Tomi Reichental. I Was a Boy in Belsen
by Tomi Reichental
(O’Brien Press, €11.99)
Joe Carroll
It is now over 70 years since the dreadful Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany was liberated by British forces so the survivors who lived to describe the horrors are becoming fewer. Tomi Reichental, who lives in Ireland, was almost 10 when he and his mother and elder brother emerged after a year of captivity.
He tells his story, with the help of Nicola Pierce, as seen through a boy’s eyes which makes it all the more harrowing as our imaginations fill in what he does not see or fully understand. His story does not begin or stop there. It begins with the almost idyllic existence he and his Jewish relations enjoyed in rural Slovakia until, with Nazi Germany influence, it became a fascist dictatorship under the anti-semitic Catholic priest Fr Tizo.
Under this regime, the Slovak Government began deporting Jews to Germany under the pretext of supplying labour, the only country to do so even before German occupation – a process only ended after intense pressure from the Vatican and the local hierarchy.
Hunted down
Another Catholic priest, Fr Harangozo, risked his life to shelter Tomi and his brother by providing false identity papers but eventually they and their parents were hunted down and sent to Germany in the infamous cattle trucks. Their father escaped from a separate train to join the anti-German resistance.
After Belsen, the family or what was left of it, returned to Slovakia now in the Russian zone of occupation. Of the 90,000 Jews in pre-war Slovakia, 70,000 were murdered in the camps, including 35 members of Tomi’s extended family.
Paradise
The anti-semitism of the post-war Communist regime was not as murderous but was a “cold place” for Jews. The newly-created state of Israel beckoned and Tomi and his immediate family emigrated there for a new life where conditions were not easy but an earthly paradise compared with all that had gone before.
It was not the pre-war idyll, but they were free and now in a country they could be proud of as their own.
How Tomi became a successful engineer and businessman and ended up in Ireland where he married an Irish Jewish girl, Evanne Blackman, whose father had a jewellery shop in Anne Street in Dublin, makes up the last part of his story. It has now become known to many in Ireland thanks to two films about his experiences made by Gerry Gregg, an independent TV producer.
The first was Till the Tenth Generation which filmed him in the Belsen memorial museum and at other places where he lost relatives. The second, Close to Evil, has won awards and been shown all over the world. In it Tomi meets a former Belsen SS guard, Hilde Michnia.
Tomi, who for years never spoke of his experiences even to his children, has now devoted his life to telling students in Irish schools what the Holocaust did to the Jewish people in Europe under the Nazis. His book, which first appeared in 2011, has now been re-issued with an introduction and postscript by Gerry Gregg.
As Tomi says in it: “As one of the last survivors I had a moral duty to tell my story, to ensure that the Holocaust would never, ever be forgotten.” The rest of us have the same duty.