Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct Irene Butter’s age.  

Irene Butter survived the Holocaust, she believes, by two miracles. 

The first occurred only a few days after her arrival at the Westerbork concentration camp in the Netherlands, the other at the end of her stay in Bergen-Belsen.

Now 94 years old, Butter travels the world telling her story, which is so similar to many who lost their lives and loved ones to the Holocaust. 

Butter will be speaking at the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Arts on April 21 at 7 p.m. as a part of the Holocaust Memorial Week at Oregon State University which is free to attend. 

With remembrance in mind, Butter wrote her memoir, From Holocaust to Hope: Shores Beyond Shores: a Bergen-Belsen Survivor’s True Story published in 2018 after five years of dedication and support from close friends. Now it’s translated into five different languages. 

Born in 1930 to a loving family in Berlin, Germany, Butter’s childhood was idyllic. 

In an interview with The Daily Barometer, Butter said was grateful to have lived with her brother, parents and grandparents. Butter’s grandparents lovingly spoiled her and her brother with trips and surprises. 

Butter’s father was a bank owner and when the Nazis came into power in Germany, Jews were no longer allowed to own businesses. At that time, Butter’s father was unemployed and the persecution of Jews escalated under Nazis. 

As a young child, Butter didn’t understand the political upheaval around her. Her parents protected her from the truth, but it wasn’t long before Butter realized the reality of being Jewish.

Their home country now under Nazi occupation, Butter’s family fled to Holland. Butter’s father found a job with American Express Company in Amsterdam. This marked the first breakup of their family–Butter’s grandparents weren’t allowed to come with her. 

Butter’s family moved into the same neighborhood as Anne Frank, who famously documented her life in the “Secret Annex” in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation, according to the Anne Frank House. 

“My brother and I went to school, immediately learned the language very quickly, and the first two years we lived in Amsterdam were pretty good years, although, of course, Hitler was invading more and more countries and deporting increasing numbers of Jews,” Butter said in the interview. 

Shortly after, the deportations began in the Netherlands.

“The situation became very frightening for Jews,” Butter said. “There were many restraints put on Jews. (We) couldn’t go to public places like parks and museums and theaters and swimming pools, and we had to wear the Star of David on our clothing all the time, so people knew that we were the Jews.”

All Jewish people had a curfew and were not able to use public transportation. Later, they confiscated their bicycles and limited their mobility. 

It made it a lot easier, Butter said, for Nazis to find and deport Jews to concentration camps. 

There were two miracles in Irene Butter’s life. The first was in Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands, the second in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany.

The first two years were peaceful until the Nazis invaded the Netherlands and took the reins of the government.

The Nazis stole not only the rights of Jews, but their personal items, too. 

(“The) situation became very frightening for Jews,” Butter said. “There were many restraints put on Jews. Couldn’t go to public places like parks and museums and theaters and swimming pools, and we had to wear the Star of David on our clothing all the time. so people knew that we were the Jews, and we had a curfew.”

It wasn’t long before Butter’s family was deported to the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands, which was a German transit camp. The majority of the people deported to the camp were normally sent further east to Eastern Europe, many to Auschwitz, and others to death camps in the eastern part of Europe.

Before Butter’s family was sent to Westerbork, however, Butter’s father met a friend on the street who had just received two Ecuadorian passports, one for him and one for his wife. They collected these to escape through what was called the “Exchange Policy.”

It seemed to be the best way to survive. The exchange policy allowed for the exchange of German prisoners of war and German civilians who had left Germany for the Americas to exchange for Jews who had passports in the concentration camps. 

When Butter’s father discovered this, he worked to obtain these passports for his own family’s survival. Without these, they would’ve been shipped to Auschwitz, widely known for its mass killing of over 1 million Jews, according to the United States Holocaust Museum. 

That’s when the first miracle of Butter’s life happened: her family’s passports arrived in Westerbork.

“Those passports made a huge difference because then we became exchange Jews and we had value for the Nazis,” Butter said. 

Because of these passports, Butter’s family were sent to the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp in Germany to await transport to the United States. The Nazis told Butter’s family Bergen-Belsen was a “better” camp and their stay would be short-lived.

These were both lies. 

Instead, the first exchange occurred 11 months after they would arrive in Bergen-Belsen, and they were lucky to be included in that one.

“Adults had to do slave labor every day from early morning into the evening. They had to work six and a half days a week,” Butter said. “The working conditions were horrible. They got beaten up if they didn’t perform exactly how the Nazis expected.”

Butter’s parents’ health declined significantly–they barely survived to leave the camp.

Long labor hours combined with poor nutrition–a small piece of bread and a soup made from turnips cooked in water–quickly malnourished the prisoners, Butter explained. The crowded camp became crawling with infectious diseases like cholera, pneumonia, dysentery, polio, with the most destructive being typhus. 

In just a few months, Butter’s father caught pneumonia and went to the camp’s hospital–which didn’t house any medications or doctors–and was able to rest. After some time, he returned to the barrack, but Butter said she doesn’t believe he ever fully recovered. Butter’s mother became ill and bedridden, so Butter devoted her time to caring for her. 

“She never got diagnosed, so I don’t know what was the main cause,” Butter said. “Just the conditions alone, right? It can cause you to lose your health.”

