On Monday, Feb. 5, IHM Community will host Irene Miller, Holocaust survivor, author, speaker and educator
Irene Miller, a Holocaust survivor, author, speaker, and educator will take you on a survival journey little written and known about. You will sleep in the winter under an open sky on no man’s land; you will freeze in a Siberian labor camp where the bears come to your doorfront. In Uzbekistan, you will live on boiled grass or broiled onions, and shiver with malaria. You will spend years in orphanages. When this is over you will wonder how a child with this background grows up to become a positive, creative, accomplished woman with a joy of living and love to share. Join us on Monday, Feb. 5, beginning at 2 p.m. in the Maxis Community Room at the IHM Senior Living Community for a story of courage, determination, perseverance, and the power of the human spirit.
Speaker Irene Miller has lived in a number of countries, traveled extensively, and speaks 6 languages. She is a retired healthcare executive who has held positions as a hospital administrator, planner, developer, and administrator of the first federally qualified HMO in Michigan, Group Health Plan of Southeastern Michigan. She was the director of mental health for Livingston County, Michigan. Irene was 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. For a year, she served in Washington, D.C., on an advisory committee for issues related to drug addiction in women and children. For two years, she was a public school teacher in Israel.
She has been interviewed and recorded for Spielberg’s Visual History Foundation. The PBS documentary “Irene; Child of the Holocaust” premiered in December 2016, and “Shoah Ambassadors,” a PBS movie in which Irene took part, premiered in November 2021.
In retirement, Irene is a docent and speaker for the Detroit Institute of Arts, a courts mediator, and serves on the Board of Directors of the American Jewish Committee, the oldest civil rights organization in the US. Since the University of Michigan-Dearborn published her book, Into No Man’s Land: A Historical Memoir, in November of 2012, Irene has been in demand as a speaker at many large events in various States the US, and in Canada, at professional conferences, military groups, at NASA Space Center, labor unions, churches, schools, universities, adult education centers, at a campus of adjudicated teens and many other organizations and social clubs. The memoir and her talks serve Irene’s mission to promote tolerance and diversity.
Education
- Teachers College in Israel
- BS in Psychology, University of Cincinnati
- Masters in Social Psychology, University of Cincinnati
- MBA with a major in hospital management, Xavier University, Cincinnati