Zoltan Zinn Collis was four years old when he stood at the door of a cattle truck and watched a guard snatch his baby sister from his mother's arms before throwing her over a wall. Suzi Diamond and her brother were left alone in the world after their family was murdered by the Nazis.

All of these people survived the Holocaust and lived to bear witness to the horrors they experienced. All of them now live in Ireland. And all of them welcomed the jailing last week of discredited historian and Nazi apologist David Irving.

"He is a liar, who has desecrated the lives of millions of people, " said 71-year-old Reichental, who lost 35 members of his family in the Holocaust. "He is an anti-Semite and hater of Jews. I'm not sorry he got a prison sentence. He deserves it."

"A person can't just rewrite history, " said Diamond, who was one of five children rescued from Bergen-Belsen by the Irish doctor Bob Collis.

"It is infuriating for the people who died and the people who survived that their history should be distorted like that."

Irving was sentenced to three years' imprisonment by an Austrian court last Monday for denying the Holocaust and the gas chambers of Auschwitz in two speeches in the country almost 17 years ago.

In the speeches, he referred to surviving witnesses of the Nazi death camps as "psychiatric cases" and asserted that there were no extermination camps in the Third Reich. Last Friday, London mayor Ken Livingstone was suspended for four weeks for bringing his office into disrepute by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard.

Reichental feels there is a rise in anti-Semitism that cannot be ignored. "Too often it is happening, " he said.

"Across Europe there is Nazism and anti-Semitism that is not shrinking but growing."

Reichental, Zinn Collis and Diamond are the only three witnesses of the death camps living in Ireland today who speak about their experiences.

It took all of them nearly 50 years to gather the courage to talk about their time in Bergen-Belsen, where they were all sent as children. The memories were too painful.

"I couldn't speak about it for so long, " said Reichental, originally from Slovakia. "It was just a couple of years ago that I realised, I am one of the last witnesses to this horror.

How many are left who can remember? I was nine years old and I have strong memories. I knew I had to speak out, because so many young people don't know."

Reichental's family went into hiding in Slovakia in the early 1940s but they were betrayed and sent to BergenBelsen in 1944. "The main thing that struck us was the piles of bodies rotting, as far as the eye could see, " he said.

"During winter, it was not so bad, but in the summer the stench was unbearable."

Reichental's brother, mother and father all survived and were reunited after the war.

Sixty-six-year-old Zinn Collis, from Hungary, who was also sent to Belsen in 1944, was not so lucky. He and his sister Edith were the only survivors of his family, and they were found, like Suzi, in an appalling physical state by Dr Bob Collis. They all arrived in Ireland in 1945 and have lived here ever since.

"I was never a child, " he said. "Children play and fall down and have someone to care for them. I never had that. To this day, I would have feelings of unease. I have never liked ESB poles; they have always sent shivers down my spine. When I returned to Belsen a few years ago, I found that my shed was right beside the gallows, where bodies used to be hanging off. They looked just like those poles."

Raphael Siev, curator of the Irish Jewish Museum, lost all of his father's side of the family in the Holocaust. He felt the Austrian justice system took an important and welcome stand in the face of Holocaust suppression. "How would we, or any true Irishman, like to hear from a historian that all of the events in Irish history, in which Irishmen sacrificed their lives, was nothing but a fiction, a fraud?" he asked.

"We would be outraged. Justice has been done."

Zinn Collis is glad that Irving has been imprisoned: "I think he should be banged up and for longer than three years, " he said. However, he does believe there is an argument for freedom of speech.

"Personally, I think he got what he deserved, but at the same time, he didn't say go out and kill Jews. He just said they weren't killed at all, which is obviously ridiculous."

Like Reichental and Diamond, Zinn Collis gives talks in schools and colleges around the country in an attempt to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. "People like me owe it to those who can't speak, " he said, "and you'd be surprised how little some of the kids I speak to know. They find it hard to comprehend that this is someone out of an event in their history book.

"But this is not history; this is still alive, as long as I am alive. I'm not history."

David Irving himself could not contradict that.