SAULT STE MARIE MICH. - Born in Warsaw, Poland, Irene Miller was just five-years-old when Nazi Germany invaded on Sept. 1, 1939 to mark the beginning of World War II.
Miller, who is Jewish, would face sickness, starvation, and loss in the six years to come.
She would be forced to fight through malaria and frostbite, while bearing witness to the death of an infant and others around her. She would be separated from her loving parents, losing one in the process.
“Only ten percent of Jewish children survived the Holocaust,” Miller said to audiences at the Lake Superior State University (LSSU) Arts Center on Monday and Tuesday. “Among the 6 million Jews killed, a million-and-a-half were children – 90 percent of Jewish children.”
Against all odds, she has prevailed over the war to tell her story.
Miller remembered looking down from the apartment complex she lived at with her parents and elder sister.
She remembered seeing shining Nazi boots marching through the streets. Shortly thereafter, soldiers bombed her family's home. As it burned to the ground with all their things, Miller's father knocked out a second floor window to help everyone escape.
“I stood on the windowsill and looked down,” Miller said. “It seemed so far down. I was so scared that I couldn’t move. My mother pushed me out of the window. Somehow, my father did not catch me. I fell on a pile of glass, cutting my arms and legs.”
The family found temporary refuge in a nearby bomb shelter.
“My mom sat and pulled shards of glass out of my limbs,” Miller recalled. “Running to bomb shelters occurred over and over, particularly, at night. At some point, bombs severed the water pipes. The only way we could obtain drinking water was by running down the street where there was still a functioning faucet.”
Miller said she remains fearful of certain sounds and scents 83 years later, such as low flying planes and arrhythmic pounding on hard surfaces.
“My father was the leader of the labor union in the Jewish division,” Miller explained. “As such, they were liberal people. They felt that they would be among the first ones persecuted by the Nazis.”
Miller's dad hired a Polish guide to smuggle them over the Soviet Union border. Miller vividly recalled the family's get-away wagon filled with hay.
“It was in the middle of the night, extremely cold,” she said. “We were wearing layers and layers of clothing to keep warm and minimize luggage. We were sitting inside the wagon of hay. The hay over our faces and over our heads; over all that, an old blanket.”
The guide eventually came to a stop and let the family out of the wagon. He directed them toward a train that would, allegedly, take them to Bialystok in the morning. They huddled together to stay warm that night.
“When we woke up in the morning to try to leave the area, we saw an area with thousands of people laying on the snow," said Miller. "They were leaning against bags and suitcases.”
The family's guide did not hold up his end of the bargain in taking them across the border. Instead, he left the family in what Miller referred to as “No Man’s Land.”
“This place, an open field in winter, became my home for six weeks,” Miller said. “My mother would repeat over and over, move, move. If you move, you are not going to be that cold. I moved as much as I could. When I couldn’t anymore, I would crawl under the covers.”
Miller eventually ended up with frostbite and open wounds on her feet. She was unable to wear shoes, due to immense pain. Her mother wrapped her feet in garments to shield them.
“The only food we were able to buy was that which the peasant women from nearby villages would bring,” said Miller.
The women would bring bread after sundown, she reported. Seldomly, they brought potatoes too. However, the cost of their food was extremely pricey.
“The only fluid we had for drinking was melting snow,” said Miller, still haunted by two specific instances from her time in "No Man's Land".
One night, Miller awoke to find an unknown man laying under the covers beside her. She tried to push him away, but eventually fell back to sleep.
“When I woke up in the morning, the man next to me was dead,” she said. “People were dying of diseases, exposure, and starvation. Now, the peasant women who brought bread to sell were also bringing shovels. The young men buried the dead in shallow graves.”
Then, Miller told the story of the deceased infant.
“I was standing with my mother by a fire, trying to warm myself,” she said. “A young woman approached, holding a baby in her arms and wrapped in blankets. People assumed that she wanted to warm herself and the baby. They parted, letting her come close to the fire. As she did, a man looked into her arms and said, `Lady, your baby doesn’t need warming anymore.’ The baby was dead.”
The man took the infant from its mother's grasp. He proceeded to carry the lifeless body to a Soviet guarded border. A desperate crowd followed behind.
