Why Zoltan should never be forgotten

The death of Zoltan Zinn-Collis on Dec 10 should have made national headlines in Ireland, but almost passed unnoticed.

He was born near the Tartra mountains in what is now Slovakia in 1940. Zoltan was only half-Jewish but that did not save him and the rest of his family from deportation to Bergen Belsen concentration camp in 1944. His father, mother, and two of his siblings died in the Holocaust.

Zoltan was rescued from the death camp by an Irish doctor called Robert Collis and was one of only a small number of Jewish children brought to Ireland at the end of WW II. I had the privilege of meeting him in 1997 when he agreed to speak at a Holocaust seminar that I helped organise at the University of Limerick. He also gave talks to many secondary schools on the Holocaust in his efforts to ensure that this dreadful episode in human history was not forgotten.