Alistair Burt (North East Bedfordshire) (Con)
I beg to move,
That this House has considered Holocaust Memorial Day.
I am pleased and honoured to be asked to open the debate to commemorate Holocaust memorial day. This debate has been held in the House since 2008. As colleagues will know, it is timed to be close to Holocaust memorial day, 27 January—the day that is linked to the liberation of the most notorious of the Nazi death camps, Auschwitz-Birkenau.
I welcome the support from my right hon. Friend the Member for Eddisbury (Mr O’Brien), my hon. Friends the Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd), the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), and my hon. Friends the Members for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) and for Hertsmere (Mr Clappison), who represented me at the Backbench Business Committee in order to see this debate put on. I also thank colleagues in all parts of the House who signed the early-day motion associated with the debate and a commemoration of the memorial day.
I thank—on behalf of all of us, I am sure—the Holocaust Educational Trust for its briefings and support, and for its extraordinary work in ensuring that a memory of the holocaust is kept alive by providing resources for education, the opportunity to visit Auschwitz, and the chance to meet remaining survivors.
I am conscious that a number of schools will watch and read this debate and encourage their students to do so, and I think that one of my duties in leading it is to explain exactly what the holocaust was, what it all means to us personally and why it remains necessary to remember it. I am conscious of time and that a number of colleagues want to get in, so I will do my best to be as brief as is necessary.
What was the holocaust and why does it matter to me? I was born just 10 years after the end of the second world war and brought up in north Manchester, one of the main centres of the Jewish community outside London. Jewish boys and girls were a key part of our Bury grammar school community and I was aware of them from my earliest days at five years old. As friends, we played and grew up together, and I picked up quite naturally on their different holidays and why Saturdays, not Sundays, were religiously important to them. As I got older and learned more about the war that fate decreed I had avoided, I became aware that my carefree childhood and youth had been bought at a terrible price by an older generation who had fought for my freedom.
I also became aware of something else: although a number of the families of my friends had shared that war against tyranny, they had also experienced something so profoundly shocking and beyond comprehension that it could in those days hardly be spoken of. They had experienced it not because of anything they had done, but just because of who they were: Jewish. It was the holocaust.
A good definition of the holocaust is provided in the opening displays of the permanent exhibition at the Imperial War museum in London:
“Under the cover of the Second World War, for the sake of their ‘new order,’ the Nazis sought to destroy all the Jews of Europe. For the first time in history, industrial methods were used for the mass extermination of a whole people. Six million were murdered, including 1,500,000 children. This event is called the Holocaust.
The Nazis enslaved and murdered millions of others as well. Gypsies, people with physical and mental disabilities, Poles, Soviet prisoners of war, trade unionists, political opponents, prisoners of conscience, homosexuals, and others were killed in vast numbers.”
It started, of course, with politics—the free and democratic election of Hitler and his Nazi party in 1933—and it then continued with the law. In April 1933, the law for the restoration of the professional civil service excluded Jews from professions. In September 1935, the Nuremberg laws banned intermarriage and sexual relations between Jews and Aryans and stripped Jews of their citizenship and all legal rights. Gradually, the civil rights of Jews across Germany were taken away—from being banned from being members of sports clubs in April 1933 to not being allowed to buy milk or eggs in July 1942.
And then the war. Shortly after Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Nazis began to force Jews under their control to move into ghettos. This short-term measure soon developed into a long-term policy. The first ghetto in Poland was set up in October 1939. The Nazis established more than 1,000 ghettos in Poland and the Soviet Union alone. Living conditions were abysmal. Often several families lived where before there had been one. Jews were not allowed to leave or have any contact with the outside world. Food rations were at starvation level and disease was rife through lack of clean water and sanitation. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the ghettos. In the wake of the Warsaw ghetto revolt in April 1943, the Nazis decided to liquidate the remaining large ghettos. Eventually, those who lived in the ghettos were deported in cattle trucks, without food, sanitation or water, to concentration camps.
Let me quote from a remarkable memoir entitled, “Out of the Depths”, for which I am indebted to Israeli Ambassador Daniel Taub, who gave it to me at Christmas. It is the memoir of a small boy who survived deportation from Piotrków in Poland to the concentration camp of Buchenwald and who grew up to become Israel’s Chief Rabbi: Israel Meir Lau. His father, also a rabbi, is attacked during the process of deportation, and Rabbi Lau writes not only of the incident, but of how it was so important to him—and the Jewish people—in surviving the years to come. He says:
“Today, looking back on the six years of that war, I realize that the worst thing I endured in the Holocaust was not the hunger, the cold, or the beatings; it was the humiliation. It is almost impossible to bear the helplessness of unjustified humiliation. Helplessness becomes linked with that dishonor…
When a young boy sees his father beaten by a Gestapo captain with a maikeh”—
a rubber club—
“kicked with nailed boots, threatened by dogs, falter from the force of the blow, and suffer public shaming, he carries that terrible scene with him for the rest of his life. Yet I also carry the image of Father, with astonishing spiritual strength, bracing himself from falling, refusing to beg for his life, and standing tall once again before the Gestapo captain. For me, that image of his inner spiritual strength completely nullifies the helplessness that accompanied the humiliation.”