“He laid that baby in front of one of the guards, and the crowd started shouting, ‘Let us in, let us in,” Miller recalled. “See, we are dying one by one. That guard didn’t say a thing, just kicked the baby back into the crowd.”
That was the last straw. Miller’s parents had had enough. Her father snuck across the border one night. There, he bribed a Soviet official into writing a letter that permitted his family to cross the border. For reasons unknown, the Soviet official left Miller’s mother out of the letter.
“The guards would not let my mom go,” she said. “Our parents decided that my father should take my sister and myself to safety.”
Miller walked all night long with her sister and father, still shoeless from frostbite wounds. Eventually, they reached Bialystok. There were groups of Jewish people from Poland, residing in small and empty cabins.
“After being outdoors in the winter for six weeks, laying on a wooden floor with a roof over my head, I probably felt like a queen in a palace,” Miller said.
That was about the time her father ran out of money.
“Travel in the Soviet Union was forbidden,” said Miller. “Only those who were big dignitaries, had a lot of money, or bribed an official would get a ticket with permission to travel.”
As such, he had no idea how to get their mother across the border.
“Our father tried to reach ‘No Man’s Land’ on the roof tops of trains,” said Miller. “He was caught by the police, put in jail for a while, and let out. He kept on trying over and over. During all that time, when our father was gone, we were left alone. Here and there, some caring person would bring us a meal, but I don’t remember what and how we were able to eat besides that.”
By the time Miller's father finally made it to “No Man’s Land,” it was desolate. His wife was no where to be found.
“The Nazis came and took all the people, including my mother,” said Miller. “They put them on trains in the direction of Poland and Germany.”
Miller feared she would never see her mother again. She was devastated.
Her father had no choice, but to move forward. He was able to find a job in the city to feed his young girls. This meant leaving them alone to fend for themselves when he was at work. The girls managed through it, mostly.
While doing laundry one day, Miller spilled some soap. The incident fueled growing animosity between siblings, as both were frustrated.
“In midst of all the tension, the door to our cabin opened and our mother walked in,” Miller said, smiling. “You can imagine my enormous joy and excitement, but also my confusion. We didn’t know whether she was alive. We didn’t hear anything from her and suddenly she showed up. It took me an enormous length of time to trust that my mother would not disappear. Well, we were happy. We were together."
The family’s happiness was short lived. Word was traveling throughout town that Soviet soldiers were detaining young men. Miller feared for her father’s safety.
“My mother took the train to the city where my father worked," said Miller. "She warn him not to come back until he hears from her, but she missed the last train coming back to us.”
When the girls were home alone that night, Soviet soldiers raided the family’s cabin.
“They marched us to a train station where there was a long line of boxcars,” she said. “They were shoving as many people as they could into those boxcars.”
Somehow, Miller's parents heard about the raid. They showed up in a truck.
“Was I happy to see them and relieved,” said Miller, having no idea how they even knew to find them. “As soon as they arrived, they shoved us into one of those boxcars.”
The family crammed themselves together in the boxcar, next to others of Jewish decent.
“Once a day, soldiers walked around with buckets of soup,” said Miller. “Everyone was given a cup of soup. On the days when we were lucky, we got with it a little piece of bread. Those lucky days were very far apart. Once, sometimes twice a day, they let everyone out to relieve themselves.”
The family was on that boxcar anywhere from six to eight weeks, before getting dropped off at a labor camp in the Siberian taiga.
The taiga is a wooded subarctic region just south of the Arctic Circle.
“Temperatures would drop to 50 (degrees), sometimes 60 (degrees) below,” said Miller. “If a bird did not fly away in time, it would freeze to the tree like a lump of ice. When you were outside and did not have layers and layers over your face, breathing felt like swallowing sharp objects.”
She said the snow was much higher than she was tall. Everybody was required to work at either a nearby cement factory or in the forest to cut down trees. Her 10-year-old sister was sent to work in the factory.
“We were in Siberia for two to two-and-a-half years,” Miller said. “During all that time, I remember only one day of not being hungry. Hunger was a daily part of my life.”
