80 Years since the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp
Dr Bob Collis with a group of child refugees arriving in Ireland.
Photograph Lee Miller 1947
On the 15th of April 1945 Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British Armed Forces.
Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany, originally established as a prisoner-of-war camp before becoming a site of mass internment, suffering, and death.
Tens of thousands of people died there from starvation, cold, disease, and neglect.
The liberation of Bergen-Belsen in 1945 has huge significance for Ireland as five child survivors from that camp eventually made their homes here.
Dr Bob Collis, an Irish volunteer doctor with the British liberating forces, worked in Bergen-Belsen immediately after the war and brought six orphaned Jewish children back with him to Ireland: Zoltan and Edit Zinn, Terry and Suzi Molnar, Evelynne Schwartz and Franz Berlin.
Bob and his wife reared Zoltan and Edit Zinn-Collis to adulthood in their own home. They
took the name ‘Collis’ as part of their own. Bob arranged for Terry and Suzi to be adopted by a Jewish couple, Willie and Elsie Samuels. Everlynne Schwartz was ‘found’ by relatives in Australia and Franz Berlin returned to Germany.
Zoltan remained in Ireland where he married and had 4 daughters, all of whom live in Ireland with their families and children. Both Zoltan and Edit died in 2012. Terry and Suzi Samuels grew up in the Irish Jewish community where they married and had children of their own. Terry passed away in 2007. Suzi still lives in Dublin.
Tomi Reichental was born in Slovakia in 1935, the year of the anti-Jewish Nuremberg Laws.
Tomi and his family were deported to Bergen-Belsen in 1944 and lost 35 close family members in the Holocaust. Tomi came to Ireland to work in 1959, married and raised three sons. He has lived here ever since. Tomi has shared his experiences of the Holocaust in countless hundreds of schools and institutions, written his life story and made several documentaries. He still lives in Dublin.
Learn more about Ireland’s link with the Holocaust through the link below.
