On Nov. 5, 2015, the University of Guelph was proud to host Holocaust survivor Hedy Bohm as a guest speaker for Holocaust Education Week. The event was organized in collaboration with Guelph Hillel and boasted an impressive turnout. The UC’s Peter Clarke Hall was at maximum seating capacity—easily double the amount of people who attended a similar event the previous year. Audience members who were unable to find a chair went so far as to sit on the ground in order to listen to Bohm speak.
Born and raised in pre-war Romania, Bohm was the only child of two loving parents. Before the country fell into the orbit of Nazi Germany, she had no prior exposure or knowledge of racism or anti-Semitism until the Star of David was a yellow badge sewn to her coat.
“My parents sheltered me from the darkness of the world,” explained Bohm. “At 15, I was as naive as a five-year-old today.”
The first stirrings of anti-Semitism came with the taking of Jewish men, who were forced into hard labour—their families were left to fend for themselves. Around the same time, Jewish schools were shut down and children who attended them were forbidden from pursuing any further education.
Bohm says that an order for the surrender of all personal belongings was issued and she, alongside the other Jewish citizens of her city, was required to bring anything of value to the police. Jewish citizens were then required to abandon their homes and relocate to the Jewish ghetto.
In the ghetto, Bohm and her family were assigned to a tiny apartment in which three other families had already been placed in residence. However, the families were not to remain within the ghettos for long, and in the summer of 1944, Bohm and the rest of the ghetto’s inhabitants were loaded onto cattle cars to be shipped to the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Bohm commented on the on-campus cattle car exhibit, on display from Nov. 3, 2015 to Nov. 5, 2015 in Branion Plaza. She described the exhibit as a “luxury” version of the real train cars that Jewish citizens were forced into, due to the four windows present. The car she was forced into—the same car that approximately 90 other Jewish citizens were packed into—possessed only one window. The people with whom she shared the train car— who were of all ages and walks of life, but of a shared Jewish heritage—were forced to endure three days and three nights of standing in extremely close quarters with no food or water.
Upon arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau, people were unloaded from the cattle cars and lead through a set of gates—their fates decided in a split-second decision made by a member of the SS who directed them to either the barracks or the gas chambers. It was here that Bohm was forever separated from her mother.
Bohm became emotional at this point in her story, although she continued to power through. When asked about what helped her survive the atrocities she experienced at the hands of the Nazi, Bohm said that she found comfort in thinking of her mother waiting for her at the end of the war. Her mother’s memory helped Bohm strengthen her will to survive.
Bohm spent three months at Auschwitz-Birkenau, before being transported to an old Volkswagen factory that had been transformed into a mass armament manufacturing plant, where she was forced to assist in the creation of weapons of mass destruction. It is here that she gained her first insight into how the war—which she had had no knowledge of taking place—and the rest of the world was faring through a secret message passed onto her and the other factory workers by a French prisoner of war.
“The Allies are advancing,” Bohm remembered the note saying. “Do not lose hope.”
Bohm was relocated a final time—to a secondary work encampment—where she spent the rest of the war until American soldiers provided liberation. Upon liberation, Bohm returned to her former hometown in Romania where she lived with her aunt for two years before marrying at the age of 19. She and her husband—to whom she is still married to and has two children with—escaped Europe in favour of immigrating to Canada.
It is difficult to fathom the depths of the pain that Hedy Bohm and other survivors of the Holocaust experienced and still experience to this day. Bohm’s story came full circle this past summer through what is now referred to as “the last Nazi trial,” during which she provided testimony. She ended her inspirational story of survival by emphasizing the importance of the universal acceptance and tolerance of all human beings, as well as her hopes for a future in which people of all ages and backgrounds take action for positive change in the world.