By Sarah Zientarski, One Detroit Contributor

Part one of a two-part series. Part two is about how the children of Holocaust survivors are carrying on their parents’ legacies.

Holocaust survivor and author Irene Miller shares her firsthand account of displacement, survival, and resilience during World War II as part of our “Destination Detroit” series.

Born in Warsaw, Poland, Miller was only six or seven years old when Nazi Germany invaded in 1939. She said she doesn’t have a birth certificate so isn’t sure.

During an interview with One Detroit, Miller recalled her parents realized the danger their Jewish family faced, so they packed what little they could and hired a guide to smuggle them across the border into the Soviet Union. She said the guide abandoned her family in “no man’s land” where they spent six weeks in snow surrounded by thousands of other refugees.

“My feet got frostbitten,” Miller recalled. “I saw people dying there from hunger, from disease, from exposure.”

Her family eventually reached the Soviet Union, and the struggle for survival continued. They were deported by boxcar to a Siberian labor camp and later sent to Uzbekistan, where food was scarce. Through it all, Miller said her will to survive came from an instinctive drive to live.

“In the most difficult situations,” she said, “find one grain of positivity, water it, nurture it, and cling to it. There is not a situation no matter how painful it is that you cannot find one little grain of something.”

After the war, Miller immigrated to the United States and eventually made it to Michigan.

Katie Chaka-Parks, Director of Education at The Zekelman Holocaust Center, said approximately 4,000 Holocaust survivors moved to Michigan after WWII. Today, there are still over 400 Holocaust survivors in the state.

Miller, now in her nineties, went on to earn multiple college degrees and built a career in mental health and community service. She wrote a memoir “Into No Man’s Land” and continues to share her story across schools, libraries and community centers around the country.

“Speaking throughout the United States, it’s a mission for me to let the world know what hate and prejudice did and what hate and prejudice can do again unless we learn from it,” Miller said. “My extended family was close to a hundred members. Not a single one of them survived. When I speak, I’m their voice as well.”