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Of the 10% of Jewish children who survived the Holocaust, almost all of them are gone now, Dr. Irene Miller, 94, said in her opening statement during her speaking engagement Tuesday night at the Warsaw Performing Arts Center.
Out of the 6 million Jews who were killed during the Holocaust, about 1.5 million were children.
“Ninety percent of Jewish children were killed. Though I can tell you only about my survival journey, those who are fortunate to be left alive become also the voices of those who didn’t live to tell their story,” she stated.
Miller was born in 1932 in Warsaw, Poland. Her immediate family was made up of four - her, her older sister and her parents.
“But we had a large extended family in Poland numbering close to 100 members. When the Nazis attacked Poland, it seems to me that Warsaw was under siege for a few weeks,” she said.
Miller and her family lived on the top floor of an apartment building that was a vulnerable place to be. Friends let them move in with them on the second floor, but even that wasn’t safe from the bombs. They eventually had to move to bomb shelters over and over, particularly at night.
“I remember when the Nazis entered Warsaw. I was looking out of the window of our apartment ... I was too high up to see the faces of the Nazi soldiers. They were filling the width of the street, pounding the pavement with their shiny boots, marching and marching,” she recalled.
Germany invaded Poland on Sept. 1, 1939, which marked the beginning of World War II. Miller said there are still some sounds and smells to which she still reacts emotionally.
“One such sound is low-flying planes. Another one is a rhythmic pounding on a hard surface. I hate it,” said.
Her parents felt that being Jewish, and her father was a leader in the labor union, they would be among the first ones to be persecuted by the Nazis. Sometime in the winter of 1939-40, her parents sold the lease to their apartment and hired a Polish guide to smuggle them across the border to the Soviet Union.
“I remember the last leg of the journey trying to cross the border. It was in the middle of the night, extremely cold. We were wearing layers and layers of clothes. You could keep warm and minimize the luggage. We were sitting inside a barrel of hay, the hay over our faces, over our heads, and all that and all the blankets, so should the Nazi soldiers come across the wagon at night, they would not be able to see the people in it,” she recounted.
At some point, Miller and her family were let out in an area surrounded by tall trees. The guide told them they were already across the border and pointed where in the morning they were to take the train to get to the city where her parents wanted to go.
After huddling up for the remainder of the night, they woke up in the morning, they found out with others on the journey they had not been taken across the border to the Soviet Union. They were left on no man’s land. Her parents didn’t want to go back to Poland, so the family lived in an open field in the winter for about six weeks. At some point, Miller’s feet got frost bitten and she had open wounds. The only food they were able to buy was from peasants from nearby villages who charged exorbitant prices. Their only thing they had to drink was melting snow.
Two images from her time in no man’s land are still vivid in her mind. One was waking up in the morning next to a dead man, and the other involved a woman with a dead baby.
Her parents concluded they had to take some drastic steps or they wouldn’t survive living in the open field. One night her father smuggled himself across the border into the Soviet Union and bribed an official to give him a letter giving permission for the family to cross the border. But when he returned with the letter it only included him and his children, nothing about Miller’s mother. Her parents decided her father would take the girls to safety. They walked the whole night in the forest, and Miller said it was painful, but they made it to the city with clusters of Jews from Poland and found a cabin to stay in.
At some point, her father eventually tried to reach his wife, was put in a jail for a few days and the two girls were left alone for a while. When her father reached no man’s land where her mother was supposed to be, no one was there anymore as the Nazis came and took all the people, including her mother, and put them on trains to Poland and Germany. After her father returned, weeks went by and then her mother returned.
“You can imagine my enormous joy and excitement, but also confusion. I didn’t know if she was alive. It seemed to me that it had been so long since I last saw her, and suddenly she showed up,” Miller said.
They were all together a while, her father was able to work enough to buy food, but the joy didn’t last long.
Soviet soldiers rounded them up and put them on cattle carts. They were on the train approximately six to eight weeks and sometimes ate little more than a cup of soup. They were delivered to a labor camp in Siberia. It was cold and dark and they didn’t have the right clothes for that type of climate. Everyone had to work, including Miller’s sister who was 11-12 years old at that time. Miller and her family remained in Siberia for over two years.
Next, they were sent to Uzbekistan.
“While we were very hungry in Siberia, we were almost starving to death in Uzbekistan. They placed us in a very poor farming village. My parents were not given any land to cultivate, and there was no way of finding work,” Miller recalled.
There were stretches of time they lived on boiled grass and leaves. Another stretch of time, they lived on boiled onions. They all came down with malaria.
Some Jews from Poland in Uzbekistan established orphanages for Jewish children from Poland in an attempt to save the children from dying of starvation. Miller and her sister were sent to the orphanage by their parents. Sleeping arrangements in the orphange were tight, and lice was still bad even after all the children’s heads were shaved because the sanitary conditions were so terrible.
A few months after entering the orphanage, Miller’s father died during an epidemic of dysentery in the village. He was buried in a communal grave and her mother didn’t know which one.
World War II ended in 1945, but Miller stayed in the orphanage in Uzbekistan until 1946.
“During all the years of the Holocaust, hunger was the most difficult part to live with. There was also a lot of fear and anxiety, not understanding what’s going on, not knowing what will happen from day to day and a lot of loneliness,” she stated.
To keep herself busy, Miller learned to read herself in Polish. In the Soviet Union, she learned to speak and read Russian. She wrote poetry.
When she returned from Uzbekistan to Poland, she spent another five years in an orphange. Anti-semitism still raged in Poland after the war. She learned about the horrors of the concentration camps.
“I told you earlier that my extended family numbered close to 100 members. Not a single one, not a single one of them survived. They were all killed during the Holocaust,” Miller stated.
Her mother felt that to continue to live in Poland would be like living on the graveyard of her brothers and sisters. Miller’s sister, who was by then married to a boy from the orphanage, and her mother decided to leave Poland and go to Israel. Miller decided to join her mother in 1950 in Israel.
“Not only am I fortunate that I survived, but more so I am fortunate that I was able to create a meaningful life, and significantly contribute to the communities in which I lived,” she stated.
Miller earned her Doctor of Humane Letters from Oakland University in 2025. Previously, she earned her Bachelor of Science in Psychology and her Master of Science in Social Psychology from the University of Cincinnati; and her Master of Business Administration with a major in hospital management from Xavier University, Cincinnati.
“I am retired now, which means I work and I don’t get paid,” she said. “... My whole adult life, I try to lead guided by the Jewish ethical principle Tikkun olam. Tikkun olam literally means repairing the world. Implied in it is that we each have a responsibility to and proceed with care to make everyone’s world better.”
She said she respects fully and equally every good human being, regardless of religion, race, religion or where they came from. She supports worldwide organizations, as much as she can, that work to alleviate hunger.
“I know what hunger is. I don’t want another child to experience it,” she said.
“... But the most important thing, my mission in life now, is to use my Holocaust experience to show what hate and prejudice did, to show what hate and prejudice can do again unless we learn from it.”
After her 45-minute talk, she also answered questions for about another 45 minutes.
Miller’s speaking engagement was made possible in part with support from the Fort Wayne Jewish Federation and Warsaw Performing Arts Center. It is an extension of the “Americans and the Holocaust” exhibition at the Warsaw Community Public Library June 20 through July 24.
More about the exhibit and other related events can be found online at https://www.warsawlibrary.org/
More information about Miller can be found at www.irenemillerspeaker.com
