Fonds jhse-124 - Edelmann family fonds

Eugene Edelmann was born in Hungary in the small town of Jaszalsoszentgyorgy in 1923. At the age of 19, he moved to Budapest, where he worked until 1944, when the Germans occupied the country. He was deported to Auschwitz, where he worked in a munitions factory until liberation. In 1945 he returned to Hungary to find his parents and two sisters, but could not. He spent 1 ½ years in a refugee camp in Austria waiting for immigration papers for Canada. He arrived in Toronto in 1948, where he started to work as a baker. In 1952 he met and married wife Judy, a Hungarian survivor brought by the Canadian Jewish Congress to Winnipeg as an orphan in 1948. Eugene worked for seven years as a baker in Toronto before moving to Edmonton in 1956. They opened the Bon (Patisserie) Bakery in the Tower Shopping Centre. In 1960 they moved to Lynnwood Shopping Centre, calling the bakery the Bon Ton. They operated for 43 years until 1998, when they sold the business to Hilton Dinner. Eugene and Judy have three sons.