Obituary: Helen Edel , 88, was Holocaust survivor and social worker
Orphaned by the Nazis in her teens, Edel triumphed over the Holocaust to build a life and career in Canada.
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Helen Edel knew first-hand the worst in humanity. At 16, the Jewish teenager had to assume a false identity to survive the Nazi occupation of her Polish hometown.
Her parents obtained forged papers that enabled her to pose as a foreign worker in order to escape death. They did not survive.
Edel had seen the worst in humanity, yet she exemplified its best traits. The trauma of her youth did not cripple her but revealed an iron resolve. A survivor, Edel came to Canada determined to rebuild her life, which is exactly what she went on to do.
“She was fiercely independent,” said her son, Martin Regg Cohn.
Edel died Aug. 20 in hospital from complications after surgery. She had just turned 88.
Edel’s wartime experiences — orphaned and living under the alias of Stefania Stefanowiz — were a defining period of her life.
Because of her ability to speak German, Edel was hired by the head of a Nazi employment bureau in occupied Poland to work at his farm and inn back in Germany. She performed Catholic rituals to keep her Jewish identity a secret, and while serving as a waitress had to listen to guests’ anti-Semitic stories without showing emotion.
She received the news of her parents’ death through a coded reference in a letter. It was a painful secret she could share with no one.
“What enabled me to play my role almost to perfection was my ability to separate my public and private personas,” she once wrote. “One thing I couldn’t do was cry. When I was feeling depressed, which was often, I wanted badly to cry, sensing that tears will relieve my pain. But no tears came. I think I knew that if I cried I wouldn’t be able to stop.”
Unaware of her Jewish identity, her bosses ironically considered adopting her after the war. But in 1945 the area was liberated by the Russians. Edel eventually learned to speak five languages, and her knowledge of Russian helped her deal with the sometimes raucous soldiers.
Hesitant to return to Poland because of anti-Semitic pogroms there, she made her way to Czechoslovakia and then to Paris.
Thanks to an uncle in the United States, Edel came to Montreal, where she had cousins, to start over again.
“She really wanted to rebuild a new life here in Canada after going through so much in Europe,” said Cohn.
This meant resuming an education disrupted by the war. She started with secretarial courses but moved to university and obtained a B.A.
Edel married, had two sons and then returned to school, earning a master’s degree in social work and a career in that field.
She worked as a psychiatric social worker at a hospital in Montreal and at what was then Toronto General Hospital, where she charmed co-workers and advocated tirelessly for patients. Her insight into the human condition made her all the more effective at her profession.
Edel took tremendous joy in her children and grandchildren. She instilled in them the importance of remembering the Holocaust, but was also aware of the need not to burden her children with too much of its horrors. She loved life.
“She wanted her children to have a balance between understanding [not just] the history and the inhumanity — but also, getting on with life,” said Cohn.
Edel leaves her sons, Dr. Arthur Charles Cohn of San Francisco, and Toronto Star columnist Martin Regg Cohn. She is also survived by five granddaughters: Emily, Rebecca, Megan, Yasmeen, and Haleh. She was predeceased by her former husband, Dorel Cohn.
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