Looking around the camp, Eva Olsson saw guards with machine guns herding people like sheep through yards lined with electric fences and high towers.

It didn’t look much like a brick factory, she thought, after arriving at what was supposed to be a German labour camp.

Auschwitz, as she would soon discover, was actually a killing factory.

Jews were lined up for a selection process and in moments, Olsson’s mother disappeared into a mass of bodies. She never came back.

“I didn’t know where she was sent,” said Olsson, choking back tears as she told her story to classes at Castlefrank Elementary School on Wednesday, Nov. 12.

After surviving the Holocaust, where about six million European Jews were killed during the Second World War, Olsson had some lessons for Kanata students.

Stand up to bullies, she said. Don’t be a bystander.

“Bystanders are not good, bystanders are not innocent,” she said.

“How many have been bullied? It’s not a very good feeling is it? I know a lot about that.”

Olsson, a Jew from Hungary, was a victim of “Nazi bullies,” as they swept through Europe in 1945, packing her people onto trains bound for concentration camps.

Simply keeping quiet isn’t good enough, she said. The Holocaust happened because people, who didn’t all necessarily agree with the Nazis, stood back.

“When I leave your school, I will leave with hope in my heart, hope that I touched one of you,” she said. “I cannot change the past, I have lived in it. The future is in your hands.

“We are one family, one race: the human race.”

THE PAST

Olsson’s past weighs heavy on her mind.

“For me, it’s Remembrance Day every day,” she said. “Every day I remember.”

She remembers the inhumane living conditions: people crammed into rooms, forced to sleep on the floors.

“We weren’t allowed to keep our shoes,” she said.

Instead, they were indiscriminately handed out ill-fitting wooden clogs.

For meals, they were doled out a daily ration of bread: a small morsel that was “80 per cent sawdust.”

“You couldn’t even swallow it,” she said.

Prisoners shared bowls, about 150 of them circulated the prison yard to be used by 500 people.

Then there were the despicable medical experiments, most notably by Dr. Josef Mengele. At Auschwitz, he performed brutal surgeries including amputations and attempts to change children’s eye colors.

“All kinds of despicable things,” she said.

Olsson remembers the bodies.

Thousands and thousands of them were dumped into trenches when they overwhelmed the German furnaces.

Many were still burned and many were alive at the time, she added.

“Children, burning alive,” she said, pausing to let the concept sink in for the elementary school students.

With unsuitable living conditions, rampant disease and poor diet at the camp, only one thing kept Olsson alive: her strength of spirit.

“If I die, who will win?” she asked. “The Nazi bully.”

But Olsson’s fight for equality didn't finish when she left Auschwitz. Even after moving to Sweden, and then Canada, she faced more prejudice.

Her grandson has been called a “stupid Jew” and her son was told to “burn in hell.”

“My family did burn in hell. All of them,” she said, adding that from her huge family, only her sister escaped and now lives in Israel. “Their voices were silenced by hate.”

The lesson to learn from the experience is one of tolerance, she said.

“We don’t have the right to judge people by their religion or the colour of their skin,” she said. “People that carry love in their heart don’t hurt other people.”