On the 16th January 2018, our TY year and the 3rd years went to see the screening of Tomi Reichental's documentary 'Condemned To Remember' in the Eye Cinema in Galway. This documentary gave us an insight into the happenings of the Holocaust and how history may begin to repeat itself with racism on the rise in today's world.
Tomi Reichental was born in 1935. He is one of the only Holocaust survivors alive today. During WW2 he and his family were brought to Burgen Belsen concentration camp. This was where 35 members of his family died from starvation, overwork, shootings or gassed. We learned that most Jews died from being shot, not gassed. We also learned from the documentary that there have been much brutality towards different races and religions since WW2 that we hadn't heard about before now. In this documentary, we saw Tomi take us to different parts of the world going to different places to pay his respects to Jews who lost their lives. At each place he left a stone. We learned that there is a great unrest in Bosnia with their political figures and in Slovakia, where different religions and races are being taunted in the streets and blamed for different things happening. This is like what Hitler did in the lead up to WW2. It showed us that history was in a way repeating itself which was a scary thing to discover. However, there was a happy part in the story. We saw Tomi reliving some fond memories when he returned to where his home house was. His fondest memory being of his mother making ice cream. At the end of the documentary, we got to have a question and answer session with Tomi about the documentary and about what life was like before, during and after the war. Overall I found the entire experience very interesting and eye opening as I learned a lot of things I didn't know before. |