ADRIAN — Irene Butter had just a few requests for the people who listened to her speak at the Adrian District Library on Nov. 19.
Refuse to be enemies.
Remember that one person can make a difference.
And never be a bystander.
Butter, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, visited Adrian as part of an educational series on the Holocaust organized by Bob Behnke and the Adrian Diversity Event Fund. She is a retired University of Michigan professor and author of the memoir “Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope.”
Born in 1930 in Berlin, she left Germany as a child when her family fled to Amsterdam to avoid Nazi persecution. But just a few years after they moved to Amsterdam, Hitler’s forces overran the Netherlands too. She and her family were deported first to the Westerbork transit camp and then to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen.
Butter described how the Nazis carried out their deportations. They would block off an entire neighborhood and go from house to house, and any Jewish people they found would be given 10 minutes to gather whatever belongings they could carry before being marched to a central point and loaded onto trucks.
She displayed an image from one of those deportations that provides a stark visual reminder of the reason for her admonishment about being a bystander. It shows Nazis rounding up their victims while other people sit outside a cafe, calmly drinking coffee.
“There are people sitting there, having their regular morning coffee, watching what’s going on but not doing anything about it,” she said.
After Butter, her parents, and her older brother were taken from their home, they were packed into cattle cars on a train where they sat in darkness — no windows, no food, no water, no toilets.
They were sent first to Westerbork, where conditions were brutal, and then to Bergen-Belsen, where conditions were even worse.
With once-a-day meals consisting only of turnips boiled in water and a single piece of bread, people were malnourished and weak. Between the bad nutrition and the unhygienic conditions, disease was a constant threat. Butter vividly remembers the daily roll calls during which, rain or shine, everyone had to stand outside for hours while the guards counted them, even if they were too ill to stand.
Butter’s father was eventually able to secure their release as part of an exchange. At the screening station prior to release, Butter had to impersonate her mother, who was so weak that friends had to carry her to the train. Her father died on the days-long journey to the Swiss border.
When they arrived in Switzerland, Butter’s mother and brother were so sick that they were taken immediately to a hospital. She herself was less ill and was sent to Camp Jeanne d’Arc, a refugee camp in Algeria, where she stayed — with no family — until December 1945.
She and her family would finally be reunited when they came to the United States to live with relatives. She arrived at the port of Baltimore right around her 15th birthday.
Over the course of her life and career — which included teaching for more than 30 years at the University of Michigan School of Public Health — Butter developed a few rules to live by.
One, of course, was to never stand by when someone is being threatened or injustice is being done.
Another was to refuse to be enemies with another person, a principle she tries to embody as one of the founders of Zeitouna, a group of Jewish and Palestinian women in Ann Arbor.
And one is that one person can make a difference. She cited the example of Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman who saved thousands of Jewish people while serving as Sweden’s special envoy in Budapest, and Gunter Demnig, a German artist who started what’s known as the Stolperstein movement. That effort involves placing engraved brass stones in front of the former residences of people who were murdered by the Nazi regime.
