It’s a story with legs, as editors used to say in the print newspapers of yore, and this story does have legs. When the Irish Central online newspaper in New York picked up a San Diego Jewish World story about Holocaust survivors Peter Kubicek — in New York — and Tomi Reichental in Ireland, word started spreading via social media about these two men and their happy, contented lives in 2015, despite having seen the Nazi evil close and personal in 1944 when they were mere teenagers (and in Reichental’s case, just nine years old).
Both have written books about their memories of those days, and both have appeared on YouTube videos speaking about those memories. Reichental was recently the subject of New York Times article on March 14, and three days later, St. Patrick’s Day, the San Diego website ran a story about the Times story, in hopes of bringing the two men together one day.
Kubicek has been profiled here at Teleread in the past about his crusade to get Amazon to stop selling Nazi memorabilia.
The IrishCenrtral news article by Frances Mulraney, a 24-year old Dublin woman now living in Brooklyn, was headlined ”Two Holocaust survivors, one in Ireland, find they were on the same train to Bergen-Belsen.”
Two two men, Kubicek and Reichental, were both surprised by how quickly the internet has served connect them, they told Mulraney in separate interviews and phone calls.
The power of the what used to be called the ”world information highway”, her article is spreading worldwide via social media, tweets and emails. And there’s more to come.
“Both men now believe they may have been in the same train car on their horrific journey to the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen,” Irish Central reported.
“Through an amazing series of events [Kubicek has been] reunited with Tomi Reichental, an Irish citizen who lives in Dublin and is also a Holocaust survivor from the same village in Slovakia,” Mulraney wrote, adding this poignant note:
”They both realized they were very likely on the same cattle car that toook them to that notorious concentration camp.”
Struck by the parallels between these strangers’ lives and a desire to bring them together, on March 17, St. Patrick’s Day, San Diego Jewish World ran a preliminary story about the two men, based on an earlier New York Times story of Reichental and a series of emails from Kubicek.
Reichental, after reading the story here at the San Diego Jewish World website, said in email that he was interested in contacting Kubicek. “I am writing to you as I would like to get the email address of Peter Kubicek. I go sometimes to New York, too, so it might be a possibility to meet Peter some day in person.”
The San Diego website connected the two men by email, and since their initial contact, Reichental and Kubicek have continued discussing the similarities of their experience via email, the Irish Central reported.
The more they shared, the more similarities they realized, Mulraney said.
Kubicek told her, “I was very surprised. We compared notes and I suspected that we we were on the same cattle car transport from the Slovak concentration camp of Serad to Bergen-Belsen in November 1944 which was the first transport that went there instead of Poland. He [Reichental] confirmed that that was the one.”
In his email to Kubicek, Reichental stated, “It was the 2nd of November when we were deported from Sered and we arrived on the 9th to Bergen Belsen… it was the first transport from Slovakia with children, mothers and the elderly that didn’t go toBirkenau because the gas chambers were blown up by the Germans on the 7th of November due to the advancing Russians towards the camp.”
“We were in the cattle cart traveling at the time and must have been diverted to Bergen-Belsen. We lived in block 207.”
“It’s an amazing thing – the people who were in Bergen-Belsen – it’s an amazing feeling to meet somebody that has that connection. That’s what sort of connected us, there was nothing else, but when you meet someone who has also lived through horrific times. It makes us special and we have an affinity to each other because we were in the same place, which was a horrific experience,” he told Mulraney in New York.
Reichental gives talks and lectures on the Holocaust in schools throughout Ireland. Kubicek gives talks as well in New York, where he works as a docent at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Age hasn’t slowed these gentlemen down.
“It is the last chance. We are the last witnesses to this horrific crime that happened not long ago, and to speak against those people who are trying to deny the Holocaust,” Reichental told the Mulraney. “I spoke directly to 72,000 students here in Ireland and I think they tell their parents and friends and my story reaches hundreds and thousands.
“It is important for me. I owe it to the victims. I lost 35 members of my family and it’s very important that we speak to young people – that they hear the story and tell their children that they met a Holocaust survivor.”
“It’s not easy – reliving my past – I started to lecture 11 years ago. I didn’t speak about it for 55 years before this and when I first started it was hard.”
Kubicek published his own memoir, “Memories of Evil: A World War II Childhood,” in 2012.”
Tomi mentioned in an email to me that for many years he didn’t talk about it and that is true of many of the rest of us too. They talk now of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and that’s certainly what we were all suffering from,” he told the Irish Central reporter in an interview. “It took us all a long time to live with our memories, but I found that once I started writing it was like I was starting catharsis, like a boulder fell from my back and the process was almost therapeutic.”
Tomi Reichental said he is not sure when he will meet Peter Kubicek, but both men hope it will happen this year or next.
Kubicek told this reporter that since Reichental comes occasionally to New York, he would love to host him here.
“I work in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and I would love to take him for lunch there. My family would to love to meet him,” he said.