The Nazis established hundreds of concentration camps across Europe and six extermination camps located in Poland. The largest of the camps was Auschwitz-Birkenau, established by the Nazis in 1940 at a Polish army barracks in the suburbs of a small Polish city. Auschwitz-Birkenau was actually three separate camps with three different purposes, but Birkenau—also known as Auschwitz II—was the main death camp, built in 1941 on the site of the village of Brzezinka, 3 km from Auschwitz. The overall number of victims at Auschwitz-Birkenau in the years 1940 to 1945 is estimated to be just over 1 million—between 1.1 million and 1.5 million—people, the majority of whom were Jews and died in the gas chambers.
Those are the facts about the holocaust. I did not know all that when I was young, and I did not at once understand it all. My holocaust education and experience has continued throughout my life and my political career. As a student, I paid my first visit to Israel, and the first of a number of visits to Yad Vashem, which many other hon. Members have visited. That great centre tells the story of the holocaust through painful documentary, but, most poignantly of all, though family pictures and artefacts of the lost—the lost people and their lost homes, villages and towns.
We will all have our own memories of Yad Vashem, and know the points in the building at which we are stopped in our tracks. For many, it is the pile of children’s shoes, but for me it has always been the children’s memorial, where, surrounded by everlasting light, the names of the children of the holocaust are read out, with their age and location. It represents the most painful loss of all—the loss of innocence and of promise.
Yad Vashem, and other excellent memorials, such as that designed by Daniel Libeskind in Berlin and the Washington holocaust centre, I have found profoundly moving. Auschwitz, where many colleagues in the Chamber have been, should be part of people’s life journey to understand their world. I particularly commend the Holocaust Educational Trust’s work in providing such a chance to so many young people. Strangely, it is one visit I have not yet made. I do not know why. Perhaps, with all I now know, I am afraid to confront the emotion of being there, but I know that the time is coming when it will be right for me to go.
One place I have been is Warsaw. I have long been inspired by the extraordinary story of the rising of the Warsaw ghetto—the just over one mile square area that housed some 400,000 men, women and children. After some 250,000 had been deported by 1943, to die at Treblinka, the ghetto rose. The fiercest fighting was between mid-April and 16 May 1943, after which both life and the ghetto were extinguished. Some of the world’s most harrowing images of war and suffering come from the ghetto.
There is little left of the ghetto—the Soviet empire had no wish to commemorate or preserve the area, and built upon it—but I spent a morning tracing a couple of buildings, a handful of cobbles, the tramlines and the renowned wall on Sienna street, just to connect in some physical way with what had happened. Remarkably, there is a synagogue, which was saved because it was used as a stables by the Wehrmacht. There is a memorial at the Umschlagplatz, the station used for people to begin their journey to Treblinka.
The stories of survivors such as Chief Rabbi Lau, so painstakingly preserved, remain vital to the memory of what happened. Reading them is graphic. Meeting survivors is both humbling and inspiring, and I have been fortunate to meet several over the years. I commend the UK’s ambassador to Israel, Matthew Gould, and his team for their inspiration in co-ordinating funding from the UK to create a remarkable series of centres called Café Britannia.
Nearly one in every three senior citizens in Israel survived the camps or lived under Nazi occupation. According to a survey that was released earlier this year by the Foundation for the Benefit of Holocaust Victims in Israel, 37 Israeli holocaust survivors pass away each day. Of those who remain, many live alone and in poverty, psychologically and physically scarred by the trauma of their experiences. Those survivors often carry a deep need to share their stories, both to ease their personal pain and to educate others. In some cases, they crave the company of their fellow survivors—the only ones who can genuinely relate to their feelings and memories. As time goes by, the window of opportunity for reaching out to those ageing, vulnerable citizens grows smaller.
The UK has been involved in co-ordinating finance from the Jewish community and others in this country to fund a series of centres where survivors can meet socially. More than 1,000 survivors are now enjoying company and activities through the Café Britannia network, which represents 20% of all the social clubs for survivors in Israel. In January 2011, while I was Minister for the middle east, I visited one such centre to find people from Manchester and hear about their extraordinary backgrounds. Thus, history and the contemporary meet.
That leads me to my last point, which is why we still need to remember. The holocaust is unique. There is no parallel—it was a cataclysmic event of such size and quantity that there can be none. Although its facts are unique, the evil heart that created the horror still beats. As Solzhenitsyn said in “The Gulag Archipelago”:
“Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts.”
It is because of that universal appeal that I am pleased that Holocaust memorial day embraces the genocide in Bosnia, Rwanda, Cambodia and Darfur. I do not believe that the unique nature of the holocaust is devalued by recognising the horrors that have occurred since. The generosity of the Jewish community in being inclusive reminds all of us of our common humanity. However, we should still choose our words and descriptions with care so as never to minimise the scale of what the holocaust represents. If that heart of evil has produced what it has since, it can do so again. The greatest enemy of those who wish to cause us harm is memory—the human conviction never to forget, so as to warn others.
