AN IRISH-RESIDENT survivor of a Nazi concentration camp gave a personal account of his experience to students in UCD last night and described a poor level of understanding in Ireland of the genocide.
In his address, Tomi Reichental discussed growing up as a Jewish child in occupied Slovakia and the torment of seeing thousands of dead bodies in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Mr Reichental said there was a need to educate and inform people about the Holocaust in Ireland in order to overcome anti-Semitic sentiment and all other forms of racism and intolerance.
He had kept silent most of his adult life about what he saw in Belsen, until about four years ago when he began working with the the Holocaust Education Trust. He is one of the few people living in Ireland to have witnessed Nazi genocide at first hand.
Mr Reichental said he can still remember the camp’s crematoriums in 1945 being unable to cope with the vast numbers of corpses as “thousands of bodies were left by the Nazis to decay”.
Describing Belsen, he said: “There were no gas chambers in the camp, but people were dying and wasting away from starvation.”