We are all condemned to remember the threat that’s still in our midst

YOU were there listening to the Christmas story for the first time at the crib, and I’ll bet you said to yourself, “I would have taken in the pregnant lady Mary, who was on the run from the slaughter of the innocents”. Did you know our country refused entry to the Jews who were on the run from the Nazi death camps?

Tomi Reichental is an old man now, in numbers only. Inside is the boy from Belsen. Tomi is Irish, Jewish and Slovakian, but there’s a sense his home village of Merasice is closest to his heart.

Tomi was nine when he lived in the concentration camp, and he still remembers so all of us will never forget. Tomi tells students the story of how he was forced out of Merasice, and how it was that some of the neighbours turned against the family because they were Jewish. His family were slaughtered in places like Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz. His uncle was beheaded by the Nazis for daring to protest. The young Tomi barely survived, and was one of those liberated when the Allies won the war.

It took Tomi 50 years to “face his ghosts” and tell his story.

Tomi spoke to 900 young adults recently here in Listowel, at a Writer’s Week event. The students stood up as one to clap him. I asked Tomi at a public interview what advice he had for the students, and he replied: “You must stand up for your classmates who are being bullied because they have come to Ireland from another country. This is how it starts. This is how it happened to me and my brother. The journey from school yard bullying to the gas chambers is shorter than you might think,” said Tomi.

Yet there are those who deny the Holocaust ever happened. Those of you who spread this lie are accessories after the fact to mass murder.

Gerry Gregg is the Emmy winning Irish filmmaker who directed ‘Condemned to Remember’. In the movie, Tomi travels back to Merasice and the ruins of his old home, and to several places where mass murder was committed. Tomi prayed in Poland at the place where the locals burned Jewish families alive in a barn, and he cries too with the Muslim survivors of the slaughter in Srebrenica, which took place on European soil just a few short decades ago.

The film is a true history of our times. The fascists are on the rise in Slovakia and all over Europe. The Slovak fascists even wear the same insignia on the uniforms as the thugs who betrayed Tomi’s family to the Nazis. Fascists have won seats in the Bundestag for the first time since the Holocaust.

Tomi meets up with a Syrian Muslim refugee in Germany, who comes across as just one of us. Sami Aioub found some happiness in Germany. Sami abhors violence. He is a decent man who, like most refugees, needs sanctuary and will maybe return someday to help rebuild his homeland.

Gerry Gregg, at great risk to himself and his crew, filmed the mass fascist rallies in eastern Europe. There was a terrible scene where the fascists spat hate at a frightened Muslim family who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Here we are, and the battalions of hate are at the front gate.

There are governments too who deny atrocity. Croatian president Kolinda Grabar-Kitarovic described General Slobodan Praljak, who took poison at his trial just a few weeks ago when he was convicted of crimes against humanity, as “a man who would rather give his own life than live as someone convicted for acts that he firmly believed he did not commit”. Yes, Croatia is part of the EU.

I didn’t think I could face ‘Condemned to Remember’, but the documentary is required viewing for all of us who live in times more dangerous than we ever imagined. The overall message of this life-changing film is one of hope. We meet so many good people on Tomi’s travels.

There was a Christmas story from Belsen. The kids in Tomi’s hut sang ‘Silent Night’. One of the guards gently placed her hand on a child’s head. This was the only time any of the cruel female SS guards ever showed any kindness in Belsen. But Tomi never forgot that single moment on Christmas Eve, 1944. Wouldn’t it be nice if we just smiled at women in veils who pass us on the street, or said a kind word to people who have made their home here and are now the new Irish? Such random acts of small love are stored forever in the consciousness of small boys and girls.

It’s only a few short decades since our people in the North were denied the vote and the victims of violence on both sides are wounded forever. We now have a Taoiseach who is the son of an Indian emigrant and is proud to be a gay man. But there is racismhere.

I know because I meet people who are racist and homophobic. We must never assume Ireland is safe from bigotry and intolerance. Rather we must strive to educate and inform through thought, word and deed. Yes, Ireland is for the Irish, new and old, born here or adopted as our brothers and sisters, all under the shelter of the green, white and gold. Sadly Tomi was criticised when he called for a more open policy on the admission of refugees.

‘The journey from school bullying to the gas chambers is shorter than you might think’

IONLY have bits of my childhood stored on auto recall, but I remember sitting up on my dad’s lap in our sitting room when I was about the same age as Tomi when he was a boy in Belsen. Dad told me about the Jews and how they were murdered. I went to ‘Condemned to Remember’ for dad and my three Kerry-Irish-Jewish first cousins who live in California. My lovely aunty Anne married Martin Klaben in New York more than 50 years ago. It was a big thing for a Catholic to marry a Jew. Uncle Martin lost most of his family in the Holocaust some say never happened. The lost Klabens are my people too through my beloved cousins in American. Get to see ‘Condemned to Remember’ and bring the kids. You will see the world with new eyes and leave with new ideas. We remember too the story of another refugee kid born 2017 years ago in a stable in Bethlehem, far from his home place of Nazareth.