Dr. Eva Olsson knows extreme hate and what it can do to people.
The 87 year-old Holocaust survivor, who endured Nazi Germany’s death camps in the Second World War that saw most of her family murdered in what was known as the “Final Solution,” spoke with students at Arthur Public School on Oct. 11.
She brought a message of hope that people have learned from an episode in history that saw millions killed.
At the conclusion of an almost one-hour presentation to the students, Olsson urged them to work for “unconditional acceptance and love for another human being.
“I need you to take that gift and pass it on to other children,” she told the students, teachers and guests, many of them wearing T-shirts with an anti bullying message.
“It takes a lot less energy to be kind to someone than it does to be mean. I was bullied by Nazi bullies. I don’t understand why Canadian children bully. You must accept others, it doesn’t matter what they look like or where they come from,” said Olsson.
The focus of her message about bullying and not being a bystander to injustice was rooted in her war experience.
The soft-spoken author and recipient of an honorary doctorate from Nipissing University, Olsson has spoken to thousands of children on the importance of standing up against forces of racism, bigotry and intolerance.
Born in 1924 in Szatmar, Hungary in a traditional Jewish family, she recounted the experience of May 1944 when she was 19. It was the day Jewish families were rounded up and told they had two hours to pack their belongings to board a train destined to take them to work at a brick factory in Germany.
They had heard rumours of Nazi atrocities against Jews in Poland, but believed they were headed to a work camp. Eventually some 24,000 Jews would be relocated.
The walk to the train was seven kilometers, a considerable distance for the extended family of 89. They were herded into boxcars with about 100 people in each. Each boxcar had one pail used as a toilet and one with water for drinking.
“We were packed like sardines,” she recalled.
The prisoners in their “standing room only” boxcar soon noticed the train was not headed to Germany. Instead it made its way on a four-day journey to the dreaded death camp Auschwitz. In all some 430,000 Jews were transported to the camp and killed in a two-month period.
When they arrived at the camp her mother was crying.
“I asked my mom why are you crying and she said ‘I’m not crying for me, I have lived.’ She was 49. She was crying for the children,” Olsson said.
Olsson was taking care of a young niece when they got off the train and was told to give the child to an older woman. She gave the child to her mother and survived because women and children were executed first. It was the last time she saw her mother, something that left a lasting impression on her.
“Auschwitz was a killing factory,” she said. “I didn’t have a chance to tell her how much I loved her. It was too late.”
She urged the students to make a commitment never to “go to bed angry” with their parents, and in particular their mothers, based on her own experience.
“You must tell her you will always love her. Never, ever take your parents for granted.”
Olsson was put into forced labour with daily reminders of the death happening all around her.
“When I was a prisoner I would ask, ‘who could do this, animals?’ Animals would not do this, people who are possessed with hate do this.”
She holds the image of seeing upon her arrival Dr. Josef Mengele, the Nazi doctor who conducted unspeakable experiments on prisoners. Known as the Angel of Death, Mengele’s experiments included injecting diseases into prisoners to see how they would react and sewing twins back to back to see how long they would survive, she said.
Eventually the only survivors from her family were her and her sister Fradel, who was three years younger. Her father would later die of starvation in another camp in Buchenwald, Germany.
“I survived by not giving up.” Her determination to take care of her sister, who she felt she was “responsible” for, was the strength she needed to survive through the final days of the war and imprisonment. She remembers the day the camp they were in was liberated by Canadian and British troops, but she also recalled that some 40,000 camp survivors would later die. “They were liberated, but they died free.”
She was violently ill with typhus and dysentery when she was liberated from Bergen Belsen on April 15, 1945.
She would eventually make her way to Sweden with her sister, where she met and married Rude Olsson who later died in a car accident in 1964.
“I lived in Sweden to regain my faith in humanity,” she said. She urged students to develop a good attitude on life.
“That good attitude will help you guys make good choices.” The doctor was hugged by students inspired by her speech following the presentation.
