By Shelby Stewart
Staff Writer
Irene Miller was only 5 years old and living in Warsaw, Poland when World War II broke out.
“My survival is very different from what people perceive as a holocaust experience,” she said. “I survived in many countries in the most extreme conditions.”
At 6:30 p.m., March 12, the Brandon Township Library will host Miller who will be sharing experiences from her memoir ‘Into No Man’s Land.’
She tells about all of the places she stayed during WWII, such as the name-sake of her book, No Man’s Land, with no shelter and only melted snow to drink, a Siberian Labor Camp where bears would walk up to the front door and Uzbekistan where she lived on boiled grass and contracted malaria.
“It’s a chapter of history that can repeat itself if we don’t learn from it,” said Miller.
Miller also spent many years in orphanages before finding her mother and moving to Israel after the war, where she also went to teaching school. Today she is a retired health care executive. After her book was published in 2012, she has been giving talks like the one she will give at the library.
“We need to learn from it,” she said. “And not just from knowing that it happened, but how it happened.”
Miller also stressed that numbers of holocaust survivors are dropping, and that there are only so many years left to hear their stories first hand. Around six million Jewish people were killed during the war, about two thirds of Eastern Europe’s Jewish population, between 1941 and 1945.
Also killed those of Slavic, Romani, communists, gay men, Jehovah’s witnesses and others, resulting in about 17 million killed during the holocaust.
“It’s basically me telling my survival story,” said Miller. “What we can learn, and then using it as a base to promote tolerance and diversity.”
See her presentation at the Brandon Township Public Library, 304 South St., Ortonville, on March 12 at 6:30 p.m. Call 248-627-1460 for more information.