Irene H. Butter

Irene Hasenberg was born in Berlin on 11 December 1930 to John and Gertrude Hasenberg, with a younger brother, Werner. The family practiced Reform Judaism and was rooted in German banking; her father and his grandfather before him worked in that trade. After the bank was confiscated because of Jewish ownership, and after further attacks on their livelihood, John moved the household to Amsterdam in December 1937.

When Germany occupied the Netherlands in May 1940, restrictions on Jews tightened. Irene's father sought foreign travel papers through a Swedish businessman. Before those documents arrived, German authorities deported the family from Amsterdam to Westerbork in February 1944. There Irene met again friends from her Amsterdam neighborhood, among them Hanneli Goslar and Anne Frank. At Westerbork the family finally received Ecuadorian identity papers forwarded from Amsterdam. Those papers moved them into Bergen-Belsen's section for foreigners and into an exchange that would take survivors toward Switzerland. John Hasenberg died of camp injuries before the departure. Irene, then fourteen and severely underweight, was sent to a UNRRA camp in Algeria to recover, reached Baltimore on Christmas Eve 1945 with help from American relatives, and six months later was reunited with Gertrude and Werner, who flew to the United States.

Encouraged to put the war behind her, Butter focused on schooling. She attended Queens College in New York and completed a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Michigan. Michigan hired her in 1966. Colleagues later noted that her courses highlighted race, gender, and poverty as forces on health, and the place of child and family health in a healthy community, long before those topics were routine in public health teaching.

From the 1960s through the 1990s she published on U.S. health care, health manpower, the migration of physicians, foreign medical graduates, midwifery, and gender hierarchies in the health workforce. The University of Michigan Regents granted her emeritus status on retirement in 1996. She continued to write and to appear in university and community programs after leaving the full-time faculty.

She married Charlie Butter; they raised two children and made their home in Ann Arbor while both worked as University of Michigan professors. For years after the war she followed advice to keep silent about Bergen-Belsen. That silence broke in 1976 when her high-school daughter Pamela asked to base a class project on Irene's wartime story. Irene spoke to Pamela's class, found the response supportive, and began a second public life as a witness and educator.

She co-founded the Raoul Wallenberg Lectures at Michigan, honoring the Swedish diplomat who saved Jews during the Holocaust, and she took part in Zeituna, a dialogue group of Arab and Jewish women. Her memoir and later interviews returned often to Amsterdam, Westerbork, and the cost of silence.

Irene Butter died in the United States on 2 October 2026 at the age of 95. German public broadcaster NDR reported that she died among family and friends, and that her literary agent, Mary Bisbee-Beek, confirmed the death. Tagesschau and other outlets carried the news on 3 and 4 October 2026. No cause of death was made public in those reports.

Butter is remembered as a survivor who turned private trauma into public teaching, and as a public-health economist who put inequality and women's health at the center of her classroom. Germany's Order of Merit (2024) and the Dutch Anne Frank Award (2025) recognized decades of Holocaust education. At Michigan she helped create the Raoul Wallenberg Lectures; in the wider community she modeled dialogue across Arab and Jewish women's circles. Students, alumni, and German and Dutch audiences who heard her late-life testimony kept her insistence on memory and peace in circulation after her death.