Transcripts For CSPAN2 Irene Butter Shores Beyond Shores 202

[inaudible conversations] good evening. Good evening. If i can ask the last of her guests to take their seats. I want to welcome everyone. Im margot lurie contractor programming and engagement at the museum of jewish heritage, a living memorial to holocaust. A little bit about this institution before we go into the program. This is the thirdlargest Holocaust Museum in the world. Offering a range of rigorous and engaging exhibitions, programs and resources. In a world of rising intolerance, antisemitism and holocaust denial, we are called upon to be bolder in mission of education and outreach than ever before through events like this one. Tonight if it is indeed a special one. This is the launch of the new edition of shores beyond shores power from them wife by irene butter, a survivor of two concentration camps camps whose dedicated her life to Holocaust Education and peace activism. She is the cofounder of the metal and lecture series at the university of michigan where she is professor America Public health. Shes also one of the founders of an arab jewish womens Dialogue Group in ann arbor. We are also simply step with us her coauthors john and chris. We are honored to have doctor but in conversation with Andrew Solomon who is the renowned author of far from the tree, parents, children and the search for identity as well as the new day demon which one that 2001 National Book award for nonfiction. Hes professor of clinical medical psychology at Columbia University Medical Center and a former president of pen american center. I just want to share with you briefly his reaction to shores beyond shores. After reading this memoir he was inspired to write that, quote, irene rider book is a type of clarity and decision written with a passion intent to inform and was not a shred of selfpity. It is intimate and bears witness to the resilience of a family who drew strength from one another, even through the darkness of the holocaust. It is a shockingly honest and helpful book. Thats quite a response, and with that as a starting point i am very much looking forward to this conversation. We will have an audience q a afterward. Following that books and from h are distinguished guests will be on sale in the museum shop and the authors will be available for signing in the main lobby. Id like to welcome our cspan2 was watching us on booktv. We are going to watch a brief video about auschwitz not long ago, not far away. This is the exhibition that a ts on view at our museum and effort that a program will begin. Thank you so much. [applause] well, let me begin by thanking the museum of jewish heritage for hosting this important conversation. Thanks to the books coauthors. Thanks to mary veeck who helped organize this event and many thanks most of all to doctor irene butter. You heard the enthusiasm of my response to the book which is right about before so i wont read it aloud again. But i will say that it is an extraordinary book, extraordinary in part because it tells the story of the holocaust over again, and every time you read it that may come as as a k but also extorted because of the transformation that it describes, irene, as she went her original experiences as a small child in germany through the many painful expenses of the war and then onto a life afterwards. Its very encompassing. Its very humane. I think its a very, very important book so in honor to be with you. Thank you very much. Why do we begin with you too skinny quick description of what happened and what you are and where you went . So my book is a a memoir tht covers the first 15 years of my life. I was born in berlin and that age seven my family left to immigrate to the netherlands because of hitler, because of persecution of the jews. My grandfather owned a bank in berlin. My father was a partner and when the bank was taken away by the nazis, because jews were not allowed to own a bank anymore, my father was unemployed and that led him to the netherlands. Hoping that we would be safe there. We were in holland two years before the invasion by the nazis, and, of course, instantly holland became an occupied country, things happen very gradually. Rights were taken away from the jews one by one, and, of course, the worst was the deportation eventually. We were deported to a concentration camp that was also called a transit camp. After eight months were sent to bergenbelsen. After bergenbelsen, we had the incredible fortune of being included in a Prisoner Exchange between germany and america. America was sending german citizens who had lived in america but couldnt go back to germany when the war began, and held the jews with american passports for this Prisoner Exchange. And we were included in one of the few transport out of bergenbelsen, after having been there almost a year and barely surviving. Then sadly my father died on the train the second night on the train. And when we arrived in switzerland, my mother and my brother were so ill that they had to be hospitalized immediately. The swiss did not allow me to stay there. So i was sent to a displaced persons camp, a refugee camp, in algiers, north africa, and it took one year before i was able to come to america. We had family who provided affidavits eventually. We got visas, and it took six more months for my mother and brother to come to america. So altogether i was separated for 18 months from my mother and brother, four days after i i had lost my father. So thats the outline of the story. Sometimes people ask me why did you wait so long to write this book . And some of it has to do with just being very busy raising a family, elderly parents, a career. And so after retirement i begin to consider this. And i must say, im really glad i waited so long because i think the book is far more relevant today than it wouldve been ten or 20 years ago, had i had the time to write it. Talk a little bit about your parents and your family, and the experience you had in being with them. I think it was unusual for whole family to remain intact through to the different camps and for that length of time. Do you think he wouldve been able to make it without having been altogether in that way . I have serious doubts, because when it came to bergenbelsen i was 13 years old. I think if it had not been for my family i would not have survived very long. Family