An earmark of a different kind

On June 20, 2024, Holocaust survivor Irene Butter, professor emerita in U-M’s School of Public Health, received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. The Federal Cross of Merit is the highest tribute the nation can pay to civilians for achievements in the political, economic, social, or intellectual realm.

In what can only be described as an ironic twist, the awards ceremony marked 81 years to the day that Nazi soldiers captured Butter’s family in their Amsterdam home and deported them to the Westerbork transit camp en route to the Bergen-Belsen extermination camp. Butter, only 12 years old, grabbed her childhood blanket in the rush. The year was 1943.

“June 20 has always been a tragic earmark for me,” Butter says.

And now the fateful date has become a positive earmark.

“You wonder how this happens,” she says with a bemused shrug.

The highest order

Butter visiting her father’s gravesite in Laupheim, Germany, 2014. This image appears in her memoir, co-authored with John D. Bidwell and Kris Holloway.

There is no wondering as to why Germany would bestow its highest cultural honor — the equivalent to the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom — on this much-celebrated peace activist and expert in health management and policy. Butter has returned to Germany a number of times to speak about the Holocaust and genocide. She’s motivated thousands of young people in the U.S. and Israel to stand up against hatred and racism. On a recent visit to Germany, she met in person with four high school students who produced an award-winning podcast about her life.

When traveling in Germany, Butter often visits Laupheim, the city where her father, John Hasenberg, is buried. His grave provides small comfort at the memory of his death as the family escaped Bergen-Belsen in January 1945. Hasenberg, who had been awarded the German Iron Cross for heroism in WWI, acquired passports for his wife and children from the Ecuadorian consul. The counterfeit documents qualified them for a prisoner exchange. But guards beat Butter’s “Pappi” so badly before departure that he died en route to Switzerland and the family was forced to leave his body at the train station in Biberach, Germany.

“I’ve always been grateful that my father died on the train,” Butter says, demonstrating unimaginable grace. “Think of the millions who were gassed and buried in the ground so nobody knows where they are. My father is buried in a place that I can visit. I’ve gone there a half a dozen times or more and the people in that town, the people who guard that cemetery, have become my friends.”

Refusing to be enemies

Closer to home, Butter also belongs to a circle of Ann Arbor friends who call themselves Zeitouna (or “olive tree” in Arabic). The dialogue group, founded 22 years ago in the wake of 9/11, comprises six Jewish and six Palestinian women who have developed a safe and mutually supportive space amid the ongoing and escalating violence in the Middle East. The multi-generational group traveled together to Israel in 2006 (just before the Israel-Hezbollah War) and met one another’s families there, including Butter’s daughter and son-in-law, who is Palestinian. Butter’s grandchildren also are in Israel.

“Everybody thinks Palestinians and Jews would be enemies, but we make it a point to contradict that,” Butter says. “We spent [the first year of Zeitouna] just listening to each other’s stories. By that time, we bonded, and nothing was going to pull us apart.”

That bond helps navigate the women’s shared devastation in the wake of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Israel’s retaliation, and the horrific aftermath. Even as friends and peace activists, they struggle with the discourse at times.

“We address complicated issues and we’re not always on the same page, but we talk about it,” Butter says.” We may not get to resolution, but we understand why the other person feels the way they feel.”

They rely on a solid foundation of open-heartedness and the willingness to “let in” new information, says Laurie White, a Zeitouna member who produced and directed the 2007 documentary Refusing to be Enemies. It helps that White and other Zeitouna members have professional experience in conflict resolution and the formal practice of Dialogue (with a capital d). They are not interested in debate.

White showcases Zeitouna’s pilgrimage to Israel in her film and is currently working on a follow-up documentary.

“I felt it was important for us to tell our own story,” she says. “And now that we are 22 years down the road, the question is: What is the value of maintaining relationships over the long haul with people who are ‘the other?’ What does that process look like?

“The time since October 7 has been challenging for us,” she says, “not because we don’t want to be together, but because it’s just so painful.”

