Join us in St Paul’s Church, Ardmore on Saturday, 23rd July at 2.30pm for An Audience with Tomi Reichental, who after 60 years of unbroken silence and 45 years of residential anonymity in a quiet cul-de-sac in Rathgar, embarked on his public mission of remembrance? As one of only 2 Holocaust survivors left in Ireland, Tomi is mindful that the horrors of the Holocaust will soon pass from memory to history. The words of Paddy Fitzgibbon at the unveiling of the only Holocaust memorial in Ireland at Listowel, Co. Kerry are imprinted on Tomi’s “Our generation, and the generation after us, will be the last that will be able to say that we stood and shook the hands of some of those who survived. Go home from this place and tell your children and your grandchildren and your great-grandchildren that today in Listowel, you looked into eyes that witnessed the most cataclysmic events ever unleashed by mankind upon mankind.
Tell them that you met people who will still be remembered and still talked about and still wept over 10.000 years from now – because if they are not, there will be no hope for us at all. The Holocaust happened and it can happen again, and every one of us, if only for our own sense of self preservation, has a solemn duty to ensure that nothing like it ever occurs again”
Tomi puts it very simply: “In the last couple of years I realised that, as one of the last witnesses, I must speak out, I owned it to the victims that their memory is not forgotten” Having taken the courageous leap from the safety of silence to the emotional exposure of public remembrance, Tomi took the last big step on his painful journey through the dark days and months of his childhood incarceration. In October 2007 Tomi Reichental was among a group of survivors invited to attend the opening of a museum on the site of the Bergen Belsen camp. There with his brother Miki and cousin Chava who also survived, after 62 years these survivors stood for the first time at the giant mound which holds the bones of their grandmother along with thousands of others lost to history.
Tomi’s story is a story of the past. It is also a story for our times. The Holocaust reminds us of the dangers of racism and intolerance, providing lessons from the past that are relevant today.
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