Hedy Page, a Holocaust survivor and a Long Beach artist, died on Feb. 4. She was 96.
“She was an amazing mom, wife, mother-in-law and grandparent,” Ken Page, Hedy’s son, said. “She was all about love.”
Hedy Kellman was born in Vienna in 1929. In 1938 she fled to Panama with her parents, Paula and Jacob Kellman, and her brother, Richard, to escape the Nazi regime. The family came to the United States in 1947, and the following year Hedy met and married Eric Pagremanski in Chicago. The two later changed their last name to Page when they became American citizens.
The Pages moved to Long Beach in the 1980s, and opened Follow Your Art, on Park Avenue, across from Stop & Shop, where they taught art. Ken Page said that people would walk in, watch his mother paint, and get to know her — and one another. “It was a home for so many people,” he recalled. “People were so loving and welcoming. A lot of deep friendships were built in that gallery.”
Hedy studied at the Art Students League of New York, in Manhattan, under renowned artist Isaac Soyer. During her free time, she taught art, volunteering at the Nassau County Correctional Facility, in East Meadow, and the Sing Sing Correctional Facility, in Ossining.
Follow Your Art closed in 2003, but Page continued to make an impact in the community. She painted scenes from New York City to Long Beach, and collaborated with Johanna Mathieson, who now directs Artists in Partnership in the city.
Page and Mathieson first crossed path in the late 1990s, when Mathieson was the director of Youth and Family Services at the Magnolia Community Center, and Page was a volunteer at the Fortune Society, a nonprofit in Long Island that focuses on helping incarcerated people. Over the next two decades, they collaborated from time to time at the Fine Arts Fair in Kennedy Plaza. Page also took part in a pilot program of dance classes for seniors and high school students with special needs.
In 2022, Page attended AIP’s Tor Nagashi Festival, a multicultural event in Kennedy Plaza, for which families decorated lanterns with messages of peace and love and placed them in the fountain outside City Hall. That sense of community and acceptance, Mathieson said, was one of her guiding principles.
“You could see Hedy was glowing with excitement,” she said. “She was so inspired.”
Outside of their professional lives, Mathieson said that Page would always help her stay focused, and was her biggest supporter. “She was like my personal cheerleader,” Mathieson recalled. When they chatted, Page would hold Mathieson’s hand.
“She was a force,” Mathieson said. “But behind the force was kindness, balance of strength, beauty of her smile, and her warmth.”
In her later years, Page was a member of the Long Beach Art League and maintained her standing with AIP. When the pandemic struck, she launched Facebook Live shows, in which she discussed art and philosophy. She also spoke at public schools in Oceanside and Long Beach, recalling her experience with the Holocaust to teach students how to stand up against bullying, racism and prejudice.
In 2024 Page was the subject of a documentary, “The World I Know.” Directed by filmmaker John Terracuso, it followed her creative process, her artistic journey and her life with Eric Page, who died in 2016.
Her artwork is preserved and exhibited at 12 locations across the country, including the Museum of the City of New York and the Long Beach Museum.
Page had many traditions with her children and grandchildren. They would go on walks, reciting poems and singing songs like “Just the Way You Are” and “Don’t Fence Me In.”
After her daughter, Joanne Page, retired as CEO of the Fortune Society in 2024, the pair spent time together on Saturdays. Joanne, 72, said they would exchange stories, page through photo albums and sometimes end up at the IHOP in Oceanside, where strangers would stop to talk to her mother.
“All the waiters knew us,” Joanne said. “They would smile and just enjoy the fact that this was a 96-year-old woman.”
Joanne recalled when the pair attended a retreat for Cambodian adoptees. Her mother was talking with a cashier in the dining hall about what she wanted to do with her life.
“I remember saying,” Joanne said. “How did you get to that?”
When she asked Hedy, she responded, “Because I don’t have any time to waste.”