The evidence that we need to do so is all around us. Anti-Semitism remains on some university campuses in the United Kingdom and appears to fuel the rise of proto-fascist parties in continental Europe. Other Members might raise Jobbik in Hungary and the potential visit of an individual to the United Kingdom. Jobbik holds 12% of the parliamentary seats in Hungary. It has been reported that in 2012, the party’s foreign affairs spokesman called for a list to be compiled of all Hungarian citizens of Jewish origin as they were a “national threat”.
Frank Dobson (Holborn and St Pancras) (Lab)
The right hon. Gentleman has referred to a Hungarian neo-Nazi who intends to come to my constituency this Sunday to organise an anti-Semitic rally. That is the constituency that contains the Jewish museum, where the national launch of the Holocaust memorial day commemoration will take place on Monday. Does he share my view, which I have expressed to the Home Secretary, that she should use the powers that she has to keep this stinking, rotten, neo-Nazi alien out of this country?
Alistair Burt
I share the concern of the right hon. Gentleman and the views of the Jewish community, which have been expressed in exactly the same way. I hope that my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary takes due note of what has been said by so many.
Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)
My right hon. Friend has mentioned all the people who were killed in Auschwitz. As somebody of Polish origin, I know that this issue is very important for all of us. Will he pay tribute to the many people in Poland and throughout Europe who hid Jewish families, at great risk to themselves and their families, because many people were spared the concentration camps by people who realised that what the Nazis were doing was so deplorable?
Alistair Burt
My hon. Friend makes an extremely valid point. Colleagues will appreciate that when opening a debate it is not possible to cover everything, but the role of the righteous gentile, appropriately recorded at Yad Vashem and other places, is an honourable one. Year after year we hear more stories of people who did extraordinary work, putting themselves at risk, and those in Poland who did that are to be as well thought of as any, bearing in mind the horror of Nazi occupation.
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
I congratulate my right hon. Friend—I see him as a Friend in this—on securing this debate. Does he agree with me about the Jobbik leader and the problems originating from that? I am going shortly to see the Hungarian ambassador about that matter. Does my right hon. Friend agree that inter-parliamentary co-operation in dealing with racism and anti-Semitism is essential in stopping the spread of that kind of vehemently racist party?
Alistair Burt
My hon. Friend’s record on this issue is one of great courage and hard work over many years, and he again makes a good point. Parliamentarians need to work with each other to prevent abuse of parliamentarians and loss of their rights in certain places—the right hon. Member for Cynon Valley (Ann Clwyd) does an invaluable job in the Inter-Parliamentary Union on that—and I and other colleagues would be interested to hear more about how co-operation between parliamentarians, particularly in Europe, can counter that scourge.
I am conscious of time, so let me move to a conclusion. Anti-Semitism also pains the people of France, who saw three Jewish children murdered in Toulouse in May 2012, and where we currently see public demonstrations of support outside synagogues for an entertainer of clear anti-Semitic views, who has allowed a holocaust denier to share his stage. This man is associated with a salute—the quenelle—made notorious in this country through its use by the footballer Nicolas Anelka. It is for Mr Anelka to answer the charges laid against him and I do not intend to make him the subject of our debate, but I would contrast his behaviour with that of the English football team who, with the support of the Holocaust Educational Trust, made a journey to Auschwitz during the European Championships of 2012. Captain Steven Gerrard spoke of the impact of that visit on the players, their awareness of their privileged life and their position as role models, and their understanding of that. I think those are the footballers whose views we should note today, and we should watch the film of their time there made by the Football Association and the Holocaust Educational Trust. That is what schools should look at as representing role models in this country.
Last January I attended the commemoration of Holocaust memorial day at the London Jewish Cultural Centre in north London, at the request of one of my longest standing and much loved friends from college, Mandy King. I took part in a moving morning of music and verse, with predominantly young people drawn from diverse communities. I was proud to follow at that ceremony a young girl from the Islamic Foundation. What a statement from both Jew and Muslim that they could stand together, because in my recent role I have been more acutely aware than ever of the pain in the Islamic world from so many sources, of the misery inflicted every day through sectarian violence, of that evil which flows through too many human hearts, and the pain of unresolved injustice, which perhaps this year might finally be addressed. All could be put aside in remembering the uniqueness of holocaust, while the generosity of the Jewish community in sharing the pain now has powerful resonance throughout the country.
With many thanks to those who work so hard around the country to remember this weekend and involve so many, let me conclude with Primo Levi’s haunting poem, “Shema”, which echoes the pain of his existence in Auschwitz:
“You who live secure
In your warm houses,
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way.
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble.
Disease render you powerless.
Your offspring avert their faces from you.”
Mr Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)
It is pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who is respected across the House, and his compelling and emotional opening contribution.
The holocaust has always baffled me. If we are going to give away our age, I was born 20 years after those events. I have never understood how human beings in their millions could be so seduced by a message of hate that they could stand by and watch as other human beings were degraded, humiliated and murdered; how people could have stayed at the entrance to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, stripping people of their belongings and their last remnants of dignity, knowing that the fate that lay in store for them was a 20-minute, excruciatingly painful journey to death.