Mentors and friends

Butter’s memoir From Holocaust to Hope: Shores Beyond Shores (Leapfrog Press, 2021) was a National Jewish Book Award finalist.

Butter also is the subject of the 2015 independent documentary Never a Bystander. And earlier this year, CBS News’ Lisa Ling profiled the Zeitouna sisterhood, spotlighting its ties to the Arab-Jewish Alliance on the Michigan campus. Much like Zeitouna, the U-M student alliance serves as a refuge from the complex geopolitical history and divisiveness that makes progress toward peace so daunting.

Arab-Jewish Alliance co-founder Evan Rotker, BA ’24, sought to bridge the two distinct communities on campus after realizing he was the only Jewish student in his Arabic-language class. (He’d been studying Arabic since high school and plans for a career in foreign policy.) In 2021, he and co-founder Mutaz Faqqouseh, BS ’23, focused on community-building, not politics.

“Here’s a chance to bring two groups together who have a history of tension,” says Rotker, noting it was a lot easier said than done. He graduated from the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy. Faqqouseh is a certified clinical medical assistant.

“It came down to: ‘Let’s just sit down and share a meal, become friends.'” says Rotker. “We had the most amazing conversations about movies, sports, growing up. Sometimes religion or politics would come up, but that wasn’t our goal.”

After October 7, the group took a hiatus. “I saw reasonable, rational people who could no longer have reasonable, rational conversations,” Rotker says. “It was upsetting beyond belief.”

But on reconvening, the solid core of 10-12 members shared what they were experiencing on campus and on social media. They focused on contextualizing and defusing the extreme rhetoric on both sides.

“It’s easy to see videos and social media posts and draw conclusions,” Rotker says. “We were like, ‘This is not how real people are. We don’t want death and destruction.’ We’re all Michigan students and should help each other out. I always felt safer after meeting and talking to more people, having this community.”

Having the Zeitouna members as mentors also helped, he says. As Butter notes, “There are so many courses at universities about public speaking, but there aren’t any courses about listening. And it’s difficult at times.”

Some relationships were tested in the spring as students protested and camped on the Diag, demanding the administration divest from entities profiting from the war, Rotker says. “But to live in a democracy we understand you can fundamentally disagree while respecting each other’s perspectives.”

As students return to campus this fall, Rotker is confident the current alliance leaders will maintain ties to Zeitouna and their model of honest dialogue and mutual respect.

“The longer the war goes on, the harder it will be,” he says. “[The Arab-Jewish Alliance] is a stepping stone, but I don’t know what the next stepping stone is, or where it goes.”

We can be heroes

Butter hopes students like Rotker and his friends will continue to speak up and articulate their opinions and demands: “That’s what society needs, right? Young voices.”

She retired from the University in 1996 after 20 years of teaching microeconomics and policy analysis to Michigan students. Her late husband, Charlie Butter, was an emeritus professor of psychology at U-M. During her pioneering years as a female faculty member at SPH, she co-founded the annual Raoul Wallenberg Medal & Lecture Series. Wallenberg, who graduated from U-M in 1934, was a hero who saved tens of thousands of Jews from the Holocaust before disappearing at the hands of the Soviets. Among the early Wallenberg honorees was Miep Gies, one of the Dutch citizens who hid Anne Frank and her family until they were captured in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam. Butter and Frank were childhood acquaintances who encountered one another at Bergen-Belsen.

Butter’s achievements and awards are too numerous to mention here, but her most recent honor at the German embassy was especially poignant, says filmmaker and Zeitouna sister White. She attended the ceremony in Washington, D.C., and says Butter “was in her element.”

“She had so many of her dear people around her,” White says. “She had such a good time.”

During the trip, Butter visited the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, where she donated the childhood blanket she grabbed when the Nazi soldiers captured her family. It had been with her for 90 years.
 
 
(The lead image is an extreme close-up from the cover of Butter’s memoir “From Holocaust to Hope: Shores Beyond Shores, A Bergen-Belsen Survivor’s True Story,” Leapfrog Press, 2021.)