A standing ovation followed Dr. Eva Olsson's evening presentation at Sundre High School last Thursday.
Born in Hungary, Olsson is an 88-year-old Holocaust survivor who travels worldwide to share her story.
“It's really important for children to be aware of hate, everybody uses it,” she said, in a personal interview.
“It's not just important to me because I lost most of my family, also because one and a half million their age and younger were murdered by hate...five of those children were my nieces.”
“Their voices were silenced by hate.”
The room filled with emotion as Olsson shared six years of torture she was forced to endure under Adolf Hitler's Nazi regime.
Hitler planned to eliminate the Jewish race of 11 million and came close, with over seven million Jews reportedly murdered.
When Olsson was 19 years old, she was ordered to sleep in a hole in the ground with other Jewish prisoners who were beaten, raped and starved.
They were dehydrated to the point where they drank their own urine, until they became so dehydrated that their bodies were no longer producing urine, Olsson said.
She suffered from typhoid fever, which is transmitted by the ingestion of food or water contaminated with feces of an infected person.
When they were fed, she said they were fed soup with tufts of human hair and when they were given water, it was contaminated.
She said small miracles were key to her survival, along with courage and the strength to never give up.
The Nazis ordered the Jewish women to remove their clothes, and after examining their bodies, would send them to the gas chamber or to work as a slave labourer, if their body was healthy.
Any women with scars were immediately murdered, she said, but Olsson managed to hide her scar from having her appendix removed a few months prior.
This was a significant miracle that allowed her to survive.
“Without compassion we have destruction. Where there is compassion, there is hope and where there is hope, there is life,” she said, during the presentation.
“Good will prevail over evil.”
On the day she was rescued, it was 11 a.m. and the Nazis had planned to kill her and the other prisoners at 3 p.m. – another miracle.
She lost her two sisters, two brothers and mother and father to the Nazis. Eighty-seven relatives, on her mother's side only, were murdered.
After she was rescued, she went to Sweden and married a man she called her best friend. At the age of 35, he was killed in a car accident caused by a driver who was under the influence of alcohol.
Together, they had a son, who became all she had left. He gave her three grandchildren.
“Don't judge people. Not every German was a Nazi and not every Nazi was German,” she said.
Bystanders are held as responsible as the Nazis, she said, because when the Second World War started in 1939, there were 300 Nazis. By 1942, there were 300,000.
She has been to over 3,000 schools in the past 17 years to share her story with students, their parents and other people in different communities.
She has spoken to people across Canada and the United States, and at the United Nations. She has also spoken to the military, at air force bases, churches and community events.
In June, she will be speaking in Ontario to college professors from British Columbia, Alberta, Nunavut, Quebec and Ontario.
She made three presentations in Sundre last Thursday, and after each one she was surrounded by people in tears, hugging her and thanking her for sharing her story.
It's important to create awareness of eliminating hate and people shouldn't toss the word around, she said.
She has received over 14,000 letters of support in her Ontario home.
“If I didn't have the support that I am getting from my audience, I wouldn't be out there anymore,” she said.
She has written two books, one on her own and one with her son. She also has a documentary film.
“I would like to tell the parents to send their children to school the way they want to see them as adults, not to expect the teacher to fix it for them,” she said.
“A child is a product of their environment.”
