'What hate did, and still does': Holocaust survivor tours Quebec schools to combat bullying, discrimination

When Eva Olsson's six-year-old grandson asked her how her mother had died, she made a commitment to herself to start speaking publicly about the violence that decimated her family.

"If a child is old enough to ask this kind of question, they need to know the truth — what hate did, and still does."

Olsson, who turns 94 today, spent the week speaking with CEGEP and high school students in Quebec City about the Holocaust, and the forms in which hate lives on, decades later.

She has given more than 3,700 presentations in schools, churches and meeting halls across Canada since her grandson's question, in 1996, recounting her experience at Auschwitz II–Birkenau, the concentration camp in occupied Poland where her family was sent in May, 1944.

Olsson walked in with 13 family members, including her mother, father and six siblings.

Only she and her sister survived.

Of the 1.5 million children who were killed during the Holocaust, five were Eva Olsson's nieces.

"I had to speak for them, and all children who had no voice," she told CBC Quebec's afternoon radio show Breakaway, during her stop in Quebec City.

Olsson spoke to CBC before the tragic shooting that took place at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, killing 11 and injuring six. 

Olsson said the killing of six million people during World War II would never have happened without the support of bystanders and "bullies in Eastern Europe."

"Hitler could not have done what he did on his own," she said. Part of her mission is to push youth to speak out against acts of hatred and discrimination they witness.

Teen suicide

During her conferences, Olsson said she's seen the devastation bullying has left on entire communities, pushing young people to take their own lives.

She has been invited three times to speak in Sioux Lookout, in Northern Ontario, where the Wapekeka First Nation has be grappling with a wave of teen suicides.

"That's why I'm here — it's about eliminating hate," she said.

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Olsson returned to her hometown in Hungary in 2007, a trip she describes as "28 days of hell."

"How do you go back to a city where you had 56 relatives, where 13,000 Jewish people lived, and there is nobody waiting for you. Nobody."

Olsson returned to the "ghetto" where her family lived in two small rooms. The space is now occupied by a post office.

"So there was nothing to go back for except for more pain."

In the days leading up to her family's deportation to Auschwitz , 24,000 Jewish people barricaded themselves inside the six blocks surrounding her home.

On the morning of May 15, 1944, military personnel told them they were to be sent to Germany to work in a brick factory.

After four days aboard a train, they rolled into Auschwitz, and to the gate "where the Angel of death was standing, Dr. Josef Mengele," Olsson recounted.

Separated into two separate lines, she would never see her mother again.

"I turned my head to the left and didn't see my mom. At that point the sadness that came over me — after 74 years, that sadness is still there."

Confronting alt-right movements

Olsson said her mother's legacy is what she lives by now, and what keeps her going, at age 94, to speak out against hate.

Seeing the rise of alt-right rhetoric in Canada and especially in the United States has revived fears for the future of her own grandchildren, and has pushed her to continue.

"It's scary, and that's what I tell my audience — I'm not here for me, I'm here at your school because I'm concerned for your future."

Olsson's stop in Quebec City was at the invitation of the Quebec High School Leadership Class.

One of its students, Mia Tenasco, said she hopes Olsson's message will stay with her fellow students.

"I hope they come away with knowledge, and acceptance. I don't want this happening again," said Tenasco, who is from the Kitigan Zibi Anishnabeg First Nation.

She said being able to talk about genocide, in a country where "there's been an Indigenous genocide," was fascinating to her.

"I'm First Nations, and I never got to talk to anyone who survived that and who was comfortable talking about that."

She sees it as her generation's responsibility to learn from the past, and take things into their own hands once they will be the ones influencing politics and economic issues.

"I think kids my age should get that and should say, 'OK, I need to be more considerate in that situation, and I need to think about my future now,' because that future is coming soon."