The Kerryman (South Kerry Edition)
‘WE CAN’T HAVE ANOTHER HOLOCAUST’
LISTOWEL IS HOME TO IRELAND’S ONLY HOLOCAUST MEMORIAL, AND SURVIVOR TOMI REICHENTAL IS A REGULAR VISITOR TO THE TOWN. OVERWHELMED AT KERRY’S REACTION TO HIS NEW FILM IN RECENT DAYS, HE SPOKE TO TADHG EVANS ABOUT HIS EXPERIENCES.
I WAS A CHILD; I WAS FREE. NEXT MINUTE, I WAS FORCED ONTO A CATTLE CART.
TOMI Reichental lost a rural Slovakian childhood to a nightmare in which he played hide-andseek among corpses. In November 1944, the nine-year-old was bundled onto a cattle cart and sent to Hell on earth.
One of some 90,000 Jews driven from Slovakia in the 1940s, the Dublin resident stands today as one of the few living reminders of one of history’s titanic crimes; he survived six months’ imprisonment in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where some 70,000 people perished under the Nazi regime.
Listowel’s Garden of Europe is home to Ireland’s only Holocaust memorial, and Tomi has visited the North Kerry town many times – but if his regard for this part of the world is intense, the feelings reciprocated by young and old are stronger. Attending a screening of Tomi’s new film in the Classic Cinema this month, school-children and adults queued to meet the 82-year-old and their fascinated questioning kept him for hours. Given the gravity of his recollections, that’s the least one could wish for him.
“I was a child; I had been free. Next minute, I’m in a cattle cart with 50, 60 people for seven days,” he says. “There was no privacy, no room, and the stench was unbearable. We had a barrel in the middle of the carriage, and that was our toilet. The journey to the camp was the most horrific experience of my life.
“When the train finally got to Bergen-Belsen, we found Hell on earth. These skeletons were walking around with shaved heads and striped uniforms; we couldn’t tell if they were men or women. They were terribly sick, they walked very slowly. Sometimes, they would drop dead right in front of you.”
With brother Miki and mother Judith, Tomi had fled from his rural home towards Bratislava after their father, Arnold, was betrayed locally and forced onto a train bound for Auschwitz. Arnold sidestepped death by leaping free from his carriage, later going on to join a resistance movement. Tomi and his immediate family were soon captured themselves but were also among the few to survive the cleansing. The family would reunite and return to Slovakia – but 35 relatives had perished.
“By January 1945, the Germans were retreating, bringing prisoners with them to Bergen-Belsen,” Tomi says. “The population exploded: huts built for 150 inmates now had 600. There was no room, no food – and I was hungry all the time.
“Disease ripped through the camp and the crematoria couldn’t cope. Thousands of bodies were left rotting in the open air. As children, we played among the corpses. I got used of the stench.
“We’d expected liberation because we knew the Germans were retreating, but it took months. One day, we heard rumbling and we ran out to see jeeps, lorries, tanks. There were shouts: ‘This is the British army. You are being liberated’.
“We were happy, but there was no dancing and no celebrations; we were too sick. We just stood there, smiling and waving. We didn’t have the strength to clap. I was a skeleton … I could have survived another two weeks, a month, not much more. It was not an extermination camp, but 70,000 died at Bergen-Belsen, 12,000 afterwards because they were too far gone.”
It was only the end of the be- ginning; Tomi, like all Holocaust survivors, was condemned to remember. Some 15 years after liberation, his profession – engineering – brought him to Ireland, where he married Evanne. She lost a battle with cancer 14 years ago knowing her husband survived the Holocaust, but little else of his time in Bergen-Belsen. For 55 years, Tomi did not speak of it to anyone.
It’s wondrous then to think he appeared at this year’s Listowel Writers’ Week in front of almost 1,000 people. Last week, he was in Listowel again for multiple screenings of the Gerry Gregg-directed documentary film “Condemned to Remember” – and further plans to screen for Kerry and Limerick schools in the New Year are at an early stage.
Since evading the silence his hellish memories forced up on him, Tomi has spoken to some 100,000 students, and North Kerry has been particularly fortunate, regularly hosting the recollections of one of the last living witnesses of a nightmare.
“My biography, ‘Til the Tenth Generation’, was screened in Listowel, St John’s Theatre, on April 15 2010, exactly 65 years after my liberation,” he says proudly, “and I’ve been back many times since. “It was incredible to be in the community centre a few weeks ago in front of 950 students, not far from Ireland’s only Holocaust memorial. Kerry people have great respect. I was in Listowel with Gerry for packed screenings last week: one in the evening for community and another in the afternoon for schools. We always do a Q&A session after, and we were kept until 11.30pm on the Monday night. They had more questions, but we told them we had to get sleep!
“In Condemned to Remember, I wanted to show that Europe learned nothing. When the Jews wanted to escape, nobody wanted them. Today, refugees are trying to escape rape, murder, but nobody wants them … it’s happening again.
“I travel Europe in the film, and you see the 1939 ideologies popping up in Hungary, Poland, Austria, even Germany. In my native Slovakia, ten per cent of parliament is held by the farright. Today, people parade in the uniforms of the people who terrorised my family. We need to be careful another tragedy doesn’t happen to somebody else.
“This film is for everyone, because we cannot forget. In 10, 15 years, there will be no Holocaust survivors left. If a teacher tells children about the Holocaust, only some will listen. In Listowel, nobody was playing on their phone or talking during the film, because I was there. They will never forget.”
Condemned to Remember is available for school and group bookings. For further information, please contact Claire Dunlop of Eclipse Pictures at claire@eclipsepictures.ie