Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive

Irene Hasenberg Butter - September 22, 1986

Immigration to America

In Algiers?

In the camp. And uh, then in May the war was over, you know, it was uh, um, liberation and um, by... And so people started going home slowly wherever their homes were. Uh, wherever they wanted to be, all kinds of contacts were made and... I mean, and I can't describe that very well, but other people told me that there was the Joint Relief Organization and the HIAS and they um, did a lot of work in compiling lists of survivors and sending these lists to America and, and all over the world and so our relatives found out um, around May I think, that we, we were survivors. And so, the, the UNRRA people contacted the relatives and they got um, affi... affidavits ready and, and uh, they all pooled um, resources to, to pay the money for our passage. Well, my mother and brother weren't coming then but for my passage and so um, uh, this however, took a long time to get all these papers together and also to find transportation. By September or October of 1945, they dissolved the camp. There weren't enough people left there and those of us who were left, they put us up in Algiers in hotels and a group lived, lived there in hotels until we found ships. And it was difficult because the um, Americans wanted to get all the soldiers home before Christmas and there was rarely a boat available to bring refugees to America and when it was, when there was a boat then they took... These boats were the Liberty ships that they manufactured in twenty-four hours and they weren't, weren't made for tourists or for passengers and they took either men or women and they didn't take families so many times families had to be split up in order to get transportation. And so a um, family that I knew um, consisting of father, mother, and son, they finally decided they wouldn't wait any longer and the father and the son went on a male boat and the mother um, it's my second adoptive mother, said, "Well, you and I will travel together." So she and I um, had in December of 1945 a very turbulent voyage of twenty-one days from Algiers to, to the United States together on this boat and um, we became very close and, and this is a lady who is now, I think, eighty-seven years old and lives in a nursing home in Switzerland where I visited her this past May. I hadn't seen her in fifteen years. We kept in touch for a long, long time, but I hadn't seen her and last year when it was my fortieth anniversary, last December was my fortieth anniversary in the United States, and as I thought about the event, I wondered what had happened to my adoptive mother with whom I arrived and called her son and anyway, in May, I had an opportunity, I was in Switzerland anyway, and I visited her. This was one of the most wonderful experiences um, of this, this past summer was to see this woman again who's perfectly intact um, intellectually and um, very frail physically but her husband died years ago. And uh, together we spent several hours reminiscing and uh, and we laughed and we cried but the interesting part was that there were things she remembered that I didn't remember and things I remembered that she didn't remember, so when we parted we both had a, a larger pool of memories. And, and that was very meaningful experience, so we traveled together on this ship and uh, arrived on, on Christmas Eve. It was suppose... We arrived in Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland. And the harbor was frozen, so after a long voyage with all kinds of disasters, probably too long, we had a, a car collision in the desert from, from Algiers to Bougie, which was the harbor where this boat took us from and we, there were I don't know about twelve people who, in our group, who were traveling to America and we needed a taxi and a truck for all the luggage, big taxi and some people sat in the truck and on a Saturday afternoon, they collided. In the middle of the desert, so there were many adventures this trip. So finally, we arrived in Baltimore on Christmas Eve and the harbor was frozen, and we couldn't uh, dock. So the next day, on Christmas Day, they took lifeboats and, and let us out down the boat and um, put us in these little ice cutters, these little motorboats, so we could get to the, to the land in Baltimore. And then um, uh, it was interesting uh, all of the, our relatives lived in New York City. Everyone was met by a relative who lived in New York City. But um, that was 1945 and people didn't travel from New York City to Baltimore to meet relatives and, and so we, um... I remember, I had a cousin who had a friend living in Baltimore and they, so they delegated this friend and this friend and his wife were at the harbor and came with us to the train station in Baltimore and the next thing, we get off at Grand Central Station and that was where we met our relatives. So, that was the beginning of life in America.

What did you tell them?

I, I didn't... I wasn't allowed to tell them anything. They, they told me um, the... I lived with a cousin of my mother's and her husband and daughter and these people had come from Mainz in the thirties sometime and had, had to leave Germany without any of their possessions. They had struggled. They were carpet sweepers, repair people. My... This cousin and her husband went everyday to hotels to repair carpet sweepers, they had a very modest income, and uh, lived in a one bedroom apartment where the daughter slept on the couch in the living room and, and then had to share the couch with me. Uh, they were absolutely wonderful. Um, like parents... Parents couldn't have been better uh, I, they integrated me into the family. I went to school, they bought me clothes, they did everything but I couldn't talk about the experiences. They told me, I think, either the first evening when I arrived or the next day, "Now you must start a new life. You are in America um, the past is behind you, and you mustn't speak about it. You have to forget." And, they wouldn't, they wouldn't let me talk about it. We didn't talk about it at all, my mother, my brother, or I, with relatives. None of the relatives uh, could, they just couldn't cope, they couldn't hear about it and even though my mother had a cousin in New York, and, and we were with two of the sisters of this cousin, they were in Westerbork, we saw them off to the train. We thought they would want to hear what happened to their sisters. They, they couldn't bear to hear about it. I mean they knew they were dead but as far as the details were concerned. And um, I, I had an interesting experience again this summer. I visited relatives of mine in New York who, I mean, the first years we lived, all lived in New York, we saw them every Friday night, we were practically every Friday night, we were at this, this family for dinner. And so we certainly have always been in touch even after moving away from uh, from New York. But last summer, I was coming back from Europe and um, and planned to see these relatives. I hadn't seen them for a long time. Spent the night and um, we were around the dinner table and for the first time ever, they asked questions. It was very surprising.

© Board of Regents University of Michigan-Dearborn