Boehm, Heige S.

Heige S. Boehm’s writing is greatly influenced by the stories and lives of her parents who grew up in Nazi Germany and, at the end of the war, found themselves in East Germany, locked behind the Iron Curtain. They escaped with their first two children to West Berlin in 1961, just days before the start of the building of the Berlin wall. After living in several refugee camps they settled for a few years in Euskirchen, where Heige was born in 1964. Eventually the family relocated to Cologne. With the family living beside a thoroughfare, Heige would awake at night to hear and see army tanks rumbling down the street. There was a WWII bomb shelter across the street, and she had heard stories of how a young boy had died in that bomb shelter. Heige’s older sisters discovered a secret hiding place in their basement, and they told her that a Jewish family had hidden there during the war. She came to believe that WWII was still raging, a belief that was reinforced on visits to relatives in the former GDR (East Germany), where she saw bombed-out buildings and bullet-riddled structures. It wasn’t until she was nine and her family immigrated to Canada that her war finally ended. It was then that her questions about the war began. The answers lie in Secrets in the Shadows. Heige is a graduate of The Writers’ Studio at Simon Fraser University. She now lives on the Sunshine Coast of Canada where she is writing and researching her next novel that follows the life of one of the secondary characters in Secrets in the Shadows. Visit her at www.heigeboehm.ca.