“I am here because I need to bring awareness to the power of hate,” Dr. Eva Olsson told the students of Victoria Cross Public School last week. “I don’t ever use the word hate, because hate murdered my family.”
A WWII holocaust survivor, Dr. Olsson has spoken to more than one million people over the past decade; and brought her harrowing message of intolerance and remembrance to VCPS last Thursday afternoon. She spoke of how Nazi cruelty was responsible for the deaths of six million Jews in WWII, 1.5 million of which were children.
“Five of those children were my nieces. I am here to speak for them today, because their voices were silenced by hate.”
Dr. Olsson was 19 years old in 1944, when Nazi soldiers invaded her home in Hungary, forced her family into railway boxcars, and shipped them to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. She was forced to endure squalid living conditions there, with starvation, sickness and death casting a cloud of misery over each and every day.
On the train platform stood the Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr. Joseph Mengele, who separated prisoners into two lines; one for death in the gas chambers, the other for slave detail in the work camps. Dr. Olsson said the sky was covered in black smoke and a foul stench filled the air, due to the cremation of dead bodies.
Dr. Olsson was separated from her mother and nieces, those deemed too old and too young to work, and she never saw them again as they were led to gas chambers capable of killing 2,000 people at a time.
“People’s hopes and dreams were turned to ashes. Eleven million people died, and hate was the cause, not accidents or disease,” she said.
Survivors were stripped and shaved, their hair collected and used to make blankets and socks for German soldiers. Still alive and fit enough for work, Dr. Olsson was marched 7km from the ghetto to the railway, with a promise of work in a German brick factory. The promise, however, was an empty one.
Death trains moved her to Bergen-Belsen, a work camp where the barrack floors were covered in excrement, human corpses were piled into hills, bulldozed and burned. Over 100,000 people died there.
“The way I survived was not to give up. The only thing the Nazis couldn’t take away was your spirit, your will to survive,” she said. “I couldn’t let the Nazi bullies defeat me.”
Eva Olsson was liberated in October 1944, when the Allied forces bombed the camps and routed the Germans. She found her way into Sweden to join a family, he human family.
Dr. Olsson told the students she “returned to hell” to visit in 2007, but didn’t see the empty gas chamber that remains on display at Auschwitz. She saw only her mother and nieces helpless and dying amid the chaos. She visited a memorial in Budapest, where thousands of people were massacred and thrown into the Danube; and also toured the Buchenwald slave camp, where her father died of starvation.
Although some countries, such as Sweden and Denmark, worked hard to save thousands of Jews from the death camps, Dr. Olsson said Nazi barbarism and hate spread throughout Europe because so many people stood aside and did nothing. There was not enough compassion or action to stop the madness from spreading.
“Hitler could not have done what he did without bystanders,” she said. “Bullies are losers, and so are bystanders. Think of the 1.5 million children who died. You have a voice. Theirs was silenced by hate.”
Dr. Olsson urged the students to never again use the word hate, telling them it is okay not to like someone, but it is never acceptable to say you hate someone. She said hate creates bullies, and her family suffered unimaginably at the hands of “the Nazi bullies, the ultimate bullies.”
Prejudice spreads like a disease, and we all have the power to wipe out disease. By not being a bystander and doing nothing in the face of oppression and negativity, we all help each other get rid of hate, she said.
Dr. Olsson told the students to never take their freedom or families for granted. She said there will always be challenges to face, but living the golden rule of always treating others as you would want to be treated is the secret to a good life.
“Know who you are,” concluded Dr. Olsson. “When you love yourself, you can love others. Be the one that can make a difference in someone else’s life, and never again shall a child die by evil hands. Never again.”