Photo/DAN PELTON EVA OLSSON, a survivor of the Nazi holocaust, spoke to a capacity crowd Tuesday at the Westminster United Church. Throughout the talk, she intimated the cause of the Holocaust was ignorance of, and disrespect for your fellow man as well as the Nazis. Six decades after the fact, few occurrences in history reveal the potential blackness of the human soul more than the Holocaust.

Yet when survivor Eva Olsson related the horrors to a capacity crowd at Westminster United Church Tuesday, her message wasn't so much a condemnation of the Nazi brutality as it was a plea to end the bigotry and ignorance that served as the foundation for this horrific event.

A native of Hungary, the former Eva Malloch posed a rhetorical question to the audience. "Who could do this? Animals? No, animals only kill when they are hungry or defending themselves.

"These were human beings possessed by hate and hate, when unchecked, turns to rage." By the time the concentration camps were liberated by the Allies, the rage had taken the lives of six million Jews.

More recent tragedies, such as the Serbian "ethnic cleansing" and the genocidal slaughter in Rwanda, make Ms. Olsson's message even more compelling.

"The only thing that matters is sharing love," she reminded the audience. "It's not who's right and who's wrong."

While relaying a message of compassion, Ms. Olsson was vivid in her gut-wrenching recollection of the Holocaust.

She spoke of the "train with no destination" run by the Romanian Nazis, or Black Iron Guard. Prisoners would be herded into boxcars and the train would run up and down the tracks to the camps until all had perished.

As for her own ordeal, she spoke about travelling four days in a boxcar with 100 others, arriving at Auschwitz-Birkenau and staring into the face of the man who became known as the Nazis' Angel of Death, Dr. Joseph Mengele.

She was separated from her mother, unaware that her mother, led away in a different direction, was heading to her death in a gas chamber.

She would also lose her father, who died of starvation in Buchenwald, and two brothers and two sisters.

Ms. Olsson related how the prisoners' heads were shaved to avoid (they were told) head lice. As it turned out, the human hair was used to make felt and socks for sailors in German U-boats.

She was emaciated and ravaged by spotted fever when the Allied soldiers arrived. Later, in Sweden, she met a man who would be instrumental in forming the message of compassion and racial tolerance she carries today.

"He was a Christian. I was a Jew. We didn't speak the same language. Yet, he was not afraid to get to know somebody who was different."

She was married to her husband for 19 years before he died in a traffic accident.

Since 1996, Ms. Olsson has spoken about her life in over 2,000 venues, to over 1.5 million people, throughout Canada. She received an honourary doctorate from Nippissing University in June, 2005 and is a recipient of the Order of Ontario. In 2008, Ms. Olsson was made an honourary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada.

Her best-selling book — Unlocking the Doors: A Woman's Struggle Against Intolerance — was released in 2001. A second book entitled Remembering Forever: A Journey of Darkness and Light, was released in 2008, as was a documentary film called Stronger Than Fire: The Eva Olsson Story.

The film told of her return to Auschwitz after 63 years. "For 63 years, I would not go back," she told the Westminster audience, "for fear that the people who committed the genocide would do it again."

But she did go back and then, as she has done all her life, she faced down her demons and maintained the belief she spoke of on Tuesday.

"We are one people. We are one race. The human race."