Tomi shines light on unimaginable home

Arts Week with Judy Murphy

“My home where I grew up was my paradise. I had a lovely life and didn’t know about anything that was going on. My parents didn’t tell me. So, when I was captured and taken to Bergen Belsen, it was unimaginable. It’s very difficult to even describe,” recalls 83-year-old Tomi Reichental ahead of his visit to Galway where he’ll take part in the Arts Festival’s First Thought Talks.

Slovakian-born Tomi was nine years old when he, along with his mother, brother and other family members were captured by Nazis in October 1944 and sent to the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Northern Germany. His father, meanwhile, was transported to Auschwitz in Poland, a place of even more unimaginable brutality and terror. All because they were Jewish.

Tomi and his family lived in appalling conditions for six months – and they were the lucky ones, because they were liberated by the British and Canadian armies in April 1945.

“As a child, it didn’t make an impression the way it would on an adult,” says Tomi of the time in Bergen-Belsen. “We didn’t really understand what was happening around us.  We played among corpses, I know it’s not normal but we did play. You can’t describe the sights and the smells but it was something that was around all the time.”

Bergen-Belsen was a detention centre and didn’t have the gas chambers of Auschwitz, where an estimated million people were murdered. But its residents did die of starvation and disease.

Built to accommodate 25,000 people, it had 60,000 inmates when it was liberated, 12,000 of whom died in the weeks after liberation. It’s a staggering figure.

The explosion in numbers came because the Nazis had evacuated Auschwitz several months previously. As the Allied forces grew closer to that camp, they moved 35,000 of its wretched inmates back to German soil.

“The population grew from 25,000 to 60,000 in a few weeks. That’s when the majority of people perished,” says Tomi of Bergen-Belsen’s final months. “There was typhoid and it spread.”

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.

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