A holocaust survivor is to explain the unimaginable horror of his experience in a Nazi concentration camp during World War II to students in Limerick this Thursday.

Tomi Reichental, who lives in Ireland, will gave students at Salesian Secondary School on the North Circular Road an insight into Nazi-occupied Poland through the eyes of a child.

Mr Reichental, will address pupils and parents of the Salesian Secondary School, on his experiences as an inmate of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to coincide with the feast day St John Bosco, founder of the Salesian order.

Mr Reichental, one of the dwindling number of survivors of the Nazi death camps, will testify to the terrifying ordeals suffered by the inmates to ensure that the lesssons of mans inhumanity to man are not lost to future generations.

"For over 55 years I didn't speak about the dark days and months spent there. I just couldn't. In the last couple of years I realised that as one of the last witnesses I must speak out," Mr Reichental told the Limerick Independent.

Born in 1935 in Piestany, Slovakia, Mr Reichental was just four years old when the Nazis invaded Poland.

His father was sent to a concentration camp before the rest of the family and they only learned of his fate on their return years later.

Tomi recalls his memories of people dying of starvation before his eyes or, in exaspiration, choosing to quickly end it all by making an impossible run for freedom and then been shot down by Nazi machine guns.

Amaziingly, Tomi, his mother and brother survived the ordeal of Belsen-Belsen, however, Anne Frank, who was not so lucky, died of typhus in the wooden barracks next to Tomi's after being transferred there from Auschwitz.

Of the 13 of Tomi's family captured, only five survived but remarkably years later they were reunited with Tomi's father who also managed to escape.

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