Tomi Reichental, who lost 35 members of his family in the Holocaust, gives his account of being imprisoned as a child at Belsen. Tomi Reichental was nine-years old in October 1944 when he was rounded up by the Gestapo in a shop in Bratislava. Along with 12 other members of his family he was taken to a detention camp where the elusive Nazi War Criminal Alois Brunner had the power of life and death. Tomi, his mother Judith and his brother Miki, his granny Rosalia and two other relatives were dumped into a cattle wagon on a train bound for Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The others were sent to the slave labour camp at Buchenwald, where inmates were literally worked to death. It took seven days and nights for the train to arrive at Belsen as Allied bombing had disrupted rail links all across occupied Europe. All together, 35 members of the Reichental family - grandparents, uncles, aunts, cousins - died in the Holocaust. For 55 years, Tomi didn't speak of his experiences "not because I didn't want to, but because I couldn't." Since breaking his silence he has been on a mission of remembrance. Tomi has lived in Dublin since 1959 and hardly a week goes by without him travelling up and down the country to talk to Leaving Cert. students about his wartime boyhood experiences.
