Tomi Reichental, a Bergen-Belsen survivor who settled in Ireland and spent decades educating its younger generations on the horrors of the Holocaust, has died at the age of 90.
Reichental, who lost 35 close family members in the Shoah, was one of the last remaining Holocaust survivors living in Ireland. Half a century passed before he was able to speak about the horrors of his experience at the notorious German concentration camp, but from the 2000s onward Reichental made it his mission to inform people of what happened there. Through his talks at schools and colleges across Ireland as well as his 2011 autobiography I Was a Boy in Belsen, he shared his harrowing story of survival so future generations might learn from the Holocaust’s atrocities, and the victims of the Holocaust are never forgotten.
Born in 1935 to Jewish farmers in the small village of Merašice, Slovakia, Tomáš Reichental described his early childhood as idyllic, with summers spent swimming and fishing in the stream and plucking fresh cherries and gooseberries from the trees. As the only Jews in their village, the family – including Reichental’s parents and his brother Miki – would walk to a small synagogue south of Merašice on every Sabbath to pray and to socialise with Jewish friends. “It was the only day that I felt Jewish and thus different from our neighbours,” he wrote in I Was a Boy in Belsen.
Things began to change when new anti-Jewish regulations akin to the Nazis’ Nuremberg Laws were introduced in Slovakia in 1941, and the family was subjected to increasing hostility and exclusion. Reichental’s father stayed at the family home, hoping his connections in the area would protect him, while the young boys and their mother went into hiding. But in 1944, Reichental, Miki, their mother, grandmother and cousin were caught and deported to Bergen-Belsen.
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