During a small birthday celebration, Miller’s mother asked her what she wanted more than anything else in the whole world. She responded with, “A big loaf of bread and as much of it as I can eat.”
Her mother immediately broke down in tears.
“There was only one day I remember not being hungry, and I remember that day very well,” said Miller.
The family was given a tiny piece of land to grow potatoes on. Millers mother told her she could eat as many potatoes as she wanted.
Miller was unable to recall exactly how many potatoes she ate that day.
“For me to eat potatoes everyday, I thought you had to be very rich or royalty,” Miller said. “I still like potatoes, but now I have to be careful not to eat too many. No potato will ever taste as good as that one in Siberia when I was so hungry.”
Next, the family was shipped south to Uzbekistan. At that time, Uzbekistan was a southern republic of the Soviet Union. Today, it is an independent country.
“While we were extremely hungry in Siberia, we were starving in Uzbekistan,” said Miller. “They placed us in a very poor village. My parents were not given any land to cultivate. There was no way of finding work. My father walked from farmer to farmer, willing to do any kind of work in exchange for food.”
The family lived on boiled grass and leaves. Miller’s mother would boil anything that grew, but taste tested it herself before serving her husband and kids.
“There was a stretch of time when we lived on broiled onions,” said Miller. “Some farmer must have had a good crop of onions. In exchange for some of my mother’s clothing, she got a bag of onions. Then, we all came down with malaria.”
Miller recovered, but had difficulty walking for sometime after due to muscle weakness.
“There were some Jews from Poland in Uzbekistan,” she said. “I don't know who they were and how they were able to do it, but they established orphanages for Jewish children from Poland.”
A man came in a horse and buggy to take Miller and her sister away to a safer environment.
“The orphanage was basically in one large room,” Miller said. “From one end of the wall to the other, boards had been ripped off the floor and propped up on stacks of bricks. Girls were laying tightly, one next to the other on those boards. They were covered with old blankets, and their heads were completely shaved.”
They shaved Miller's long thick braids from her head.
“The caregivers shaved the children’s heads because the sanitary conditions were horrible,” said Miller. “I don't remember when and where I was able to take a bath or shower. They were afraid that under those conditions the kids would come down with lice that spread diseases.”
Despite their best efforts, this did not stop lice from nestling in various fabrics and multiplying. In no time at all, the orphanage became infested with lice.
“You know how many years have passed since then?” Miller asked her audience, rhetorically. “I talk about it and my head starts itching so badly that all I want to do is take my ten fingers and scratch.”
Meanwhile, Miller’s father fell ill to a pandemic that ravaged the small Uzbekistani village.
“My mother walked a whole night to another village in search of penicillin,” Miller said. “I don’t know whether she obtained it or not, but when she returned my father was dead.”
They buried him in a local cemetery. His wife had no idea where his body was buried.
The war ended on Sept. 2, 1945, but Miller was forced to stay at the orphanage until 1946. She is still unsure as to why they had to wait.
Upon returning to Poland, Miller spent four to five years in orphanages. She attended a school for Jewish children.
"Nothing of what I envision or hoped for became a reality," she said, referencing the Polish city of Kraków. "Antisemitism was still raging in Poland after the war. A lot of Jews had been killed by Polish people in small towns after the war. The tiny, tiny Jewish community that was left alive tried to do everything possible for us, the Jewish children left behind. There were just a handful of us kids left alive."
The school took the children to what used to be a concentration camp one day.
"In the display room was a pile of shoes: men's shoes, women's shoes, little kid shoes," she said. "They were the shoes of those who were sent to the gas chambers to die. There was a tall pile of hair. Women who had long hair had their hair cut off before being sent to death. They used the hair for various purposes. There were lamps with shades made of human skin, and soap made from human flesh."
It would be a long period of time before Miller could hold a bar of soap without thinking of deceased friends and family members. Apart from her sister and mother, everyone else she knew and loved had passed away.
Miller felt a great deal of lonliness in the orphanages. Left to entertain herself for many years during and after the war, she learned how to read and write in Polish. While in the Soviet Union, Miller taught herself how to read Russian. She turned to poetry as a form of self expression.