We are in the month of January and the phrase, “Man’s inhumanity to man” was first introduced in a poem by Robert Burns titled, “Man Was Made to Mourn”. As poignant as those words are, I still do not think they convey the horrors that took place over 70 years ago. Probably like everybody else in the House, I have read the books and watched the documentaries. I have watched “Schindler’s List”, “Band of Brothers”, in which the 101st Airborne Division liberated a sub-camp of Dachau concentration camp, and “The World at War”. All those depictions of what took place, however, fail to equal the insight offered to me by a survivor, Harry Bibring.
I had the privilege of meeting Harry in 2012. The Holocaust Educational Trust suggested that I might like to encourage my local authority to have a survivor meet and talk to older pupils from high schools in my area. Harry was born in 1925 and lived in Vienna with his mother and father and his sister, Gertie. His father owned a men’s clothing shop and, for that time and place, his family were relatively well-off. The young Harry remembered having family holidays. He enjoyed swimming and ice-skating, and his mother and father were well-off enough to be able to give him a season ticket membership to an ice-skating rink. He remembered hanging out of a window in Vienna watching the Germans march in, in 1938. He remembered liking the soldiers marching and the bright flags, but little did he know as a child that they were Nazi soldiers and that those bright flags were swastikas.
Harry’s membership of the ice-skating rink was revoked just days later, when a “No Jews Allowed” sign was erected. In November 1938, Harry’s father’s business was destroyed during Kristallnacht. He was arrested soon after. After he was released from prison, the family intended to flee to Shanghai, but his dad was robbed on his way to purchase the tickets. Thinking, as any mother and father would, of the safety of their children, Harry’s parents arranged for him and his sister to flee on a Kindertransport to the United Kingdom.
Harry’s father had arranged for guarantors to pick them up when they arrived in the UK. Harry said:
“I remember going to the Vienna West Bahnhof with my sister and our parents to get on the train at 10pm on the 13th March 1939 with about 600 other kids. The following day the train went slowly through Germany until it reached the Dutch border. Once it crossed over into Holland we were met on the platform by Jewish volunteers from Holland who gave us sweets and toys. We crossed to England on the night ferry from Hook of Holland to Harwich and arrived at Liverpool Street station in the afternoon of the 15th March 1939.”
Harry was not to know, when he left Vienna, that that was the last time he would ever see his mother and father. They were killed by the Nazis. Harry and his sister Gertie survived. Harry is still with us, and the world is an immeasurably better place with him in it.
Looking back from 2014, I would like to think that I would not have followed the crowd had I been in Germany at that time. I would like to think that I would have behaved like Irena Sendler, a Polish lady—the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) mentioned such people from Poland—who did so much to protect Jewish people. She was honoured in 1965 by the state of Israel as “Righteous among the nations”. During world war two, Irena served as a plumber working in the Warsaw ghetto. She smuggled Jewish babies out of the ghetto in the bottom of her toolbox. At the back of a truck, she kept a dog she had trained to bark to cover the noise of the infants when Nazi soldiers approached. The Nazis eventually caught her, sentenced her to death and broke both her arms and legs, but she managed to evade execution and survived the war. She kept details of all the children she saved in a glass jar she buried in her back garden, and she tried to locate their parents after the war, but sadly most had perished in the gas chambers. I wonder if I would have been brave enough to do something like that.
Holocaust memorial day allows us to remember those who perished, those who survived and those who were brave beyond our comprehension, and it challenges us to learn from history to prevent such events from happening again. That is our aspiration, but sadly Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda remind us that history can repeat itself.
Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)
We need to observe Holocaust memorial day, given that across Europe we have national list systems for elections, meaning that a small percentage of a population can elect neo-Nazis. We have to remember that this is happening, and we need to reinforce to people that 6 million of the Jewish community were murdered. We must not forget that Hitler came up partly through democratic institutions, and we must ensure that such a thing never happens again.
Mr McCann
I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. I appreciate that others want to speak, so I shall move on without taking any further interventions. However, the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire said that politics was at the heart of the matter, and we must remember that it was the treaty of Versailles that gave Hitler a platform on which to build the hatred that led to the terrible atrocities of the second world war. It was a twisted variety of politics, but politics none the less.
I want to finish on a positive note. I have been very lucky in my life. I have visited both the Holocaust museum in Washington DC and Yad Vashem. These museums are grim, and going through their exhibits can be an emotionally draining experience. At the end of the museum in Washington, the visitor passes down long corridors, either side of which are huge glass containers filled with the spectacles, shoes, luggage and possessions of the Holocaust victims—a haunting end to an experience that you can never forget—but at the very end is a video loop in which a woman explains her personal story of liberation. When she was emaciated, dehydrated and thought she was near the end of her life, she was picked up by a soldier. She told the soldier that he could not touch her because she was Jewish, and he replied, fighting back the tears, “I’m Jewish too.” The gentleman was a GI. After the war, they married and they settled in the United States of America—a triumph of the human spirit over evil and another reason we should all observe Holocaust memorial day.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Mrs Eleanor Laing)
Order. As the House will be aware, several Members wish to speak and there is limited time, so I am imposing a seven-minute time limit on Back-Bench speeches.
