Irene Hasenberg Butter, Holocaust survivor, educator, human rights advocate, and author, died on October 2. She was 95.
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| Irene Hasenberg Butter | |
Jewish and born in Berlin in 1930, Butter and her family fled to Amsterdam in 1937, four years after the Nazi takeover of Germany. Following the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, she and her family were deported in 1943 to the Westerbork transit camp and subsequently to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Butter survived the war, along with her mother and brother, and immigrated to the U.S. in December 1945.
Butter earned an undergraduate degree from Queens College before attending Duke University, where she became the only woman in her economics Ph.D. program, receiving her doctorate in 1960. She went on to serve for decades as a distinguished Professor of Public Health at the University of Michigan, specializing in health economics, women's healthcare, and global health workforce policies.
After remaining silent about her childhood trauma for 40 years, Butter began speaking publicly about her experiences, including her time in Bergen-Belsen alongside her childhood neighbor in Amsterdam, Anne Frank. Recognizing her moral duty to bear witness, she addressed middle schools, high schools, universities, and international community halls, speaking to youth about hope, human dignity, and the responsibility to confront intolerance at its earliest stages.
With John D. Bidwell and Kris Holloway, she wrote Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope: A Bergen-Belsen Survivor's True Story (Leapfrog Press), which was a National Jewish Book Award Finalist in 2019 and was translated into multiple languages.
Among awards and honors, Butter received the Anne Frank Award for Human Dignity and Tolerance in 2025; the German Order of Merit in 2023 in recognition of her decades of work in youth Holocaust education, reconciliation, and peace promotion; and a royal knighthood from the king of the Netherlands in recognition of her lifelong dedication to Holocaust education, peace activism, and combating antisemitism.