As an adult, Miller eventually ended up in Michigan. More details of her life and everything in between can be found in her autobiographical novel, “Into No Man’s Land: A Historical Memoir.” The autobiography can be ordered through Miller’s website: Irenemillerspeaker.com.
A tornado tore through her lower Michigan home in 1975, leaving behind an old book of poetry she had written during the Holocaust. She remembered reading it for the first time in several years, impressed by the written thoughts of her youth.
As found on Miller's website, she delved into an extensive education and rewarding career.
First, she received an education at a teacher’s college in Haifa, Israel. From there, Miller earned a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Cincinnati. She went on to obtain a master's degree in social psychology, also from the University of Cincinnati. Miller went on to earn an additional graduate degree in hospital management from Xavier University.
In Miller's professional life, she functioned as a healthcare executive. Miller developed and ran Michigan’s first federally qualified Health Maintenance Organization (HMO). She even served as Livingston County’s director of mental health. Miller directed the psychiatric division of Detroit Osteopathic Hospital. She was also the director of treatment centers for drug addicted women at Detroit Medical Center.
Miller served on a drug addiction advisory committee in Washington DC. She also taught at an Israeli school.
In Miller's “retirement,” she serves as a docent at Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) and court mediator. Further, she has made a habit of traveling around the nation to tell her Holocaust survival story. She hopes to travel to Canada as well.
Miller currently serves on the oldest civil rights organization board in the United States – American Jewish Committee.
She can speak, write and/or understand the following languages: Polish, Russian, English, Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Czechoslovakian, Yugoslavian, and multiple other Slavic variations.
Miller told the 650 students in attendance on Tuesday, “I love you all” in multiple languages to include Polish, “kocham was wszystkich” and Russian, “ya lyublyu vsekh vas.”
Miller was welcomed to Sault Ste. Marie, MI by the staff of Bayliss Public Library. The event was financially supported by Chippewa County Community Foundation. Assistance also came from the Rotary Club of Sault Ste. Marie, MI and Chippewa County Sunrise Rotary. LSSU Arts Center and EUPISD also helped bring Miller to the Sault. Bayliss Public Library Adult Programming and Marketing Director Natalie Nowak said that she originally planned on just applying for a youth grant for students to attend.
“Irene wanted to present to the public as well,” Nowak said.
More than 400 people attended Miller's first speech at 7 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 12 at the LSSU Arts Center. Among them was Sault Ste. Marie City Commissioner Andrew Rubinstein of Jewish descent. He stood and asked Miller, "As a young Jewish person, how do I teach younger generations about the Holocaust?"
Miller's main goal is to do just that, to which she answered, "It is important to tell them what happened because history will repeat itself."
A lady in the audience rose to speak after, her rather strong accent torn apart by tears. The woman identified herself as a German descent of Nazis. She asked for Miller's forgiveness. Miller told the lady that it was not her fault, as she was not even alive during the Holocaust.
A US military veteran stood too, followed by more and more engaged audience members.
Ashtin Kay, an eighth grade student at St. Mary's Catholic School, was also in attendance on Monday night.
“I almost started crying when I realized she wasn’t in concentration camps, and it was still that hard to survive,” Kay said, releasing a couple tears from big brown eyes. “I could not imagine if I had lost my mom. We are very close.”
Kay attended Miller’s speech for the second time with her St. Mary's classmates at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 13. Nowak said that approximately 650 EUPISD students from ten schools attended, mostly high school age students. Some junior high school students also attended.
“My teacher said we were extremely privileged,” said Kay, agreeing 100 percent.
At the end of the first event, Kay met Miller. They embraced each other with a big hug.
Kay was sure to purchase, Miller's autobiographical novel, “Into No Man’s Land: A Historical Memoir."
This book, along with more information about Irene Miller can be found at Irenemllerspeaker.com.
Lastly, Irene Miller would like everyone to know that she is more than willing to speak to large groups all over the country and in Canada. She has asked for anyone who is interested to reach out.
The National World War II Museum, states that worldwide casualty estimates vary among sources. The number of civilian deaths in China is estimated at over 50 million. World War II has been estimated to have wiped out 3 percent of the global population in its time.
