At a barbed-wire fence inside the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, a teenage Irene Hasenberg tried to pass a bundle of clothing across to a girl from her old Amsterdam neighborhood. Someone else snatched the bundle before it reached her, and Irene never saw Anne Frank again. Irene Butter, the Holocaust survivor who carried that memory into a long career as a University of Michigan economist and Holocaust educator, died on October 2, 2026, in the United States, at 95.

She was born Irene Hasenberg in Berlin in 1930 to John and Gertrude Hasenberg, with an older brother, Werner. After the Nazis seized her father's bank, he found work with American Express and moved the family to Amsterdam in 1937, settling in the same neighborhood as the Frank family, Ann Arbor Observer.

'We were rounded up again on June 20, 1943, and sent to Westerbork transit camp,' Butter later wrote of the day the Nazis caught up with the family, Irene Butter's website. They were transferred to Bergen-Belsen that February. There, her childhood friend Hanneli Goslar told her that Anne Frank was imprisoned nearby, and the two girls met briefly at the fence separating their camp sections, Ann Arbor Observer. Butter recalled Anne simply as popular and mischievous, and only learned after the war that her friend had died in the camp not long afterward, NOS.

Butter remembered January 1945 at Bergen-Belsen as 'very black,' when her father was badly beaten and her brother fell seriously ill, Ann Arbor Observer. Ecuadorean travel papers her father had secured years earlier made the family eligible for a prisoner exchange that finally carried them out of the camp, but he died two days after their release. The exchange train carried the rest of the family to Switzerland, where her mother and brother were hospitalized while Irene was sent on alone. She said later: 'The Swiss managed to do what the Nazis couldn't: they separated my family,' Ann Arbor Observer. Irene recovered at Camp Jeanne d'Arc, a displaced-persons camp in Algeria, then reached the United States on December 24, 1945; her mother and brother did not join her until about six months afterward, Irene Butter's website.

She finished her schooling at Queens College in New York, then in 1960 earned a doctorate in economics from Duke University, among the first women to do so. 'I met another student, Charlie Butter, and fell in love,' she wrote of the marriage that followed. The couple settled in Ann Arbor, where she taught economics at the University of Michigan-Flint before joining the Ann Arbor campus's School of Public Health as a professor from 1976 to 1996, teaching microeconomics, policy analysis, the makeup of the health workforce, and the role of gender, race and ethnicity in health. She later lectured abroad as a Fulbright scholar, in the Netherlands in 1983 and 1984 and at the University of Haifa in Israel in 1991 and 1992, and consulted for the World Health Organization.

For decades she said little about the camps. 'When my daughter Pamela was in high school she said she was doing a project on the Holocaust,' Butter later wrote, and that request opened a second career that grew into hundreds of talks to students, one she kept up into her nineties, Irene Butter's website. In 1990 she helped create the University of Michigan's Raoul Wallenberg Medal and Lecture, honoring the diplomat who saved Jews in wartime Budapest, and in 2002 she co-founded Zeitouna, a dialogue group pairing Arab and Jewish women in Ann Arbor. Her memoir, Shores Beyond Shores: From Holocaust to Hope, written with John Bidwell and Kris Holloway, appeared in 2019 and was a Jewish Book Council finalist; the documentary Never a Bystander had profiled her work five years earlier.

Recognition accumulated steadily in her final two decades. The Genesis Award named her a Distinguished Humanitarian in 2011, the Rotary Club of Ann Arbor gave her its Robert S. Northrup Humanitarian Award in 2019, and the Anti-Defamation League presented her its Kay Family Award in 2022. That same year, a German podcast about her survival won the Deutscher Reporterpreis for best podcast, and in 2023 it was named Germany's top podcast in the conversation category.

Germany awarded her its Order of Merit in 2024. In March 2025, at a Washington ceremony during the Dutch Embassy's Tulip Days, the Netherlands presented her its Anne Frank Award for Human Dignity and Tolerance and named her a Commander in the Order of Orange-Nassau. Butter said that day: 'Though Anne Frank's life ended tragically in childhood, she had the wisdom to articulate her values. In my much longer life, I have been able to live by our shared commitment to human dignity and tolerance,' Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

What remains in Ann Arbor is concrete. The Wallenberg Medal and Lecture she helped build still brings an honoree to Michigan's campus each year. Zeitouna's circle of Arab and Jewish women still meets. Her memoir sits in school libraries in the voice she only agreed to use after her daughter's classroom asked for it, and in those same schools, students who once sat in her audience are now the ones repeating what she told them about a girl she knew once, briefly, through a fence.