“IT starts with whispers” Tomi explained. Good people say and do nothing because they think what is happening has nothing to do with them. But they are wrong. It has everything to do with them.
Prejudice-laden rumours unite as much as they divide. They get louder when good people do not to stand up and speak out. By the time they catch on, it is too late. What was at a neighbour’s door is now at their door. The bullies have won, and bullying becomes the unstoppable force.
What is clearly belligerent, intolerant and ignorant can be stopped at the start by moderates but is not, as they sympathise with the nationalistic view that underpins it.
Education, knowledge and enlightenment are the enemy. There is no resistance. Just support. No opposition. Just blind loyalty. No criticism. Just praise. One voice sets the narrative and selects the scapegoats. Followers rally under simple slogans seeded in the basest of ‘their kind.’
All sense of right and wrong is lost, with most not seeing it this way and the few who do, too frightened to say so. Evil takes over.
I have not met, nor am I ever likely to meet, a gentler soul than Tomi Reichental (84), a man born and bred in Slovakia whose home is now Dublin and has been for 50-yrs. In a packed Ulster museum, I watched a superb Gerry Gregg film on him.
Teenagers who usually look down at a small screen, looked up at a big one. Steady silence interrupted by occasional collective gasps and ended by a standing ovation.
The deepest intake of breath was when Tomi becomes the perpetrator and his SS guard becomes the victim. The Belsen brute, prosecuted for war crimes and sentenced to a miserly 12-months, refused to meet Tomi. His grace. Her hatred.
Tomi wanted to know if she was sorry and would shake her hand if she was. But Hilda Michnia is utterly unrepentant and, it seems, so are her family. People who remain in deep denial.
Her explanations of her SS role, seen from recent interviews from what seems an oral history project keen to get her view out, are simply unbelievable. Besides her duties in Belsen, Hilda Michnia guarded a death march of women prisoners from Gross Rosen labour camp to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
It was a bitter winter and a long journey. Thousands died from starvation, disease, exhaustion or hyperthermia. Skin and bones in rags referred to by numbers tattooed on their arms. Most collapsed. No need for a bullet. Others executed for falling behind or on the whim of an SS guard.
The trail of corpses stretched from one set of gates to the other. Every day was a death day. But to believe Hilda Michnia is to believe this was not the case. Nothing to do with her, she claims. That may yet be tested in court. Some survivors of the death march are still alive.
Tomi’s story informs that every German family has a skeleton in their cupboard from that period. This is not to suggest that most Germans have not exorcised old ghosts and recognise uncomfortable truths. They have, as the film shows. Rather, for some it is taboo. Nazis are still admired, and anti-Semitism has not gone away.
In one clip, Tomi is in the room the Wannsee conference took place. This is where Hitler and his henchmen conceived the final solution. In typical German efficiency, everything was catalogued.
Now a museum, on the wall a list itemising the number of Jews across Europe to be exterminated, one of them being Tomi. The plan included 4,000 Jews in Ireland.
Factor in, others deemed unfit to be citizens by nationalist extremists and categorised with different coloured stars other than yellow, and the number was certain to rise.
I raised the Irish aspect with Tomi and Gerry. In Northern Ireland, unionist understanding of the Republic’s neutral role in World War II is routinely coloured. Constantly cited is De Valera offering condolences to Germany on Hitler’s death.
It may not have been Dev’s greatest moment but nor is it representative of a nation that interned IRA suspects throughout the war and executed those who collaborated with the Nazis.
My point here is this. Had Hitler had his way, the people to administer the Zyklon B in Ireland were the IRA, a sinister organisation based on whispers. Kids like Tomi Reichental would have been rounded up by men like Sean Russell, the IRA chief of staff who died on a Nazi submarine.
For the Sinn Fein family, Russell is an Irish patriot or victim, but never a perpetrator. No, never that. Each year they pay homage to his statue in Dublin. If Russell was still alive, Tomi would ask him, are you sorry for what you did?
In the film, an old soldier from the Irish Guards told us in a rich Cork accent of how he liberated Belsen. It was the most memorable moment of his life. He proudly wore his war medals, which he was unable to do until recently in his native land.
The tragedy of this was not lost on Tomi. The old soldier has since passed away. When you think of the Republic of Ireland in World War II, think of him, not a fanatic in a German U-boat.
Today is the 15th April, the 74th anniversary of British soldiers liberating Belsen. To do this, they and the Allies had to defeat an evil regime. To free Tomi, they had first to go to the tremendous human cost of freeing the whole of Europe.
Tomi lost thirty five members of his family in the Holocaust. He puts his survival down to his mother’s smile. The message, ‘we’ll be okay, son.’ It gave him hope.
Such were the horrors of Belsen it took Tomi fifty five years to break his silence His testimony is tragic yet inspiring. He warns us to learn the lessons of the past. Get informed. Do not tolerate fanatics, especially from ‘your own side.’
Expose them and their lies. Contest historical re-writes that twist and deny facts. Educate the young.
Tomi still hears whispers. Some old. Some new. To stop them, we must stand up and speak out, like him. Don’t be fooled into thinking it is different this time. It never is. Listen to a boy who survived hell on earth. Be guided by Tomi Reichental.
William Matchett is author of Secret Victory: The Intelligence War that Beat the IRA and Adjunct Fellow at the Edward M Kennedy Institute for Conflict Prevention, Maynooth University, Ireland.
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