Holocaust survivor Eva Olsson educates young students about Bergen-Belsen

According to this news article, Holocaust survivor Eva Olsson spoke to a group of secondary school students on December 12, 2011 about “her experiences in the Second World War.”

This quote is from the news article:

She was later moved to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where Canadian and British soldiers liberated her in 1945. During her final days there, the Nazis were doing their best to finish off the Jewish prisoners still alive before the Allies arrived.

The reporter who wrote this news story did not mention whether Eva Olsson told the students HOW the Nazis were finishing off the Jewish prisoners.  However, Eva has been out on the school circuit for a long time, educating young students about the Holocaust, and in the past, she has told students about the gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen.

On November 6, 2008, Eva Olsson, who was born into a family of Hasidic Jews in Satu Mare, Hungary, told an audience of 550 delegates to the Upper Canada District School Board’s ACT Now! Symposium in Cornwall that she was sent to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on May 19, 1944; she also mentioned the gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen where she was later transferred. Eva Olsson and her younger sister Fradel were the only members of her extended family of 89 people who survived the Holocaust, according to her story, published in the news article in the Seaway News on November 6, 2008.

The following quote is from the article that was published in the Seaway News on November 6, 2008.  This article can no longer be found on the internet, but fortunately, I copied it and saved it.

Olsson told the story of her experiences as a slave labourer at a German munitions factory, and as a prisoner in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen in 1944 and 1945.  […]

As people sat at the Nav Canada Training and Conference Centre trying to hold back tears, she spoke of how she witnessed her mother and three young nieces being led away to the gas chambers on their arrival to Auschwitz, never to be seen again.  […]

The room fell silent as Olsson told of witnessing firsthand the horror of the “death factories” created by the Nazis. She told stories of German soldiers being ordered to shoot babies in their mother’s arms-killing both mother and child–to not waste two bullets. She spoke of seeing the Angel of Death-Dr. Josef Mengele-and the hospital where he experimented on young Jewish children by infecting them with diseases such as tuberculosis.  […]

Perhaps the most gruesome aspect of the tale was her recollection of her imprisonment in Bergen-Belsen when the camp ran out of pellets to fuel the gas chambers.

“On that day, five children at a time were put into the (crematorium) ovens alive, five children at a time, to be burned alive,” said Olsson, who contracted typhus in the death camp.

Notice that Eva Olsson saw the cremation ovens (plural).  The photo below shows the one and only cremation oven at Bergen-Belsen.  This photo shows that the oven was burned in the fire when the British burned down the whole camp to stop the typhus epidemic.  She did describe the gas accurately: the Zyklon-B gas was in the form of pellets.

The one and only cremation oven at Bergen-Belsen

Did “the Nazis” at Bergen-Belsen really allow the prisoners to witness the burning of children ALIVE in the cremation ovens (plural) of Bergen-Belsen after they ran out of pellets for the gas chamber?  Did Eva Olsson really see German soldiers shooting mothers and babies with one shot in order to save bullets?  Did “the Nazis” choose young witnesses, who would have a good chance of surviving for 70 years after the war, so that 8th graders in America and Canada could learn all about these atrocities?  Yes, dear reader, all of this is true.  And if you deny it, you could wind up in prison for 5 years!

I did a little more research on Eva Olsson and found “Mrs. Parker’s Grade 8 Blog” which has a post dated 30-11-2011 about “A Memorable Visit from Dr. Eva Olsson.”  This account of a speech by Eva Olsson sheds some light on Eva’s claim that the Nazis were trying to speed up the process of killing the Jews at Bergen-Belsen just before the Allied liberators arrived.

This quote is from Mrs. Parker’s blog; she is paraphrasing what Eva Olsson told the students:

Six days before the camp was liberated the SS shut off the water completely and took away all the food rations in order to speed up the deaths.

The truth is that the Bergen-Belsen camp had been bombed by the British and the prisoners had no water because the water pump had been destroyed.  A few days before the Bergen-Belsen camp was voluntarily turned over to the British, there were 30,000 new prisoners brought to the camp after they were evacuated out of the war zone.  These 30,000 people descended on the food supplies in the camp and ate all the food.

So it appears that Eva Olsson has changed her story a bit and is not telling 8th graders about the gas chamber at Bergen-Belsen anymore.  Hopefully, she has also dropped the story of the Nazis burning babies alive in the crematory ovens at Bergen-Belsen.