At Bergen-Belsen, barracks were close together and Butter made many friends. One of the friends, Hanneli Goslar, was a close childhood friend from the Netherlands and a friend of Frank.

In October of 1944, Frank and her family were betrayed in hiding and deported to Auschwitz concentration camp in German-occupied Poland, according to the U.S. Holocaust Museum. 

Not long after, Butter said, a group of women from Auschwitz arrived at Bergen-Belsen. The Nazis were beginning to liquidate Auschwitz. One of these women was Frank, along with her sister Margot Frank.

Though they were side-by-side in the camp, they were separated by barbed wire and forbidden from communicating with the other prisoners, like Butter and Goslar. 

“A group of women from Auschwitz came to Bergen-Belsen,” Butter said. “They were beginning to liquidate the camp Auschwitz, so they came to Bergen-Belsen and were side-by-side, but separated by barbed wire and not allowed to have any communication.”

When Goslar was walking through the camp, she heard the women on the other side of the fence speaking Dutch. She discovered her friend Frank was among them. 

Along with that, Frank and her sister had no clothing. Butter and Goslar prepared a bundle of their clothes–which at that point were rags–to bring to Frank. A date and time were arranged to meet at the fence. 

It had to be after dark because the guards in the guideposts watched the fence like hawks. The two sides weren’t allowed any communication. On that dark, cold evening, Butter and Goslar met Frank at the fence and flung the bundle over. However, a woman appeared suddenly in the dark and snatched the clothes.

“That was very disappointing, and that day when I saw Anne, she was so thin and pale, and all she had was a great blanket wrapped around her,” Butter said. “She explained that her sister Margot had typhus and she was too sick to come to the fence. So it was a very grim situation. And my guess is she did not live much longer after that encounter.”

Frank died in Bergen-Belsen, according to the Anne Frank House. 

Though Butter and Goslar planned to return to deliver more clothes to Frank, the exchange was finally processed. The Butters had to report to a Nazi doctor for screening. Butter and her brother were approved while her father was at work. 

When her father returned, she begged him to help her with her mother, who was still bedridden. As they dressed her, she collapsed. She would never make it to the screening station. 

Butter decided to accompany her father to the doctor who approved him. The doctor looked at Butter standing next to her father, and that’s when she experienced the second miracle. 

“He checked off my mother’s name,” Butter said. “Looking at me now, here I was 14 years old, very thin in raglike clothing, and my mother was in her late 40s. So could I have looked like my mother, or was he just being kind and making it possible for our family to leave together? That’s a question I have asked myself many times, but we’ll never know.”

The Butter family boarded a Red Cross train to the road to freedom. Once they were on the train, they were allowed to remove their Stars of David from their clothing for the first time in years. 

One detail Butter vividly remembers was the heated train. She hadn’t experienced being in a heated building for a very long time. 

Almost as quick as they escaped, Butter’s father died the second night on the train. She remembers having to leave him when h was taken off the train in Biberach, Germany. They continued on the train to Switzerland, where her mother and brother were quickly hospitalized for their illnesses. 

“He just couldn’t make it, and here he had done everything to save the family,” Butter said.

She was forced to leave to a refugee camp in Algeria, Camp Jeanne d’Arc, while her mother and brother remained hospitalized in Switzerland. Butter stayed until the war was over and on Christmas Eve in 1945 she arrived in the U.S.. Six months later, her mother and brother joined her. 

Butter left the past behind, those who brought her back to the U.S. telling her to never recall what happened in the Holocaust aloud. She finished high school and attended Queens College in New York while tuition was still free. 

She went on to attend Duke University for graduate school where she was one of the first women to earn a p.h.D in economics. There, Butter met her husband, Charles Butter, and moved to Washington, D.C. where she worked with the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. 

In 1962, Butter and her husband joined the faculty at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where Butter taught Health Economics where they taught for 36 years. 

Together, they developed one of the first courses in women’s health.

“(For) 40 years I did not talk about the Holocaust, partly because nobody would listen,” Butter said. “It took a long time before people were ready to listen about the Holocaust. I mean, it’s hard to believe that now, because there is a lot of interest and a lot of teaching also, but then people couldn’t face it.”

It wasn’t until her daughter asked her to speak to her high school class about her experience in the Holocaust that Butter realized the interest in the Jewish history. 

After that, she spoke on a panel for an Anne Frank exhibition. 

“I became aware of the fact that Anne Frank can never speak, can never tell her stories,” Butter said. “But I am alive and I should be representing her as well as my own story.”

Now, she’s spoken in countless schools across the country and abroad. 

After Butter speaks in a middle school, she asks the teacher for the students to write a letter to send. 

“They’re very interesting things they write about, like, I want to live my life so I will have a story to tell, like yours,” she said.

“One student once said, it is the responsibility of our generation to eliminate genocide from this planet,” Butter said.  “I got a letter from a student, that was sealed so the teacher never saw it, and he said he was bullied every day because he’s gay and how difficult it is to go to school and be recognized as the ‘other.’”

This past month, Butter was awarded the Anne Frank Award from the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in the USA. 

At the end of every talk, Butter leaves behind three messages: never be a bystander, one person can in fact make a difference, and to be open to interacting with different people in life.