meant everything in those times, because everyone is out for him or herself in concentration camp and you dont think about other people and a child left by itself without parents could barely make it. So i think being together with my parents and my brother helped all of us, davis resilience, gave us support, and gave us the strength to try to survive. One of the extraordinary things about the book is a wit captures the perspective of the child. I wont make the inevitable comparison to anne franks diary by the early chapters are really written not in the voice of a chump so much as from the perspective of a child. And then as it goes on you can feel the narrator maturing even at the same time you find the character growing older. When you were writing the book, do you think its too to your experience . Yes, it was quite intentional to do that because there are as you all probably know many, many books written by Holocaust Survivors usually later on in life and usually they were children when they experienced this. But most of the books i have written as an adult tells the story not from the point of view of the child, what did the child here, what did the child see, and what did the child think having the background and the conceptual information . What did the child make out of living under the circumstances . My coauthors helped a great deal with this. We tried very hard to incorporate the perspectives in the voice of the child. I said when we spoke on the phone sometime ago that i thought it was extraordinary to imagine what it wouldve been like for dr. Butter and her parents to go from the experience of living really in quite considerable luxury into the darkness of the camps. And you said to me, luxury had nothing to do with it. It was just a dehumanizing the same as a wouldve been if there had not been luxury before. Can you say a word about that . Certainly, the nazis didnt care who you were, whether you were young or old, whether you are male or female, what nationality, what color, what religion, what ethnicity. They treat everybody the same. I really dont think that people who lived a lower standard of living, or maybe less education that my parents, that they suffered less just because they had less before the camps. But i dont know. Thats just my perspective. Im going to read you one of my favorites, a brief paragraph in the book. This is about halfway through, and this is in the middle of the bergenbelsen section of the book. We kept trying to make sense of everything, as if an understanding would make the things better. There didnt seem to be any understanding, and certainly no promise so i clung to the simple notion that good people were capable of surviving. Tell me about that idea trying to make sense out of the experience and how you managed to recover from doing that in the camp itself. Well, i dont think i ever made sense out of it, but i think what helped me a great deal and i think people who survived needed that. And, of course, some of it is lock, but i think you have to have a purpose. You have to have a goal. You have to have the strong will to survive when you live under those circumstances. And i did. I wanted to live. One of my dreams was, at that time, i had as a young girl i had read books about heidi, and heidi, you know, some similarities. She had lost her parents. She went to live with her grandfather in switzerland and she was skiing. And so my dream was that i would survive and i would go to switzerland and live in the mountains and learn how to ski. And that helped me. Did you learn how to ski later on . Never. [laughing] theres still time. [laughing] talk a little bit about the idea that you had a self image which was the self image of the victim, and before you able to do the public speaking, dr. Butter started doing a look speaking long before she wrote the book. When you start to speak out about your experiences and when you started to write this book, and when you went through this time of opening up there was a sense that you were going from being a victim to being something very different. Yes. Well, certainly i had been a victim during those horrible years and all the brutal experiences, but at some point i realized that just because i have been a victim then, that that didnt mean that it was a victim for the rest of my life, and i didnt think that should mean who i was. As i thought about that i begin to realize that its much more powerful and strong to think of myself as a survivor. Because as a victim i was hopeless, i was powerless, and people could manipulate anything in my environment. But as a survivor i had potential. I was able to make choices and i could help other people and do good things and mostly move forward. So i reshaped that self image, and i feel that i benefited a great deal from kind of reconfiguring things. Wonder the things that seem to me strikingly different in this book than in others was you describe having really quite significant emotional attachments all the way through. You described the connection to your parents and your brother which is obviously the center one which also described having friendships and particularly in the descriptions of being with the other girls your age taking care of the children and the little children, the tiny children whose parents have been sent out to work at various times, and how you took care of them under these incredible adverse circumstances and tried to give them comfort but also had a connection to the of the people with whom you are doing it. You said in a concentration camp everyone is out for himself or herself, but actually part of what you describe is people within the camp, most of all your parents but also other people who are willing to pause long enough to recognize one anothers humanity. Can you comment on that . Yes. Well, of course, the children had to bring out humanity of those taking care of them because they were so beautiful. They were so hungry. Often they were sick and they were totally listless and passive. They just were not like children anymore. It became very important to try to comfort them and maybe introduce some humor or song, and maybe get them to smile if it was only for a second. We didnt have food to give them. We didnt have clothing. We didnt have toys. The only thing we could really get them was love and i think that was really important. And also as the health