Megan Patterson & Khalela Nuzum KickbackKilkenny College, Co Kilkenny.

On Friday, November 10th, at 12.10pm, an anxious group of students, teachers and parents fell silent as a small, stout man entered McAdoo Hall. He is one of the few remaining survivors of the Holocaust.

His presence alone is enough to silence any room.

He could only describe a limited amount of memories from his childhood, but when he did they were extremely vivid. He spoke about his sister, who was only two months old when she died, being mercilessly ripped out of the arms of his mother and thrown over a wall. Such horrific events as these could not but leave a man emotionally scarred and detached for life.

However, he covers up and hides these feelings from the public eye. In his talk, he took us through being captured from his home, in Czechoslovakia, when he was only four, his memories from his four- or five-month stay at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, and his eventual release by British troops, too late to help his little sister, his brother, who died shortly afterwards, or indeed his mother, who died that day. His father had disappeared earlier, before the rest of the family had been taken to Belsen.

He then told us a bit about how his Irish "father", Dr Bob Collis, came to find him and his sister and take them home with him to Ireland. Dr Collis returned to his village in 1948 to find his extended family, but although he found his maternal grandmother, she wasn't in a position to look after her grandchildren, so they remained in Ireland. He visited Belsen in 1999, just before it was razed, but doesn't think he would visit again.

Two of the transition-year journalism students spoke to him after his lecture. We asked him if many of his memories were "learned", and he admitted some were. However, he recounted to us how, when he visited Belsen in 1999, he was able to pick out the place where he had lived in the camp.

We also asked him about childhood nightmares, and if he still suffered them in adulthood. He doesn't remember if he had many such nightmares in childhood but admitted he has retained fears that he believes are based on frightening memories, such as a fear of ESB poles, because they used to hang dead bodies from such poles in Belsen.

Indeed, even to this day he prefers baths to showers, because showers remind him of the power hoses used by the German soldiers at the camp.

'A very sensitive subject, bravely confronted. It's hard to deliver an interview smoothly, but these writers have grasped the format and produced an affecting account of an important encounter.'