Mr Stephen O'Brien (Eddisbury) (Con)
It is a privilege to follow the outstanding opening speech by my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) and the genuinely moving speech by the hon. Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann).
It will come as no surprise, with the name O’Brien, that I am not Jewish, but it is critical to remember that we are all survivors and collectively have a duty to work together to avert an atrocity such as the holocaust ever happening again. As has been said, ultimately the causes were as political as anything else, and so, being engaged in politics, we have that duty.
As someone born in Africa, I do not deny the unsettling parallels with what has happened in places such as Rwanda—it is 20 years since those events—and although we were rightly warned to be extremely careful not to confuse the word “genocide” with “holocaust”, given the gravity of the holocaust, which we have to respect, none the less there were many lessons that humanity could and should have learned that could have helped us to avert the genocides on the continent of my birth. In that sense, we are all participants and all survivors.
Above all, I want to pay tribute in my brief contribution to the Holocaust Educational Trust. I have been a beneficiary over the last 12 months, and I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau with the trust in what is a Government-funded programme. We are accountable in respect of how worth while the experience is—and of that, I am in no doubt. Although I have been to Israel, including to Yad Vashem, with the Conservative Friends of Israel, nothing quite prepares one for the first visit to witness what took place at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It was a privilege to make this visit accompanied by a group of sixth formers from my constituency, which made the experience all the more powerful. As someone in their 50s, I was travelling for the first time to this place with young people; the cross-generational learning and deep emotional experience that was shared between us helped us to understand what it means to witness what amounts to an appalling assault on the eyes, the mind and the heart. We all took away different things from the day. Some things shocked us, and then there were odd things, such as the very normality of life around Auschwitz that carries on today, and the extraordinary bewilderment at how a herd of human beings could have persuaded themselves not to stop this happening at the time. It was difficult to manage the sense of disbelief, horror and outrage as we went through this vicarious experience. When we returned on the plane, there was a not a shocked silence—more a sense of relief from a discussion of shared experiences. We gained a nearer—never a perfect, but a nearer—understanding of what had taken place there.
For those who have the privilege of living in the UK, one particularly telling item was a map on the walls of Auschwitz, showing the railway lines along which all the people had been transported from around Europe. Huge distances—from Norway or Hungary, for example—were involved, but there was no line through the UK. We were not invaded by the Nazis, and were not subject to these appalling transportations, so all the more for us to learn from the experience. We all carried with us the shocking images and the sense of outrage, and we recalled the point on the tracks where the trucks were parted, the dolls’ clothing, the names on the suitcases, the sheer industrial scale of Birkenau, and the candle lighting ceremony at the end. These experiences created a deep impression and will be for ever remembered. I would like to pay particular personal tribute to the wise leadership and spiritual input of Rabbi Marcus, who is deeply involved in the visits.
One of the benefits of these trips is the ability to broadcast a longer message through local newspapers, for example, and students can be encouraged to be part of communicating the message and sharing it with their peers. It was a harrowing and tough day for all of us and the horror of what we saw and the reactions and emotions we experienced will stay with us for the rest of our lives. One cannot overstate the importance of visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau or of recognising the full extent of the ghastly industrialised nature of the holocaust. These events might have taken place 70 years ago, but as our society bears witness, we need to continue to teach the lessons of the holocaust to the younger generation in order to fight bigotry and hatred today. After witnessing what happened, it is impossible to understand how there could be holocaust denial.
We do see some anti-Semitic behaviour in our midst today—on the football terraces, for example. There have been some recent arrests. I take note of what my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire said about focusing on positive things, but let us be absolutely clear that there should be no no-go areas for this type of behaviour. We must not allow the excuse of “What happens on the terraces stays on the terraces.” In this instance, with anti-Semitic behaviour, holocaust denial or teasing chants, the police must enforce the laws of the land. If we allow a chink in this armour, we start to excuse something that is historically inexcusable. We have the witnesses of young minds on the football terraces; they must not be given the chance to think anything other than that the holocaust was one of the most horrific experiences in history. A visit to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust is the ultimate antidote to any such tendencies. I commend the trust’s work and the public support that it receives, and I would encourage not just the continuation but the broadening of its programme.
Mrs Louise Ellman (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab/Co-op)
I am privileged to be able to follow such genuine and effective contributions. I congratulate in particular the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) on the very moving and sincere way in which he opened this extremely important debate.
The first Holocaust memorial day was held here in the United Kingdom in 2001, as a result of a cross-party decision by Parliament following a private Member’s Bill presented by Andrew Dismore. At that time, there were doubters who were not sure that it was appropriate to have a Holocaust memorial day focusing on the holocaust itself. Now that date is firmly in the national calendar, and I think that very few people would question the correctness of our decision.
