Survivor’s story brings home grim Nazi history
TOMI Reichental is Ireland’s most famous Holocaust survivor and he has dedicated his retirement — he’s now 82 — to travelling to schools and telling anyone who will listen to remember the unspeakable horror unleashed by the Nazis in the last century.
Tomi was 10 when he was transported to the Bergen- Belsen death camp, and after its l i beration, he ended up in Ireland in 1959. He lost 35 members of his family to the bullet and the gas chamber, and in this moving and compelling documentary, produced and directed by Gerry Gregg, he travels around Europe to explain the message of the past and ask why modern Europe hasn’t learned the lesson.
In Poland, he recounts the story of the Jedwabne pogrom, when as many as 1,600 Jews were murdered by their Polish neighbours, most of them after being herded into a barn that was then set on fire. Such unfathomable horror, he tells us, is a reminder that there were collaborators in other countries who helped the Nazis achieve their vile goal of extermination. Not for the only time, he weeps as he notes that there were one million Jewish children in Poland before World War II; when it ended, just 5,000 survived.
Where the documentary really scores is when Tomi links the Holocaust to the mass execution of over 8,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the Bosnian War of the Nineties and to the rise of neo-Nazi groups such as Slovaks For Slovakia in his native country. Those of us of an age know all about the Holocaust. For a younger generation, this should be compulsory viewing.