Hedy Bohm

Holocaust Survivor, Educator, and Witness

Hedy Bohm was born in 1928 in Oradea, Transylvania, then part of Romania, and grew up as the only child of Ignacz, a master cabinet maker, and Erzsebet, a homemaker. She attended a Jewish girls’ school until Grade 10, living a sheltered childhood before the events of the Second World War and the Holocaust reached her community.

In April 1944, Hedy and her family were forced into the Oradea ghetto. From there, they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After arriving at the camp, Hedy was separated from her parents and selected for forced labour. In August 1944, she was sent to Fallersleben, Germany, where she worked in an ammunition factory. She was liberated by American forces in April 1945.

After the war, Hedy returned to Romania, where she lived with relatives and began rebuilding her life. She studied photography, took English lessons, and pursued modern dance. In December 1947, she married Imre Bohm, and the couple left the country the same day. With help from the Jewish Agency in Prague, they joined a group of Hungarian orphans and received visas to Canada, arriving in Toronto in August 1948.

In Canada, Hedy and Imre worked for several years before opening a small shoe business together. Hedy continued to run the business after Imre passed in 1992, retiring in 2008. In retirement, she began a new chapter as a Holocaust educator, speaking publicly about her experiences and helping younger generations understand the human impact of the Holocaust.

Hedy Bohm has been closely connected with March of the Living, returning to Poland as a survivor-educator and sharing her testimony with students at sites connected to her own history. In 2023, at age 95, she was among the survivors who joined March of the Living participants at Auschwitz, continuing her commitment to remembrance, education, and passing the torch.

Her testimony is also preserved right here through the March of the Living Digital Archive Project. MOLDAP features several Hedy Bohm survivor vignettes, including reflections connected to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Book of Names. These video testimonies help preserve her voice for students, educators, researchers, and future generations.

In 2015, Hedy travelled to Germany to participate in one of the last major Nazi war-crimes trials, testifying in the case of Oskar Gröning, the former Auschwitz guard known as the “Bookkeeper of Auschwitz.” Gröning was later convicted as an accessory to the murder of 300,000 people and sentenced to four years in prison. Hedy’s participation in the trial formed another part of her lifelong commitment to memory, accountability, and Holocaust education.

In 2026, the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program published Hedy Bohm’s memoir, Reflection, bringing her life story to a wider audience. The memoir traces her childhood in Oradea, her deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, her survival through forced labour, her postwar journey to Canada, and her later work as an educator.