You believe him, you pack your bags and you head towards the train station. Walking there feels strange, like being in a silent movie, with everyone on the sides of the streets, watching the Jews parade quietly towards the train station. No one knows for sure where the train is really going, but everyone hopes they are heading to a better future.
They are wrong.
Auschwitz. One of the most horrible concentration camps man has made. That is where Eva Olssen, her family, many of the Jews of Europe, and other innocent people were sent. The reality was that it was the place where it was almost certain that they were going to draw their last breath in the black smoke.
These were no passenger trains, they were box cars, and they stuffed them with as many people as could be squeezed inside. When they finally reached their destination, after four days of going non-stop without water or food, they arrived at Auschwitz. They were ordered into a line and were then sent to the left or to the right. Some realized that left meant certain death. Right meant you had some chance of living. Families were wrenched apart in this line. All mothers, children and pregnant ladies were sent to the left to be suffocated in the gas chambers. Eva's mother was one of them.
Can you imagine having your mother sent to certain death without being able to tell her one more time how much you loved her? Eva felt like that.
I find it amazing that some people were brainwashed into thinking that sending people to life or death was a good solution. Can you imagine being the person who did that, during the war? Feeling absolutely no guilt at all? And then after the war, once you've lost? What would you do? Run? Hide? Commit suicide? Or would you try to do so much good in the world that you eventually could forgive yourself? None of these would save you.
Eva Olssen came to our school to tell us about the horrors that the Holocaust brought to the world and to her family. I am in awe of her amazing courage, to have endured those hopeless years. Hungry, thirsty, scared, sick, all those things she had to suffer through while she was only a young woman. The whole school was silenced as her words bored through our heads.
" 200,000 people die every year because of sickness and of old age. The Nazi bullies killed 14,000,000 people who had done nothing wrong, all because of HATE and BYSTANDERS."
After she was liberated, she went to Sweden where she found love and a husband. When her son was 10 years old though, her husband died because of a drinking-and-driving accident. To lose one parent is one thing, to lose your whole family is another, but losing your husband as well? It must have taken more courage to survive all of that than I would ever be able to pull together.
Eva Olssen suffered things that I can't even begin trying to imagine. I hope that neither I nor anybody else has to suffer through such horrors, minute by minute, as Eva did.
She told us that there was one thing she wished she had done but didn't so she asks you to do it before tomorrow:
Tell your parents you love them.
Do it today. There might not be tomorrow.
