At 7 p.m. on Sunday, Oct. 15, the Temple Jacob in Hancock, Michigan was filled to capacity with both Jews and non-Jews from throughout Houghton county to listen to Irene Miller, a survivor of the infamous Holocaust. The event began with a welcome address and introduction of the speaker by Dr. Laura Fiss, president of Temple Jacob and research assistant professor of the Pavlis Honors College.
Miller started her talk with a reminder to the audience that “only 10 percent of Jewish children in Europe survived the Holocaust.” She then told the audience about her childhood. She was born to Jewish parents in Warsaw, Poland and when she was 5 years old, the Nazi soldiers invaded Poland. One day, Miller said, their apartment building was bombed. They had to jump through their second-floor window. In the process, she fell into broken pieces of glass.
Commenting on how the Holocaust affected her, Miller said, “there are still some sounds and smells that have lived with me” although the second World War ended long ago. Continuing her comments on specific events, Miller narrated that, “I was warming myself around a fire with my mom and some people. A lady approached with a baby wrapped in a blanket. We made way for her because we thought she wanted to warm herself. Then a man among us said to the woman,‘your baby does not need warmth.’ The baby was dead.”
“I was always hungry, so hungry that I always had a bellyache,” Miller said.
Miller also said that she was writing poetry when she was young. Her poetry was in Polish since that was the first language she learned. Writing poetry, she said, was a sort of escape for her. Talking about what she currently does, Miller revealed that she did not want to talk about her Holocaust experience, but she was recently motivated to speak up. This has been an avenue for her to “use my life to promote tolerance and the acceptance of diversity.”
When the war ended, Miller returned to Poland with her mother. They relocated to Israel where Miller got her teacher training. She moved to the United States in her twenties and studied psychology at the University of Cincinnati where she earned a master’s degree in social psychology. She earned another master’s in Business Administration with a major in hospital management from the Xavier University, Cincinnati. She worked as the director of mental health for Livingston County, Michigan, director of the psychiatric division at Detroit Osteopathic Hospital and director of drug addiction treatment centers at the Detroit Medical Center. In retirement, Miller works with the Detroit Institute of Arts and serves on the Board of Directors of the American Jewish Committee. Her Holocaust memoir “Into No Man’s Land: A Historical Memoir” was published in November 2012 by the University of Michigan-Dearborn press.
