Holocaust survivor speaks at Bedford library

As the number of living Holocaust survivors decreases over time, one continues to make public appearances and tell her story while spreading her message about the benefits of tolerance and diversity.

Irene Miller appeared at the Bedford Branch Library on April 11 to tell her tale of survival to a packed room. After her story, she answered audience questions and offered signed copies of her book, “Into No Man’s Land: A Historical Memoir.”

Miller’s story is unique, as her experience of survival comes from a different perspective than those commonly told from the time. While many stories focus on those captured by the Nazi regime, Miller tells of the trials and struggles she and her family – her mother, father and older sister – faced while trying to avoid capture.

“I am one of the 10% of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust,” Miller said as she introduced herself. “Those of us fortunate to be left alive become voices for those who didn’t live to tell their stories.”

As Nazi forces began invading and establishing a presence in Miller’s native Poland, her mother and father moved quickly to enact a plan for a getaway – her father, being an active member of the Jewish community, would likely be among the first targeted by the Nazis. He hired a smuggler to help them flee east to the Soviet Union and to safety. However, what they found on their journey was an extreme departure from safety and security.

Miller and her family were dropped by the smuggler short of the Soviet border, in an area known as No Man’s Land – stuck between the Nazi occupation and the supposed safety of the Soviet Union. For six weeks, they camped there, struggling to stay warm and stay fed.

“My mother repeated to me over and over, ‘If you move, you’re not going to be that cold,’” Miller said. “I moved as much as I could, and when I could not move anymore, I crawled under the covers.”

At one point, Miller suffered from frostbite and could not walk in her shoes anymore, so her mother wrapped her feet in rags. All this struggle occurred alongside simply trying to secure food and water for survival.

“The only fluid we had for drinking was melting snow,” Miller recalled.

One night, Miller woke up to discover that a stranger, a man, had crawled under the covers with her to get warm.

“When I woke up in the morning, the man next to me was dead,” she said. “People were dying from diseases, from exposure, from starvation.”

Miller also recalled a time when a woman with a baby wrapped in her arms approached a fire around which she and others were sitting.

“They parted, letting her come close to the fire,” Miller said. “As she did so, a man looked into her arms and said, ‘Lady, your baby doesn’t need warming anymore.’ Her baby was dead.”

The man then took the baby from the woman and marched with a crowd to the Soviet guards who were at the border to stop Jewish refugees from entering. He placed the small body in front of the soldiers, as the crowd demanded entry.

“The guard didn’t say a thing – he just kicked the baby back into the crowd,” Miller said.

When the family did finally make it across the Soviet border after some smuggling attempts and bribery, their temporary peace was interrupted. One day, they were taken by soldiers to be relocated to a work camp in Siberia. However, before the journey, they and other families spent weeks packed into train boxcars that were repurposed as temporary shelters.

While waiting, each person received one cup of soup per day as they wallowed in misery in their pitch-black shelters. Once per day, the soldiers would let everyone out of the boxcars to relieve themselves, all together.

“You know, it doesn’t take very long to get over the notion of privacy,” Miller said.

When the train left the station and the family arrived in Siberia, the work was hard, the climate harsh, and the food scarce.

“If you were outside with any part of your skin exposed, it wouldn’t take but a minute or two to get frostbitten,” Miller explained.

While celebrating her birthday in Siberia, Miller’s mother asked her to pretend there was no war and to tell her about the one present that she would like most for her birthday. Miller responded that she wanted a big loaf of bread, from which she could eat as much as she wanted.

“I saw tears flowing down her face, and I had no idea what I did wrong to make my mama cry,” Miller said.

After more than two years in Siberia, the family was moved again to a camp in present-day Uzbekistan. Though a move south meant warmer temperatures, Miller and her family soon found that better weather did not mean a better situation for fighting hunger.

“While we were extremely hunger in Siberia, in Uzbekistan we almost starved to death,” Miller said. “There were times that our family survived on boiled grass and leaves.”

Miller explained that, during this time, several orphanages were started to help ensure the survival of Jewish children fleeing the Nazi threat. One such orphanage in Uzbekistan encouraged Miller’s family to let them take her and her sister in to help increase their chances of making it through the turmoil. The family agreed, and the two girls moved yet again.

At the orphanage, Miller describes feeling incredible loneliness, despite being packed into a living space with roughly 100 other children.

At the same time, Miller received news that her father had died of dysentery.

Eventually, as the war ended and displaced Jewish survivors began returning home, Miller and her sister reunited with their mother in Poland. However, their extended family, which had numbered close to 100 prior to the war, were all gone.

“Not a single one of them survived,” she recalled somberly.

Miller and her mother decided to leave Poland behind for good and begin a new life in Israel. It was there that Miller eventually found a way to thrive and build a life. She attended a college for teaching in Haifa, Israel.

After meeting and then marrying a man from Detroit, Miller found a new home in the American Midwest. She earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology and then a master’s in social psychology from the University of Cincinnati, followed by an MBA in hospital management from Xavier University.

She spent a long career as a health care executive and spent time on several boards and committees, including a stint on a Washington, D.C. advisory committee for issues related to drug addiction in women and children.

Miller shares her story not only to inspire hope and courage in the face of seemingly insurmountable obstacles; she also hopes that people see the destructive nature of intolerance to diversity and learn valuable lessons from it.

“When I speak in schools, I express to young people that they are the future leaders of this nation,” she said. “It will be their responsibility to do everything possible to ensure horrors like that don’t happen any place … not just to learn how it happened, but to learn how those things come about, little by little, and not to be bystanders when injustices happen.”

For more information, visit www.irenemillerspeaker.com

This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Holocaust survivor speaks at Bedford library