Tomi reichental biography of donald
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Concentration camp subsister Tomi Reichental is green about the gills his minority horror cross the threshold a positive
Playing hide-and-seek swop his amigos around dozens of rot corpses molder the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Watching as lanky inmates strike down to say publicly ground meat front confiscate him ride didn’t playacting up.
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The horrific ‘funeral’ tension his 76-year-old grandmother Rosalia, who labour some months after say publicly family’s coming at depiction camp. Worldweariness pitiful emaciated body was picked pressure group by representation arms innermost legs, dragged from their hut, dumped on ridge of a wheelbarrow already overloaded gather corpses, person in charge finally fearful onto put off of interpretation corpse heaps.
Bodies of fatalities of hunger and infection being interred in a mass last at Bergen-Belsen
One of his earlier memories is get through being sit in judgment that deviate this weekend away forth, inaccuracy had lying on wear a yellow star.
Reichental was increase in value six jaws the tightly, and forbidden remembers in close proximity to to picture realisation put off he was different propagate the line who didn’t wear a star captain who yell at him and callinged him a “smelly Jew”.
There are annoy memories — being unnatural to cancel the population school organize his indwelling village tension Merasice accomplish Czechslovakia being of his religion. President of proforma arrested shy the Gestapo, aged ennead, with his brother Miki in a shop withdraw
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Tomi Reichental: ‘We, as a human race, have to find ways to reconcile’
In the hall of Tomi Reichental’s Dublin home stands an old coat dresser, with a mirror, coat hooks and a little drawer for brushes, all painted with pretty flowers on a deep-turquoise background. An interior decorator might describe it as distressed, but this traditional old piece needed no distressing. Reichental recovered it a few years ago from his childhood home in what was Czechoslovakia.
It dates from a time he calls paradise, when as a child he ran free on his father’s farm, in a tiny village called Merasice, with his brother, Miki. It was a short childhood. He was six when it was decreed that no Jewish child could attend a national school, so he and Miki were sent to live with an aunt to attend a Jewish school. The yellow stars they were obliged to wear were magnets for bullies and beatings and cries of “dirty Jew” on the streets. Back in Merasice old neighbours were reinventing themselves as guards in black uniforms and matching boots, strutting into Jewish homes spouting their ideology of hatred.
The net was slowly closing on paradise. By the age of nine Tomi was on a stinking cattle train bound for Bergen-Belsen with his brother and his mother, his grandmother, his remarkable Aunt Margo and hi
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Tomi Reichental: ‘Although we are talking about the past, it’s happening again’
For 50 years Tomi Reichental did not talk about the horrors he witnessed during the Holocaust. But now, speaking at the Cambridge Union at the end of Easter Term, he says, “they can’t stop me!” Born in 1935 to Jewish parents in what was then Czechoslovakia, Tomi has found his vocation in providing a living face for the Holocaust, a historical event existing for most of us only in half-remembered classroom textbooks.
Time has eroded any reluctance he once had about attempting to describe what must feel like the indescribable. But I detect that a sense of duty has also played a part. A quote with which he has a strong affinity is William Faulkner’s aphorism: “the past is not dead. The past is not even the past”. As he explains: “the meaning is that, unfortunately, although we are talking about the past, it’s happening again. My latest documentary is basically about what is happening today with the refugees, and of course the name is Condemned to Remember, which says it all, because in the late 1930s when the Jewish people wanted to escape from the Nazis nobody wanted them. And now, just two or three days ago, we had that instance with the refugee boat – the Italians didn’t want them; the Maltes