Our dear friend and colleague, and distinguished University of Michigan professor emerita of public health, Dr. Irene Butter, passed away peacefully on October 2 in her home in Ann Arbor, surrounded by family and friends. Irene dedicated her life to teaching about justice and compassion, receiving the highest civilian honor of the Federal Republic of Germany, the Officer’s Cross of the Order of Merit, in 2024, before receiving the Anne Frank Award for Human Dignity and Tolerance a year later and the royal recognition of Commander in the Order of Orange-Nassau by the Kingdom of the Netherlands. Her memoir, Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope, co-written with Kris Holloway and John Bidwell (2019), was translated into Dutch, Portuguese, Czech, and German.
Born Irene Hasenberg in Berlin, Irene fled Nazi Germany to the safety of pre-war Amsterdam until she was deported with her family to the transit camp of Westerbork in north-eastern Netherlands. Irene’s time in Westerbork was marked by the fear of a looming cattle car, sitting and waiting to deport prisoners further east. After receiving a package of fake Ecuadorian passports issued by diplomat, A. Muñoz Borrero, Irene and her family were spared the fate of the majority of Westerbork prisoners, killed in Sobibor and Auschwitz. They were deported to Bergen-Belsen instead, and escaped this camp on a train to Switzerland as “exchange Jews”, saved by their Ecuadorian passports. While Irene, her mother Gertrude (Trudi), and brother Werner survived the Holocaust, Irene’s father, John Hasenberg, died in southern Germany on the train to freedom.
In the life Irene built after the Holocaust, her messages of peace and justice reached far and wide, across continents and classrooms. Her legacy is woven into the fabric of the University of Michigan where she inspired generations of students, faculty, and community members with her visionary leadership. With her “sisters” in Zeitouna, a Palestinian and Jewish women Dialogue group she co-founded in 2002 to work across the divide, Irene spread messages of solidarity and humanity to countless people. She co-founded the University of Michigan Raoul Wallenberg Medal, which brought humanitarian leaders to our campus, among them the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu, and Dutch rescuers Marion Pritchard-Van Binsbergen and Miep Gies. Miep Gies, one of the rescuers of the Frank family and the other people hiding in the achterhuis (“secret annex”), remained very close to Irene’s heart. Irene would frequently repeat Miep’s message that rescue should not be elevated to something extraordinary, because, in Miep’s words, she merely did her “human duty.”
In our department, Irene put her weight behind the Dutch program since its institutional beginnings in the 1970s and 1980s. A central person in the Dutch-speaking local community, Irene always remained connected to a Dutch language and culture she had conquered to become her own, as a child refugee. In 2020, Irene delivered our 20th De Vries–VanderKooy Memorial lecture, named for Meindert VanderKooy and Irene’s close friend, Jan de Vries. As a first-hand witness to the life of Anne Frank in Amsterdam and Bergen-Belsen, she visited our Anne Frank course from its inception over 30 years ago. For the past 13 years, her dedication to our students extended beyond the Dutch program to the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies in our cornerstone course Anne Frank in Context. More recently, she started visiting our Amsterdam course, bearing witness to pre-war and war-time Jewish Amsterdam.
In the past decade, over 1,500 students in our Dutch program alone felt the weight of Irene’s calls to action and her warnings against authoritarianism and fascism. She mentored our Dutch program in shaping an ethically safe historiography that finds the connections between Holocaust and colonialism, teaching students about human rights and the enduring need for paths to peace and understanding. On her last day in the Anne Frank course in late March, she walked in as she always had, listening together with students to the song “Wenn ein Paketchen Kommt” (when a package arrives). The song, sung by prisoners at Westerbork, represented to her not only the arrival of the passports in the camp, but the act of standing up for people the way Borrero had in saving her life. It became the message she lived her life by: Never a Bystander. Irene kept singing the song until the end of her formidable life. As our students listen to it again this term, accompanied by Irene’s many lessons, we are committed to joining her family, friends, and colleagues in fostering her legacy.
