Photo by Ziv Koren (2023)

“As long as we are able to move, we should continue to tell our stories”

Hedy Bohm was born in 1928, in Oradea, Transylvania, and was an only child to Ignacz, a master cabinet maker, and Erzsebet, a homemaker. Hedy attended an all-girls Jewish school until grade 10. In April of 1944, Hedy and her family were sent to the Oradea ghetto, and from there, she was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was then selected for forced work detail at an ammunition factory and shipped to Fallersleben, Germany in August 1944. Hedy was liberated by American forces in April 1945.

Post war, Hedy returned to Romania, where she lived with her mom’s sister Ilus and her husband Kiss Ferencz and studied photography, started English lessons and took modern dancing lessons. In December 1947 she married her husband Imre Bohm and left the country the same day. A year later in Prague the Jewish Agency helped them join a Hungarian Orphan group and get visas to Canada. They arrived in Toronto in August 1948. After working in factories for several years, Hedy and Imre opened up a small shoe business and worked in it together. Hedy was widowed in 1992 and continued running the business until 2008 when she retired and started a new life in Holocaust Education. Hedy has two children, Vicky and Ron and two grandchildren.