By Dan Bloom
CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — After this website published a news article headlined “A Tale of Two Holocaust Survivors” on March 17, Tomi Reichental, who was one of the two men mentioned in the story and who is 80, contacted me by email from his home in Ireland and said he would like to get 85-year-old Peter Kubicek’s email address and contact him in New York.
He explained that “My uncle Oskar Reichental was from Trencin, where Peter was from. My son lives in California and I visit San Diego sometimes as I have some friends there. I go sometimes to New York, too, so it might be a possibility to meet Peter some day in person.”
When Kubicek heard this news, he was overjoyed, he told me, and he wrote back immediately that very day to Tomi. “It occurs to me that we may have been on the same cattle-car transport to Bergen-Belsen, in November 1944, from the Slovak concentration camp of Sered. The latter was under the command of the notorious Nazi, Alois Brunner, whom I still remember.”
“Tomi, ešte vypráváš Slovensky” Kubiceck asked, writing in Slovak, asking if Reichental speaks speaks Slovak. In a subsequent email, Reichental said indeed did still speak Slovak.
They two men might meet later this year, if things work out with their schedules.
“Peter, this modern technology is fantastic, all happens so fast, Reichental replied to Peter’s first letter, adding: ”I am delighted to make the contact. We might have been together in the same transport from Sered, after the selection by Alois Brunner. A propos, Brunner died in 2010 in Syria and he is no longer being sought after by the Wiesenthal Center as they have proof that he died. He would have been 102 years old now, if he was still alive.
He got away with his crimes.”
“Peter, it was the 2nd of November when we were deported from Sered and we arrived on the 9th to Bergen Belsen,” Reichental said. “As you said it was the first transport from Slovakia with children, mothers and the elderly that didn’t go to Birkenau 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 bean diverted to Bergen Belsen. We lived in block 207.”
“My son lives in California, so I travel to America every year, and I have also friends in New Jersey and New York where I made a visit a couple of times so perhaps we might meet one day as per your quote in San Diego Jewish World article,” Reichental ended his letter. “I am looking forward to that day, if we can arrange it.”
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Bloom, based in Taiwan, is an inveterate web surfer who wrote the original story that brought the two men together. Your comment may be sent to dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com, or posted on this website per the instructions below.
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I look forward to further contact with Tomi Reichental. He tells me that he sometimes visits New York City. My family and I look forward to meeting him on that occasion and taking him for lunch in the Metropolitan Museum’s Trustees Dining Room. — Peter Kubicek, Forest Hills, New York.