Holocaust Survivor Talk - Tomi Reichental
By Charlie Standen, Year 3 History
Written after attending the collaborative event between Bristol JSoc and the History Society, which happened on Monday, 7th November. Thank you to all those involved in this talk and continuing to remember the horrific events of the Holocaust and standing in defiance of anti-semitism. It is important that these testimonies from survivors are told to new generations so that these events are not repeated again, as well as, not forgetting their own personal stories and struggles as well of which make these stories more personal and impactful within society.
Tomi Reichental was born into a Jewish family in Slovenia in 1935. His father was a farmer in a small village. Together with his mother and older brother, Micky, they lived what he fondly referred to as a ‘simple life.’ The summer months provided him and his brother with sun-streaked woods and open fields upon which to run and play football. Winter was tobogganing season. For Tomi, it was nothing short of ‘idyllic.’ In the village, isolated from news on the national and international scale, a real sense of community prevailed. Tomi’s parents were great friends with the local priest, a man who would later repay such affection with forged documents for the Reichental family. The priest, a Hungarian, enjoyed speaking in his mother tongue with the Reichentals, who were fluent in the language.
This idyllic period was not immediately wrenched away from Tomi by the outbreak of war. There was a phantasmagoria of bewildering moments that wrenched the young boy from the world he once knew. At the start of the war, Slovakia was closely allied with the Nazi regime. Under Jozef Tizo, Tomi recalls a Slovakian state proud of their antisemitic laws, which they boasted of being more severe than those of Germany. Tomi’s village was firmly Roman Catholic, and antisemitic propaganda was most effectively spread through the Church (though never did the Reichental’s Hungarian friend join in delivering such diatribes). This period was one of intense confusion for the young Tomi. Neither Tomi nor his older brother would his parents speak about the increasingly desperate circumstances which confronted them. In part, this was not to alarm the young boys. Moreover, the boys were not yet of age to appreciate the increasing economic restrictions and the significance of the imposition of curfews. But also, too, and perhaps more significantly, even by 1941, when the Slovakian Jewry were first being sent to various workcamps across the country, the Nazi plan remained hidden from the majority of locals. Tomi tragically relays that many Jews were even happy to be sent off to work, thinking, ‘at least we will be useful’.
By 1942, Tomi’s existence had lost any kind of coherence or security. The village’s Jewish school had been closed. By May, 56,000 of the 90,000 Slovakian Jewry had been deported. The Reichentals remained in their village longer than most, for the father’s farming profession had obvious utility during wartime for a Germany reliant on importing allied food supplies. However, after months of heightened anxiety, the family was eventually informed, and Tomi, Mickey, their mother, and grandmother fled to Bratislava in order to avoid the inexorable visit from the Gestapo.
In Bratislava, the Reichentals were forced to assume a more covert lifestyle day-to-day. Tomi reflected matter-of-factly that this period was nothing short of a ‘hide and seek between life and death’. Each day, Mickey and Tomi pretended to go to school in order to maintain their false identities as gentiles. (It was important for them to be seen leaving the house so as not to arouse the suspicion of neighbours.) In fact, they spent their days deep in the nearby woods playing football and eating picnics. But this situation did not last. On the day that the Reichentals were to relocate to a small village outside Bratislava, the grandmother was apprehended by the Gestapo. Soon too were Micky and Tomi apprehended and beaten whilst browsing a photography shop.
This was in 1944. The timing is significant, for it determined the destination the Reichentals were sent to. The Nazis had recently blown up some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau in order to destroy the evidence of the atrocities as the Russian army advanced westwards. This is where many Jewish women and children in Slovakia had hitherto been sent for immediate extermination. Yet the Reichentals ended up in Bergen-Belsen as now more and more of the Eastern European Jewry were streamed to different camps. Bergen-Belsen was classified as a detention camp, unlike Auschwitz, an extermination camp. Nonetheless, over seventy thousand Jews died there due to a fatal combination of starvation and disease. Though young and not totally understanding of the extent of the depravity due to his youth, a circumstance Tomi was grateful for, many traumatic fragments have impressed themselves upon his mind. With great emotion, he relayed the appalling cattle car journey to Bergen-Belsen. A woman’s corpse lay in front of him for much of the seven-day journey as the stench and the dark and the crowding, and the lack of water led him to later reflect that this was the most brutally decivilizing experience he underwent. At the camp, it was normal for him and Micky to play tag amidst corpses and witness with a growing indifference the regular procession of death. Sadly, Tomi’s grandmother was among those who died at the camp.
After the war, Tomi went back to school. He caught up on what education he had been deprived of. To Germany, he went in order to study to be an engineer. A job offer led him to Ireland. And, after a fifty-five-year period of reckoning with the past in silence, Tomi began to speak on his experiences. By now, he calculates that he has spoken to over 120,000 people. He has written books and made documentaries. He is a vigorous individual, made no less so by age. Like Elie Wiesel, fellow concentration camp survivor and celebrated author, he defies those who claim, such as Richard Rubenstein, the Holocaust signalled a new era of nihilism and hopelessness. Rather Tomi is an individual filled with gratitude for the present. Especially for democracy, which has not been for him, as for so many of us, something to be expected. Such a perspective led him to stress the necessity of taking a stake and becoming an active citizen, defending encroachments on democratic practice, and denouncing tyranny. His life has made clear to him that we must all act in accordance with our principles and not leave them in the attic, accruing dust.