Holocaust Survivor, Educator, Author, Human Rights Advocate, and March of the Living Witness

Judy Weissenberg Cohen z”l was born Judit Weissenberg on September 17, 1928, in Debrecen, Hungary. She was the youngest of seven children in a large Jewish family. Her childhood was marked by family, community, and the ordinary hopes of prewar Jewish life in Hungary, until antisemitic laws, propaganda, and the spread of Nazi power began to change the world around her.

In March 1944, Nazi Germany occupied Hungary. Soon after, Judy and her family were forced to wear the yellow star, were pushed into ghetto conditions, and were eventually deported. In June 1944, Judy and her family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was fifteen years old when she arrived. Her parents, Margit and Sandor, her young nephew Peter, his mother Magda, and many members of her family were murdered. Judy and three of her sisters were initially selected for slave labour.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Judy survived starvation, selections, terror, and the constant uncertainty of whether she would live another day. After being separated from her sisters, she found support through what she called her “camp sisters,” other young women from Debrecen who became part of her emotional survival. Her later testimony and writing often emphasized the importance of women’s bonds, mutual care, and “sistering” as part of survival in the camps.

Judy was later transported to Bergen-Belsen and then to forced labour at the Junkers aircraft factory in Aschersleben, near Leipzig. There, she worked long hours under guard as part of the Nazi forced labour system. When Allied bombing destroyed the industrial complex in the final weeks of the war, Judy and other prisoners were forced onto a death march.

Judy was especially known for insisting that women’s experiences during the Holocaust be studied, documented, and remembered. In 2001, she founded the website Women and the Holocaust, which collected testimony, literature, and scholarly material connected to gender-based experiences in the Holocaust. Her work helped preserve stories that had too often been left out of mainstream Holocaust education.

Her memoir, A Cry in Unison, was published through the Azrieli Foundation’s Holocaust Survivor Memoirs Program. The book tells the story of her childhood in Debrecen, deportation to Auschwitz-Birkenau, survival with her sisters and “camp sisters,” Bergen-Belsen, forced labour, the death march, postwar displacement, and rebuilding in Canada. Azrieli describes the memoir as both a personal survival story and a call to remember women’s specific experiences during the Holocaust.

Judy was also connected with March of the Living and MOLDAP. March of the Living preserved her survivor testimony, and MOLDAP’s Holocaust Survivor Vignettes Project. Her vignette, “Please Work for Tikkun Olam,” shows Judy giving a heartbreaking account at Yad Vashem in 1997 of the last time she saw her mother during the selection on the train tracks in Birkenau.

Judy Weissenberg Cohen passed away on September 6, 2026. Her legacy continues through her family, memoir, testimony, March of the Living, MOLDAP, the Toronto Holocaust Museum, the Azrieli Foundation, the Crestwood Oral History Project, and her pioneering work preserving women’s voices from the Holocaust.

“Our prayer was the sound of this incredible cry of 800 women.”

-Judy Weissenberg Cohen’s Yom Kippur testimony about Kol Nidre in Auschwitz. MOTL/Jerusalem Post.