I am a Jew, and I am a survivor of the Holocaust. I was born in Slovakia in 1935. 

I was just nine years old when I was captured by the Nazis along with my mother, brother, grandmother, aunt and cousin. We were herded into a cattle car and from that moment onwards, we were treated worse than animals. There was no privacy or hygiene, the stench and conditions were unbearable. 

Eventually, after seven nights, the cattle train stopped. The doors were opened, and we were greeted by shouts from the SS with guns pointing and barking dogs. We had arrived at our destination – Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. I was there from November 1944 until the liberation of the camp in April 1945. 

What I witnessed as a nine-year-old boy is impossible to describe. The starvation, the cruelty of the camp guards, the cold and disease. People, who were just skin and bone and looked like living skeletons, were walking around very slowly, some of them dropping to the ground, never to get up again. They were dying in their hundreds, their emaciated bodies left where they fell or thrown into heaps. In front of our barracks there were piles of decomposing corpses. For many prisoners in Bergen-Belsen, the conditions were too much to bear, and they threw themselves on the barbed wire at night to be shot in order to put an end to their misery. We found their corpses there in the mornings.

Seventy thousand prisoners of Bergen-Belsen are buried there in mass graves. 

I lost thirty-five members of my family in the Holocaust. 

Tomi came to Ireland in 1960 and lives in Dublin with his partner, Joyce. In 2007 Tomi returned to Bergen-Belsen for the first time in 63 years as part of a documentary being made about him called Until the Tenth Generation. He and his brother, Miki, and cousin Eva, attended the opening of the Bergen-Belsen Museum and laid a memorial plaque there for their grandmother.