Remembering Forever: A Journey of Darkness and Light

On May 15, 1944, 19 year-old Ester Malek (now Eva Olson)and her family were marched seven kilometers from the Jewish Ghetto to the train station to Satu Mare, Hungary, where they were crammed into boxcars with 100 other people. ON May 19, 1944, the boxcar doors were opened and the people spilled out, dazed and uncertain. They had arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Nazi-occupied Poland, the largest of the concentration camps established to implement Hitler's dream of "the Final Solution to the Jewish question." Within a few hours, 75% of them were killed in the gas chambers. Although 87 members of Eva's family were murdered by the Nazis, Eva, her youngest sister Fradel, her father, and her favourite brother Lazar were selected to be slave labourers. Eva and her sister survived the Holocaust; her father and brother perished. On September 28, 2007, 82 year-old Eva Olsson boarded a plane in Toronto, bound for Budapest, on a journey to retrace her life from Satu Mare (now in Romania), to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in Poland, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen in Germany, and finally to Sweden, where she had gone after the war as a refugee. She had never wanted to make his rip before, but after publishing her autobiography, Unlocking the A Women's Struggle Against Intolerance, eight years ago, she felt the need to trace her roots. She knew that if she didn't do it soon, she never would. This book is a record of that trip and its impact on Eva and her mission to tell her story in the hope that people, especially young people, will not be bystanders when they see injustice