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Last Updated: May 8th, 2008 - 20:33:00
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After surviving one of the darkest chapters in human history, Eva Olsson feels it is her duty to tell others of the horrors she witnessed and help them learn lessons from her experiences.
Olsson, a Holocaust survivor and nationally-renowned speaker, brought her story to students at Picture Butte High School on Tuesday.
More than 400 people filled the school gym to hear Olsson recount her tale. She also warned the audience of the dangers of hate.
“If you keep hating, genocide will go on,” she said.
“The war ended in 1945, but genocide didn’t.”
She encouraged the students to be tolerant and compassionate and to avoid labelling others.
“It’s OK to have a different religion; it’s OK to look different; it’s OK to be from a different country. What’s not OK is being indifferent to other people,” explained Olsson.
“The power lies in your hands, by making the commitment not to be a bystander.”
In great detail, Olsson told the story of the Nazis’ brutal crimes. Along with many others, Olsson and her family were rounded up in their Hungarian village in 1944 and told they would be going to work in a German factory. They were loaded into train boxcars in groups of 100 for transport and each boxcar was given two pails — one full of water meant to last the entire journey, and one for human waste.
“We were packed in like sardines in a can,” said Olsson, adding some elderly passengers died from a lack of oxygen.
“Then my mother said something that has haunted me for 63 years — that she envied her daughter who had died at home and received a proper burial.”
When the train arrived at its destination, some inside were relieved the journey was over, believing they would received food, water and proper treatment. But when the doors opened to the Auschwitz concentration camp with its wire fences, machine gun posts and armed guards, those hopes were quickly dashed.
Olsson said the men were separated from the women and children and some were sent to work camps. She then described how many of the women and children were sent to gas chambers for systematic execution.
“They were forced in there screaming and moaning. And after 20 minutes it was silent,” said Olsson, explaining after an execution was complete, a pyramid of bodies would often be found as victims had attempted to reach as close to the ceiling as they could, struggling for clean air. She visited the gas chambers in 2007 while retracing her journey of 1944-45.
“I went into the gas chamber, but I didn’t see it empty. I saw images of my mom watching her grandchildren suffocating before she did.
“I have not been able to find the right label for the Nazi atrocities. No matter what I could say, it would not be strong enough to describe these crimes against humanity”
Olsson lost most of her family in the Holocaust, including five young nieces.
“I’m here to speak for them, because their voices were silenced by the Nazis and they can’t speak for themselves.”
Olsson said she was first inspired to speak publicly about her story after her grandson asked how his great-grandmother had died. Believing the child wasn’t ready to hear, Olsson told him to ask again when he was older. Two weeks later, after turning eight years old, he asked again. That’s when Olsson realized people needed to hear her message.
“I don’t go into a school anywhere and say that I’m going to change the whole student body,” she explained.
“I go in hoping to change one student at a time.”
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