This week’s podcast is incredibly special, as Sasha and Venetia are joined in studio with Tomi Reichental, who's personal story is inspirational, emotional and more than all - incredibly important to tell.  Born in Slovakia 1935, Tomi is one of the only Holocaust survivors to have settled in Ireland after being liberated from the Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1945. Tomi is an incredibly thoughtful and emotionally intelligent man which is clear from his account of the atrocity that he and his family lived through. 

When he was liberated in April 1945 he discovered that 35 members of his extended family were murdered, Grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins-died in the Holocaust. Tomi was 9 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 Sered in Slovakia where the elusive Nazi War Criminal Alois Brunner had the power of life or death, as he decided who would face deportation.  

Tomi, his mother Judith and his brother Miki, his grandmother Rosalia, aunt Margo and cousin Chava were dumped into a cattle wagon on a train bound for Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The other 7 members of the family were sent to the slave labour camp at Buchenwald, where inmates were literally worked to death, 6 of them perished in Buchenwald only one survived.

Tomi has experienced grief on an extraordinary level, and kept his past completely hidden from friends and family for over 50 years because of fears this could happen again. In the past 15 years, he has dedicated much of his life to speaking about the holocaust to schools around Ireland. This year The Bar of Ireland have selected Tomi as their incredibly deserving recipient of The Award For Human Right’s, will be presented to him on the 28th of November 2019. Tomi has also featured in an extraordinary  2017 documentary Condem To Remember, that details his extraordinary life pre and post-war which is well worth a watch. 

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Music by: Nctrnm

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