A Holocaust survivor will tell the story of her family’s escape across the Nazi-Soviet frontier.
Irene Miller, who is also an author, speaker and educator, will be a guest Friday at Howell High School as she share to students about her experiences.
Miller, the former director of mental health for Livingston County, has spent her career in the healthcare field and was also the past director of the psychiatric division at Detroit Osteopathic Hospital and director of treatment centers for drug-addicted and dual-diagnosed women and their children at the Detroit Medical Center. She also spent two years as a public school teacher in Israel.
Her book, Into No Man’s Land: A Historical Memoir, has been used by many schools as part of their History and English curriculum and helps to serve her mission of promoting tolerance and diversity.
The memoir tells the story of her family who found themselves stranded in a frozen field outside of Warsaw, Poland when the man they hired to help them escape instead cheated and robbed them. Miller has spoken about sleeping in the winter under an open sky in the no man’s land, living on boiled grass and onions, and being sick with malaria. Her family struggled to survive and would become separated, reunited, and ultimately sent to a Siberian labor camp. Miller would later spend years in orphanages.
Miller was also the subject of a 2016 PBS documentary “Irene; Child of the Holocaust”.
