Cover Story
ODYSSEY
from page 52
But not forget.
Since her retirement from U-M,
Butter has talked to many student
groups about her experience.
She sees her life in stages. Born in
Berlin, Butter says the first six years of
her childhood were very happy and
harmonious. Her father and grandfa-
ther were bankers. To escape Hitler, the
family immigrated to Amsterdam. But
three years later, when the Germans
invaded, the family was sent to
Westerbork.
Another stage was when the family
was sent to Bergen-Belsen, "a slow
death camp," Butter says, as opposed
to the gas chambers and crematoria at Auschwitz.
More than 50,000 people perished at Bergen-Belsen
because of disease and poor conditions.
"Food rations were very inadequate — soup made
of water and turnips — and the inhumanity ..."
Butter says. There were thefts and fights. Sometimes
cruel Jews mistreated people — and that on top of
the cruelty of Nazi beatings.
"You would get up in the morning to see who
died," she says.
The Hasenbergs were finally released as part of an
exchange for German citizens. But they had to pass
a physical to get on the train. Their parents were too
ill, so Irene and her brother went twice, once in
place of each parent for physicals. The ruse worked.
Brother and sister dragged their parents to the train
that would take them to freedom.
Sadly, Butter's father died on route to
Switzerland. Butter's mother and
brother, very ill, were taken to a Swiss hospital,
while Butter was sent away to a deportation camp
run by the United Nations in Algiers — one of the
worst moments of her life, she says.
For three months, she had no idea if her mother and
brother were even alive. It took one-and-a-half years
before the family was reunited in the United States.
How did she survive such horror?
"I always had someone who took charge of me,"
she says. "Somebody who had pure goodness and
kindness."
In Algiers, an American Jewish woman took her
under her wing, and an Algerian Jew arranged better
living conditions for her.
When American relatives saw the family's name on
a list of surviving Jews, they sent for them.
"They were truly wonderful people," Butter says.
But Butter has not fin-
,
Clockwise
from top left:
Irene Butter, 4, with her
father, John Hasenberg,
in pre-war Berlin.
Irene Butter, 5,
and brother Warner
Hasenberg, 7, before
World War II.
to
4/25
2003
54
In 1983,
Sadik Nassar and
Pamela Butter wed
in Ann Arbor and
celebrated with her
parents, Irene and
Charlie Butter.
ished telling her story of life in
the concentration camp. She is
determined that people know
the details.
"The quintessence of these
two camps, the worst thing, in
Westerbork, was the train that
came every week and left for
Auschwitz," she says.
Every Monday night in every
barrack, the lights were turned
on at midnight and a list of
names was read of the people
going on the train the next
morning.
"We never knew who would
be going," she says. But if someone was going on
the train her family knew, they spent the rest of the
night with them and walked them to the train the
next morning.
"Every week, that was the cycle of life. And
between then, you would worry constantly," she says.
"I still have a reaction to trains. They mean sepa-
ration and death."
Then conditions got even worse when the family
was moved to Bergen-Belsen, she says.
It was there she last saw a very pale and ill Anne
Frank, whom she knew of in Amsterdam — both
were Jews from Germany. Butter helped a mutual
friend of Frank's collect clothes for her at Bergen-
Belsen. When they threw Frank's package over a
fence within. the camp, another woman grabbed it
away. But Irene and her family soon left Bergen-
Belsen, and she learned later that Anne had died
shortly afterwards at the camp.
Germany revisited:
Irene Butter, son
Noah, 39, of San
Francisco, her
brother Warner
* Hasenberg and his
son John Hasenberg,
37, both of
Washington, D. C.,
visit the German
town where Butter's
and her brother's
father died en route
to freedom from
Bergen-Belsen.
:paittkg
Breaking Her Silence
Once she arrived in New York City, Butter was
unable to talk to anybody about her experiences.
"I had a great need to talk about it — to process it
— but no one would listen," she says.
"That was very painful ... It was like I had a split
-
personality."
But Americans weren't ready to hear about the
horror, she adds, and maybe they felt some guilt that
they had escaped it.
Butter didn't even speak about the camps to her
mother or brother — not even when they consoled
each other every year on the yahrtzeit of her father.
But perhaps that was a mixed blessing, she says.
How could she have gone to the university and
studied while trying to work out her past?
With a scholarship, Butter went on to college and
graduate school. She received a fellowship, a Ph.D.
in economics, married and, within a few years, had
two children, Noah and Pam, and a position at U-
M in Ann Arbor, as did her husband, now 74, a psy-
chology professor.
It wasn't until her daughter asked Butter to speak
to her high school history class that she finally broke
her silence about her Holocaust experiences. Many
colleagues and friends didn't know she was a survivor.
But years earlier, her daughter sensed what was
hidden.
"I had to work hard to get the story out of my
mother," Pam says from her parents' Ann Arbor liv-