It is absolutely essential for new generations to receive education about the brutality, the depravity and the racial hatred involved in the organisation of the calculated mass murder of 6 million people. That lesson needs to be learnt so that people not only know about the unique horror of the holocaust, but understand where hatred and bigotry can lead, because that affects all of our society and all the people in it. The Holocaust Educational Trust’s lessons from Auschwitz programme enables generations of young people and their teachers to visit Auschwitz, as part of a wider educational programme to provide a greater understanding of the holocaust and its impact for everyone.
This week I attended the trust’s annual Merlyn Rees memorial lecture, which was given by Thomas Harding. He spoke of the search for Rudolf Höss, the kommandant of Auschwitz. That served as a reminder of the need to bring war criminals to account, and also as a reminder of the nature of evil. Rudolf Höss led an apparently normal family life, with a loving wife and loving children, in the midst of the horrors and the butchery of Auschwitz. Perhaps we should reflect on the nature of evil, and on what people can do.
Also this week, the Football Association decided to charge Anelka following his celebration of having scored a goal by making an “inverted Nazi symbol” salute, the quenelle. What I found even more disturbing than what Anelka did was his defence, which was that he had acted in support of his friend Dieudonné M’bala M’bala, who is a French performer, a holocaust denier, an anti-Semite, and someone whose offences include inviting the holocaust denier Robert Faurisson on stage as part of his performances. The people who support this performer claim that they do so because they are anti-establishment, and that they are not anti-Semitic, but it does not take very much imagination to appreciate what that defence actually means. It gives us food for thought, because it is deeply and gravely disturbing.
Sadly, anti-Semitism has not gone away, even following the horrors of the holocaust. A very recent European survey made disturbing findings in that regard. There is also anti-Semitic discourse: not explicit anti-Semitism, but reference in writing, speech and films to images and words which invoke feelings of anti-Semitism. The Community Security Trust has listed incidents of anti-Semitic discourse in its recent report and they are extremely disturbing. They are disturbing because they are wide-ranging and cut right across the political spectrum. They range from the bizarre, such as the reference in Press TV, speaking for Iran, which claimed that the Olympics were a Zionist plot and blamed Jews in Hollywood and the so-called Jewish-controlled media as ultimately responsible for the United States school shootings and massacres of children, to those I find more disturbing, such as the Occupy Wall Street cartoon from Tampa in the USA which was displayed on Facebook and which showed a big-nosed bearded Jew using the UN logo as a steering wheel in a car with President Obama as the gearstick.
I am also concerned by statements such as that made by former diplomat Peter Jenkins in a debate at Warwick university, where he stated that Christian morality was somehow superior to Jewish morality. He said:
“The idea that a just war requires the use of force to be proportionate seems to be a Christian notion and not a Jewish notion.”
I find that kind of insinuation that morally Judaism is inferior to, in his case, Christianity not just plain wrong but deeply disturbing. That kind of insinuation, which I hear too often, should be recognised. Reference has already been made during this debate to the planned visit to London this weekend of Gábor Vona, leader of the anti-Semitic Hungarian Jobbik party, and his plan to be here on Holocaust memorial day.
Now that we have Holocaust memorial day firmly in the national calendar, I think we understand the need to educate people about the enormity of the evils of the holocaust. That is so that people understand what happened in those terrible years and that terrible time. It is also a lesson for today and about where evil, bigotry and prejudice can lead. It is something that all in our society need to learn.
Mr Lee Scott (Ilford North) (Con)
I start by congratulating my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) not only on securing this debate, but on the moving and compassionate way in which he spoke. You are truly a good man, sir.
Quite rightly, Madam Deputy Speaker, you called me by the name I have had since my birth: Lee Scott. However, if it had not been indirectly for the holocaust you would have called me by the name of Lee Shulberg, because that is our family name. My late father changed our name, because being caught while fighting in the second world war with a Jewish surname was the difference between going to a prisoner of war camp and a concentration camp. We kept the name after the second world war, but on a personal level I felt that I would like to get the name Shulberg into Hansard in the House of Commons.
Anti-Semitism has not gone away. At the last general election, as many friends on both sides of the House will know, I was approached by some people while out campaigning and called a “dirty Jew” and was told they wished to kill me. On a fairly regular basis I still get anti-Semitic e-mails. Has anyone learned anything from history? I sometimes fear not when we look at genocides across the world that are still happening. Even today, as we sit in this House, there are people in camps in various countries who are being killed.
I want to pay tribute particularly to Karen Pollock and the Holocaust Educational Trust. I have been to Auschwitz with them and I have also visited Theresienstadt and Babi Yar, a ravine where Jews were rounded up, shoved in and shot. I have seen first hand the piles of the children’s shoes, and I am not ashamed to say that I cried at Auschwitz. I do not often cry, but at Auschwitz I cried when I saw what man’s inhumanity toward man can lead to.
