the Podcast
The podcast was the brainchild of German reporter Caroline Schmidt. The two first met in 2010 when Caroline interviewed Irene. They kept in touch, always conversing in English, as Irene said “I can’t stand the German language anymore. It reminds me of the concentration camp.”
In 2014, Irene was invited to speak at the German-American Institute in Heidelberg. She partook in a symposium on the meaning of life. Before the presentation, Caroline asked Irene if she might tell her story in German. Irene hesitated and then she realized that it was time to make peace with the language. So, she spoke in German for the first time in almost 70 years.
Irene was invited back to Germany in March 2020. When that was thwarted by COVID, some of the children who were to hear her wanted to skype with Irene. This idea quickly grew into a podcast. Over several months, Caroline then worked with Irene to improve her German in preparation for the recordings.
The Podcast
In the fall of 2021, four 16-year-old German girls—Ida, Lonneke, Mathilda, and Milla—convened at the Hamburg NDR Info Podcast studio where they Zoomed with Irene who lives in Ann Arbor, MI. The conversation was stilted at first, but the five quickly found their rhythm. Their talk became fluid as Irene walked the girls through her childhood: about her happy childhood in Berlin in the 1930s and fleeing to the Netherlands, about the deportation and the time in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, about the constant fear, the brutality, the hunger, the ever-flaring hope, about the death of her father, their miraculous rescue to Switzerland, and her happy future in America.
Together, they made 11 episodes. In September 2022 Irene and the girls met in person when Irene visited Germany to promote the German edition of her book, Shores Beyond Shores.
The Podcast Award
On the evening of December 5, after a 3-year COVID-forced hiatus, Germany’s biggest night honoring reporters—hosted by Reporter: Innen Forum—was back. Over 500 attendees packed together in an unostentatious hall. No food, drink, or decorations, and the temperature was so low that many wore their coats. The simplicity was deliberate in light of the current economic difficulties in Germany and the crisis in Ukraine. As renowned German journalist and event host Claus Kleber said about the event, ‘it was a working atmosphere.’
Despite the economy and Ukraine, colleagues were happy to be back together. They enthusiastically applauded every category. They were especially moved by the special recognition of Anna Baninets and her website team investigating Russian war crimes in Ukraine.
Then the evening’s last category was best podcasts. There were six podcasts in the running, including Irene’s.
Caroline knew the competition was stiff. There were “very strong teams with amazing and important topics: a reconstruction of the terror attack on the Olympic Games 72 from the perspective of the author’s father who was a policeman then; a reconstruction of the 2002 school shooting in Erfurt from the perspective of a survivor.”
But, in the end, it was Irene’s podcast that prevailed as the Best Podcast of 2022. As Caroline said, her entire team was “completely overwhelmed.”
An English version of the podcast is currently being planned.