of our parents deteriorated, there was a role reversal. They could no longer take care of my brother and me, and so it became our duty to take care of them because we had more strength, more resilience than they did. And so thats another reason, it was another reason for me to fight for survival because i was taking care of my parents, so i had to the five for that reason. And taking care of other people does give one a feeling of gratification and gives meaning to your life, even under these terrible circumstances. If you can help someone take care of someone just a little bit, that might make their day. There was a sociologist who once said, we not only take care of our children because we love them, but also love them because we take care of them. Thats a very powerful process. Tell me how that shift to took place. Her father had been an annexed ordinary man doing absolutely everything he possibly could to save his family and then as you began to take care of them, with a able to receive that care . Was that a ready reversal or was that a difficult one . They were able to receive it because my mother was very ill and she was bedridden for several months in the camp before we left. I was the only one who could take care of her. There wasnt anybody else around. And my father accepted it as well, and they were so weak, they were so miserable that any help that anybody could give them would make a difference. Yeah, well, i wouldve liked to get more parenting from them, but that was impossible. And tell this story of going to be checked before you put on the train to switzerland and how you and your father went down and you are mistaken for your mother. Thats a very moving story. Yes. Well, one day there was an announcement that anybody who had south american passports, which we had and that was the reason we were included in this present exchange, anyone who any passport needed to report to a camp doctor at a certain place in the camp. And so my mother had already been bedridden for several months, and so my brother and i said we should try to dress her and walk her there, but that didnt work. She collapsed just right after we got addressed and out of bed, so we took her back to bed. Then my brother and i went and had our names checked off by the doctor, and then my father came back from work and he, we only found later what it happened to him. He had been brutally beaten, but he was so weak and he was so miserable, and he seemed to barely be conscious so we told them what it happened, that we had walked with him to the station for screening and he couldnt come he said no, if possible, i had to lie down. So we did, and after a while we begged him to come. Because of this seemed to our only chance ever to get out of bergenbelsen. And so eventually he agreed and he was leaning heavily on me because he could barely walk. We come to the station and theres the doctor, and he says to my father, you are john . My father says yes. The second question was, are you sick . Which seemed ludicrous question but he said no. And then he looked at me and he checked off my mothers name. He said your children have already been here, so get ready. Tomorrow you will leave. Now, whether a 14 Year Old Girl looked like a 45 year old woman, nobody knows. Of course we were both very skinny. We were both wearing rags. But anyway, that did it. Talk about the pink blanket. Well, the pink blanket is on the back cover of the book, and it is a blanket i had received as a young child in berlin and always took it with me. I i even took it to the concentration camps. It really gave me a great deal of comfort, like a comfort blanket can be for a child or even a person. And i always had it with me, and i still have it now. And its, maybe youve seen the blanket that is part of this exhibition upstairs and sort of looks like this. The blanket has seen a lot and experienced a lot, so i think it should also be in the museum. I hope that it will be. Im going to read another short passage aloud. This is also from later in the book and ill ask you to explain what the thank you express was in a moment but let me just read it. Poppy like the hanky express, he said. He said it was important to get to know other people in other places but if we do that it was a sure way to have more friends and few enemies. Im not sure i agree anymore. We seem to have a lot of enemies and they looked is right in the face. Maybe its still true, i said, the nazis never bothered to get to know us here i hated everything they saw. I dont think they really saw us at all. Tell me about that. What was it like to be unseen in that way . Well, it makes you feel like a nonentity, like not being human, not being recognized as a person. At auschwitz, of course, people just have numbers and they were a number, and that was the only identity they had was the number tattooed on their arms. But if people dont look at you and if they dont call you by your name, then you feel like you are a nobody and you are nothing. Right. And do you think that if you happened to have those exchange passports, those passports from ecuador, that your family wouldve survived the war. Was of course, nobody knows, but we left bergenbelsen three months before it was liberated, and considering the conditions of my parents, i have doubts that they wouldve lived that long. My brother, possibly, but he had a very bad infection so i dont know where that would have taken him. So the passports certainly were an important element. Not all people who had passports survived. Not all people were exchanged eventually, but in our case it was a fortune, a good fortune. And can you explain about those passports . The purpose of that was not to move to ecuador and obviously you are not started life as a citizen of ecuador. Tell the story about getting thin and receiving them and how they came to play in your lives. Well again, part of the exhibition here in the museum shows a console from lithuania i think that we should many passports to jews, and there were consoles in many European Countries that did the same thing, hoping that they could rescue them and save their lives. And so my father had met a friend in amsterdam who had just received the passports for him and itself, and he gave my father the name of a met in stockholm. And he said to send in four passport pictures come and you dont have to say very much in your le