I have worked closely with my hon. and good Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) on various projects that have involved holocaust survivors. I went into schools to talk about what happened and I try to make some semblance of sense of what happened and to explain it to people. But it is impossible to make any sense of it. I pay tribute to everyone from all political parties who were involved in getting Holocaust memorial day into our calendar. On Holocaust memorial day on Monday, I will be in the London borough of Redbridge, my local council. I pay tribute to Councillors Alan Weinberg and Leon Schaller, who paid for and dedicated a memorial to the holocaust, which is in our main park, where we will hold a ceremony of remembrance. I have looked around the Chamber today and seen people with tears in their eyes, and at that ceremony there will be tears in all of our eyes because people, not only Jews but Gypsies, homosexuals, and anybody that the vile Nazi regime wanted to get rid of, were exterminated.
Last night I happened to be flicking through the TV programmes quite late and saw a drama about the Nuremberg trials. I saw the evidence of what was done. I again could not comprehend, even though I know it, even though I have seen it, what we saw and what we heard. The work that the Holocaust Educational Trust does, the work that many people do to teach the next generation—because let us face it, there will not be many survivors left as years go by—recognises that if we dare forget what has happened in the past even for one second, it is not impossible that history will repeat itself.
Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)
Of course history repeats itself. I have seen genocide. I have buried 104 women and children in a mass grave. I have picked up the head of a child thinking it was a ball and dropped it with horror. I was so upset with myself when I discovered it was a child. I have seen this. Of course history repeats itself. The purpose of Holocaust memorial day is to remind us that it continues in another form, and that is the purpose of this debate and of our remembering—to try to stop it happening again. My goodness, we are human beings and it will happen, but we must make every endeavour to stop it.
Mr Scott
I thank my hon. and gallant Friend for his intervention. Yes, as I have said, things are going on as we sit here today, but I still say we can remember and we can do our utmost to make sure such things do not happen anywhere again.
I know that many hon. Members wish to speak, so I will not detain the House too much longer. My final statement is that I am proud to be a Member of this House. I am immensely proud and grateful to Great Britain for taking in my grandparents, because without any question I would not be alive today if it had not. And I am proud to be Jewish.
Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)
I congratulate the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) on securing this debate. It is a privilege to follow the speech that we have just heard.
In 1939, a 10-year-old Jewish boy from an industrial town in what was then Czechoslovakia was put on a train by his mum and two teenage sisters and eventually made his way to Britain as a refugee. It was to be the last time that he would see them. They were rounded up, sent first to a ghetto, then to Theresienstadt, and eventually to Treblinka, where they were murdered on 5 October 1942. That boy is my dad and that explains why for me this issue is so important.
Like other Members who have spoken today, I have visited Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust, which does such important work. I want to say a few words about the survivors with whom they work, including people such as Ziggy Shipper, who at the age of 84 visits schools every week to teach children where hatred and prejudice can lead, and Eva Clarke, who was born in Mauthausen concentration camp, but survived and came to the UK after the war. I met an amazing woman through the Association of Jewish Refugees, Mindu Hornick, who lives in Birmingham now. She was imprisoned in a concentration camp and then sent to work as slave labour in an armaments factory. I said to her, “Mindu, these shells that you made, how many of them worked?” She looked at me, smiled and said, “None.” Is that not incredible? Here was a woman, in fear of her life in a concentration camp, thinking about how she could prevent other people from being killed.
Ben Helfgott weighed less than 6 stone when he was rescued from Theresienstadt, but he went on to represent Britain as an Olympic weightlifter. The only other member of his family to survive was Mala Tribich, who was forced to work as a slave labourer. She was sent to Ravensbrück and ended up in Bergen-Belsen. Tomorrow, she will be speaking to hundreds of people at Dudley’s annual holocaust commemoration, which I organise. Those are all incredible people. They spend their time teaching students and young people about the evils of racism, and it is humbling to see the sense of duty and commitment that drives them and other survivors to use their experience of that terrible period to create a better world for the rest of us.
I have seen young people visiting Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust, and I have seen their lives being changed by witnessing the appalling evidence of the industrial-scale slaughter that took place at Birkenau. I have seen them return to Dudley to campaign against racism and build a stronger and more united community. No one can fail to be affected by what they see in those places: the mountains of human hair and glasses; the pots and pans and personal possessions that show that people thought they were going to live elsewhere, not to be murdered.
Last summer, my dad and I travelled to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. In Ostrava, we found the flat where he grew up. He stood on the pavement, pointed at the first floor window and told me that that had been his bedroom. He described how he had been woken up in the middle of the night on 18 March 1939. He had looked out to see what the noise in the street was. It was German soldiers marching into the town square. We found the site of the Jewish school and the synagogue he had attended. Ostrava had had several synagogues, Jewish schools, sports clubs, shops and businesses to serve the 10,000 Jews who lived there. Incredibly, the single room that serves as the city’s synagogue today has seats for just 30 people. For me, that evidence of entire families and whole communities having been wiped out is even more moving than the evidence of industrial-scale slaughter on display at the concentration camps.
