Departures of note

Irene Hasenberg Butter was born in Berlin in 1930 to a German-Jewish banking family. In 1937 the family fled to Amsterdam, where she knew Anne Frank's circle, but after the German occupation they were deported to the Westerbork transit camp and then to Bergen-Belsen. Thanks to Ecuadorian passports arranged by her father, she survived through a prisoner exchange and emigrated to the United States in 1945, settling in Baltimore on Christmas Eve of that year. Her father died before the exchange was completed.

She studied economics, earning a PhD from the University of Michigan, where she joined the faculty in 1966 and taught public health until her retirement in 1996, publishing widely on women's health, midwifery, and health manpower. After nearly three decades of silence about her wartime experiences, she began speaking publicly in 1976 and became one of the most prominent Holocaust educators, telling her story to students in the United States and Germany.

She co-founded the Raoul Wallenberg Lectures at the University of Michigan and the Zeitouna Arab-Jewish women's dialogue group, and authored memoirs including 'Shores Beyond Shores'. In 2024 she received the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany for her educational work, and in 2025 the Dutch government's Anne Frank Award. She died in the United States at the age of 95.