This week, 94-old-old Eva Olsson was at an Edmonton school where she talked about her time in a concentration camp. It’s a presentation she has given thousands of times, and will keep giving until she can’t anymore.
Since 1996, after staying silent for 50 years, Olsson has made it her mission to tell the story of her time in Auschwitz, the largest of the German Nazi concentration camps. More than six million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War.
She frames her experience within the more modern-day messages of hate, bullying and being a good leader. Her stories are about the past, but her goal is to change the future.
“If I touch one [listener], then I’m a successful speaker,” the Holocaust survivor and author told CBC’s Edmonton AM following a presentation to 400 students, staff and guests at Steele Heights junior high school Wednesday.
It’s believed there are about 100,000 surviving Jews who had been affected by the Nazi occupation. The youngest are in their 70s.
Olsson was 19 when she and her family were taken from Hungary by the Nazis in May 1944 and shipped to occupied Poland. They were told they were going to work in a brick factory; instead, they were sent to Auschwitz.
Grade 9 students Emma Cardinal, left, and Mateo Tellez were moved by Olsson’s presentation. (Sheena Rossiter/CBC)
“You just turn yourself into a zombie,” she says about how she made it through. “The only way actually you can survive, otherwise you get into a depressed stage. And that’s what they were looking for.”
Olsson points out this is the last generation she will be able to speak to face-to-face and she’s emphatic about the importance of students learn about history firsthand.
Her voice quavers with emotion during her presentation. Every time she speaks, she says, brings back the trauma she lived through during the Holocaust.
Grade 9 student Mateo Tellez called Olsson’s presentation an emotional experience.
“One part that really got to me was … her mother, the last time she had seen her. The fact that she had so many regrets, she wanted to say sorry one last time before seeing her,” Tellez said.
“The thought of one day, seeing my mother one last time and not being able to tell her all the things I’ve ever wanted to tell her, it’s horrifying. It’s terrible.”
Olsson is introduced to the student and staff at Steele Heights school last Wednesday.
In her speech, Olsson speaks passionately about what happens when hate goes unchecked and she encourages her young audiences to remember the importance of respect and acceptance.
That message made Grade 9 student Emma Cardinal consider how words can be weapons, especially in today’s world of social media and online interactions.
“I don’t think that any of us truly understand the word hate, or understand the meaning or the possibilities of what it could mean to someone else,” Cardinal said.
“We should all accept each other. Because in the end, like she said, we all bleed, we all breathe, we’re all the same.”
Olsson says she worries about the future and hopes that her presentations to the next generation — city by city, school by school — will make a difference.
“Hopefully they will make good choices, and not be occupied with ‘I’, ‘me,'” she says.
“It’s got to be ‘we.'”