Biography

Miriam “Mimi” Freedman (she would later take the married name Hart) was born in Montréal, part of a prominent Jewish family that could trace its roots in Canada back almost two centuries. Her own immediate family would immigrate to Europe after the First World War, first arriving in Belgium before eventually settling in the United Kingdom. Eager to do her part upon the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, the young woman joined the London Ambulance Service in England in the opening weeks of the conflict. She spent three years as an ambulance driver, including during the worst days of the Blitz when German bombers pounded Britain with almost nightly bombing raids, before joining the Canadian Women’s Army Corps in 1943 as a driver attached to the Canadian Military Headquarters.

Staff Sergeant Freedman would find herself close to the front lines as she landed in Normandy two months after D-Day—one of the first Canadian servicewomen to arrive on the continent—and followed the advancing Canadian troops through Northwest Europe over the course of the rest of the war. Although she was a driver, Freedman was sometimes called on to use her impressive language skills (she was fluent in English, French, Dutch, German and Flemish) to talk to the local people of the countries being liberated, as well as to help interrogate captured German prisoners.

Freedman earned a Mention in Dispatches for her impressive military service and is believed to be the only Jewish Canadian enlisted woman to be decorated for bravery during the Second World War.

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Where they participated