March 25, 2025: A special evening at the Netherlands embassy residence. Ambassador Birgitta Tazelaar presented the 2025 Anne Frank Award to Dr. Irene Hasenberg Butter, a Holocaust survivor, who had known Anne Frank when both were students in Amsterdam.
Irene and her family were sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, but they had obtained Ecuadorian passports, so they were imprisoned in a different section than Anne and her sister. Irene recounted accompanying her friend Hanneli Goslar to bring Anne a bundle of clothes. That was January 1945. Irene recalled that Anne was thin and emaciated, draped in a blanket, suffering from typhus that was spread by lice. Irene and Hanneli threw the bundle over the barbed wire fence that separated them. But another woman, also desperate, grabbed the bundle and ran off with it.
I tell this story in my biography of Anne Frank written many years ago. And now to meet someone who had been with Anne and to hear her recount it was chilling. So many memories of Amsterdam where I did research for the book—from spending time in the Secret Annex and the library to taking a bus to MerwedepIein 37 where the Franks lived before they went into hiding. I remember looking up at the apartment and wondering who lived there now. (How often did the current tenants think about the previous Inhabitants? Were they even aware?) The librarians at the Anne Frank House showed me the photo albums Otto Frank, Anne’s father, had made of Anne and her sister Margot when they were little. My hands shook as I turned the pages looking at snapshots of birthday parties and thinking “such ordinary childhoods.” And then everything changed.
Irene spoke of the many parallels and striking differences between her own experience and that of Anne Frank. Irene’s father managed to obtain the passports which allowed them to escape but he died on their way to Switzerland. Irene was sent to a live with a family in Algeria and eventually joined her mother and brother in America. Anne’ life took a different turn. She died eighty years ago, in March1945, a few days after her sister. Her mother had died at Auschwitz in early January. Only Anne’s father survived—and it was he who made the decision to publish the diary Miep Giep had found—and held onto—after the Gestapo arrested the Frank family.
For forty years Irene never spoke of the Holocaust. But later, after she married and became a professor at the University of Michigan, her daughter Pamela asked her to share her story for a high school project on the Holocaust. She found her voice and has continued to speak out, saying that she was saved through “the miracles of luck and the love of determination” of her father. “I owe it to him and everybody who suffered to talk about what I learned because suffering never ends, so our work must continue.”
Talking about the Holocaust has now become Irene’s life’s calling. And we are all the better for it. She is a small woman with kind eyes, the most radiant smile, and a powerful voice. Like Anne, she teaches us never to forget.
Ambassador Tazelaar also honored Dr. Kathrin Meyer, recipient of the 2025 Special Recognition Award. She is the former Secretary-General of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA), based in Berlin, and she is committed to ending Holocaust distortion—efforts to minimize the impact of the Holocaust and the number of victims. She calls Holocaust distortion “one of the strongest and most efficient tools of anti-democratic movements, paving the way for antisemitism and radicalization.”
Thousands of tulips—in various shades of red, pink, orange, yellow, and blue—filled the halls of the embassy residence. Chestnuts were on each dinner table, a reminder of the tree that grew behind the Secret Annex. This was the tree that helped lift Anne’s spirits at times when she glimpsed it through the attic window. The Anne Frank House has donated saplings from the tree to schools and organizations committed to upholding Anne’s vision of tolerance. In 2014, a sapling was planted on the West Lawn of the U.S. Capitol. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who helped dedicate this sapling, was present at the dinner to congratulate the awardees and underscore the importance of this annual remembrance.
Many thanks to Dirk Vermeij, the head of the political department at the Netherlands embassy, for inviting me to this event.
*Caption Ambassador Birgita Tazelaar and Dr. Katrina Lantos Swett present the award, shaped to represent a chestnut tree, to Dr. Irene Butter.
