Rare are the opportunities in life when you get the opportunity to meet someone who speaks with such heart-felt eloquence about the things that are so truly important in life. Particularly when these are things that touch all of us: life, love, family, and friendship. And most profoundly, when all of it can be lost at the sweep of a hand in a world consumed by the fires of organized hatred.
Dr. Eva Olsson knows of this first-hand, and although it happened some sixty-five years ago, the pain is still there, the emotion raw, the sense of loss in no way lessened with the passage of time. That’s because, way back in 1944, Eva Olsson was sent to a Nazi concentration camp.
St. Joseph’s was blessed with the opportunity to hear Dr. Olsson speak of her ordeal, in the name of remembrance, somewhat, but also as a clarion call to be wary of the darkness that hatred brings when it travels in the hearts of humans.
Dr. Olsson was a typical, albeit poor, 19 year-old girl on the day when the beating of drums in the town square of her Hungarian hometown summoned the citizenry out of their homes to be read a message from the Nazi-ruled authorities. And unknown to her at the time, that small scrap of paper the man read from would serve as a death sentence to her entire family; her parents, her three sisters, her two brothers, and an assortment of young nieces and nephews.
Mind you, that’s not exactly what was read out that day. Rather, it gave notice to all Jews that they had exactly two hours to pack their bags before making the seven kilometre trek to the numerous boxcars waiting on the railway tracks, boxcars that would take them to Germany to begin work at a brick factory. One can’t fully comprehend such a journey unless they’ve experienced such a thing for themselves, but Eva remembers it as if it happened yesterday, 150 or so people jammed in a rail car with two pails of water, only one for drinking, and standing for the entirety of the four day trip, the elderly and weak dying daily where they stood, often remaining that way among those still living.
After four days the train stopped, the doors flew open, and the passengers rejoiced at the prospect of getting off alive and breathing fresh air once again. But Eva recalls the darkness in the sky from the pall of smoke, and the sickly-sweet smell on the breeze.
Because this was not Germany. This was Auschwitz.
Perhaps the most notorious of all the Nazi death camps of the Second World War. This was no brick factory. As Eva Olsson put it, this was a “factory of death.”
And so it was that Dr. Olsson stepped off that train to become part of one of the greatest, if not the greatest, horror story ever perpetrated by human beings upon other human beings; the systematic round-up and extermination of Jews during World War 2.
We know of it as the Holocaust, and Dr. Olsson is a survivor, that is if that's what you want to call it. Make no mistake, this 19 year-old girl, now well into her eighties, is deeply scarred, and survival is a bit of a relative thing, notwithstanding the good fortune of a long life.
She never really did get the opportunity to say goodbye to her mother. She can only recall, with anguish, the look on her mom’s face as she was swept up in a line that Eva now knows led to the gas chamber, to be followed by burning in the crematorium. That was the line, you see, for women, children, and the elderly, the people for whom the Nazis had no immediate use. The men, on the other hand, were directed to a different line that led to death through forced labour, starvation, and soul-breaking abuse. And as for young, attractive women, like Eva, who were “blessed” with, as she says, “healthy bodies?” As difficult as it is sometimes to contemplate the depths to which humanity can sink, it would appear, sadly, that the Nazi guards did have a "use" for such women, although all decent and moral beings would rightly recognize it as "abuse'.
Towards the end of the war, many Auschwitz prisoners were transferred to other camps, and Eva was fortunate enough to get sent to a camp near Essen, in western Germany, near the border with Holland. And it was there, in the waning days of the war, that she was liberated with her fellow survivors, poignant to us in that it was British and Canadian troops that set her camp free. This was the point she referred to as the beginning of her “second life.” At war’s end, she was patriated to Sweden, where she met a young man who would become her husband. Together they would move to Canada, she a Jew, and he not, and neither of them caring about the distinction. And they would remain that way happily until his life was snuffed out by a drunk driver a few, painfully short years later.
Dr. Eva Olsson brings to us a message of respect, of having the common decency to treat one another with understanding, with the genuine belief that each human being has value, no matter the colour of skin, their belief in God, or any other thing that might make us different, one from the other. Eva has lived through a time when people were more pre-occupied by differences. So much so, that it led to mass murder on a scale that’s almost beyond comprehension to those of us born well after. To Eva, we should dwell less on what makes us different, and celebrate more the things that make us the same.
And, of course, cherish the things that are important: life, love, family, and friendship.
