Tomi Reichental, who has died at age of 90, made the Holocaust real for Ireland in a way no textbook or documentary ever could.

For many people in this country, especially for many Irish schoolchildren, Reichental was the first person they had ever met who could say in the most direct and devastating sense: “I was there.”

Here was a gentle, unassuming man, someone who seemed to carry warmth and goodness so naturally, who brought them face to face with the boy he had once been in Bergen-Belsen, the Nazi concentration camp where tens of thousands died from starvation and barbarity. Reichental described how he had been torn from the life any child should know and thrown into a world deliberately built to destroy him.

The murder of six million Jews is almost too vast to comprehend. In town after town across Europe, entire worlds were wiped out. Families were murdered, communities extinguished and centuries of history reduced to total absence, sometimes overnight. Reichental made something of such unimaginable scale comprehensible through the experiences of one small boy who had lived through it and bore its scars for a lifetime.

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