Surviving the Holocaust: A Firsthand Account from Tomi Reichental
Charlie Standen reflects on the life story of Tomi Reichental, a young Jewish boy living in Slovenia during World War Two, that was recounted to University of Bristol students as part of a collaboration between Bristol Jewish Society and the History Society.
By Charlie Standen, Third Year History
Tomi Reichental was born into a Jewish family in Slovenia, 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 he and his brother 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, rather a series of bewildering moments that pulled the young boy away from the world he once knew. At the start of the war, Slovakia was closely allied to the Nazi regime. Under Jozef Tizo, Tomi recalls a Slovakian state proud of their antisemitic laws, boasted to be 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. With 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; they were not yet of age to appreciate the increasing economic restrictions and the significance of the imposition of curfews. Yet this might have been, perhaps more significantly, because even by 1941 the Nazi plan remained hidden from most locals, despite the Slovakian Jewry being sent to various workcamps across the country. 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 heightening anxiety, the family was eventually informed upon and Tomi, Mickey, their mother, and grandmother fled to Bratislava to avoid the inexorable visit from the gestapo.
In Bratislava, the Reichentals were forced to assume a more covert day-to-day existence. 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 to maintain their false identities as gentiles 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 after Micky and Tomi were 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 destroyed some of the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau as the Russian army advanced westwards to obscure evidence of the atrocities that took place. 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 more and more of the Eastern European Jewry were streamed to different camps. Bergen-Belsen was classified as a detention camp not, like 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 laid in front of him for much of the seven-day journey as the stench, darkness, overcrowding, and dehydration led him to later reflect that this was the most brutally dehumanising 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 the victims of Bergen-Belsen.
After the war, Tomi went back to school. He caught up on what education he had been deprived of, studying engineering in Germany. 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, that 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 has led him to stress the necessity of taking a stake in the future and becoming an active citizen, defending encroachments on democratic practice, and denouncing tyranny. His experiences have made clear to him that we must all act in accordance with our principles and not leave them in the attic, accruing dust.