In Poland, we travelled to a small town called Nowy Targ, where we found the family shop of my dad’s uncle, Emmanuel Singer. A few streets away, we walked through the Jewish cemetery, which contains the mass grave of 500 Jews who were butchered in a single day. We saw the wall behind what is now a youth club where one of my dad’s cousins had been shot after being dragged from his fiancée’s family’s attic. We heard how Emmanuel Singer had fled to Krakow with forged Aryan papers and hidden there before being betrayed, arrested and tortured for his money. He was then dragged to his death along a country road, chained behind a horse and cart. Three thousand Jews lived in Nowy Targ before the war. I asked the local historian who was showing us around, “How many survived and came back? How many live here now?” She looked at me as though I was mad, and replied, “None, of course.”
Seeing that for myself and hearing the detailed, human stories really brought home to me the horrific scale of the tragedy. It is impossible to compare anything to this, history’s greatest crime, but it is certainly possible to learn lessons. There is a quote from the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, at the memorial at Auschwitz. It says:
“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.”
The fact that there are no tracks leading from Britain to Auschwitz tells us something very special about our country. When other countries were rounding up their Jews and herding them on to the trains to the concentration camps, Britain provided a safe haven for tens of thousands of refugee children such as my dad. It is a fantastic thing about our country that the son of a Jewish refugee can become a Member of Parliament and serve as a Government Minister.
Let us think of Britain in the 1930s. The rest of Europe was succumbing to fascism, but here in Britain, Mosley was rejected. In 1941, France was invaded, Europe was overrun and America was not yet in the war. Just one country was fighting not just for Britain’s freedom but for the world’s liberty. Britain did not just win the war; we won the right for people around the world to live in freedom. For me, that period defines our country. It is what makes Britain the greatest country in the world, with a special claim to the values of democracy, freedom, fairness and tolerance. Because of who we are as a people and what we are as a country, the British people came together and stood up to the Nazis and fought fascism. We are a country that does not walk away or turn a blind eye. On each occasion when people have been gassed and chemical weapons have been used against people, we have known whose side we were on and we have always in the past stood up for the oppressed.
Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)
Like my colleagues, I thank the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) for securing the debate, and it was a privilege for me and my hon. Friends to assist him in that. I thank the Backbench Business Committee. Such debates have taken place since 2008. I have been involved in them all since being elected in 2010.
I also thank colleagues for their powerful, resonant and quite modern speeches. I say “modern” because they are here today to represent their constituencies in the year 2014, yet two of my colleagues’ parents were Jewish and survived the holocaust. If they had not survived, my colleagues would not be here. That really does bring things home to me and is the reason I was always determined if I got elected to give my full support to the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust memorial day on 27 January.
All colleagues have alluded to the obvious reasons for the memorial day. It is about the memory of those millions of people who died simply because of their race, colour or creed. Another reason relates to the modern day. As other Members have mentioned, we cannot forget what happened or let it go because, if we did, we would demean the memory of many people who were slaughtered in this desperate way and make it easier for society, for nations and for people to continue to behave disgracefully.
My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) made a strong point about when he was serving in Bosnia and the reality of genocide there. That demonstrates poignantly, powerfully and horribly what life and death really mean in such situations, and it reminds us all of what is happening in the Congo and Syria and of the rise of profound political and religious extremism, which has got worse over the past few years. We all have views about why that has happened, but it is undeniably continuing to get worse. A number of colleagues have mentioned the Jobbik party in Hungary, with 15% of the vote, and another is the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn in Greece, with 12 MPs.
These things do not go away, because humanity is basically interchangeable. Feelings, ignorance, fear and anger are the same today as they were 5,000 years ago. The only difference is that we now dress differently, we have computers and a few other things, and we drive very fast in cars, which we could not do 500 years ago, but humanity does not change. However, a positive aspect of humanity is a continuous determination to get better, to improve and to be kind and generous. Alongside all the horror that the Holocaust Educational Trust helps us to understand as parliamentarians, and Holocaust memorial day helps us to remember and commemorate those who died, there is the other side of human nature. That is also part of this remembrance.
I shall give colleagues an example. There is a country at the moment that does not get a busting lot of good media coverage in the Daily Mail and the rest called Bulgaria. Perhaps all hon. Members know—I did not know until a few months ago—that, although Bulgaria is smack in the middle of the Balkans and central Europe and has had a history of virulent anti-Semitism for hundreds of years, the Bulgarian people would not accept what the Nazis wanted, so 50,000 Jews survived in Bulgaria. Is that not fascinating? That is the flip side of this horror of the holocaust; so many good things were done. As another colleague said, we should not forget the individual families in Poland and other parts of Europe who saved Jewish families, at enormous cost to themselves. I was determined to mention the 50,000 Jews saved in Bulgaria in the Chamber today, because whenever I read certain papers at the minute I find that poor old Bulgaria does not get a lot of good coverage. So I pay tribute to that nation, in my small way as a Member of Parliament within Westminster, for what its people did. A lot of the Bulgarian Government wanted to go along with the Nazis and pack all 50,000 Jews off, but the Orthodox Church in Bulgaria and the people there just would not have it.
Bob Stewart
What the hon. Gentleman has said rings a bell, and I want to place on the record the fact that in the middle of the war in Bosnia, in 1992-93, the one section of society in Sarajevo that was not threatened was the Jewish section. The Muslims, Croats and Serbs were all up against it. The one people protected, or seemingly protected, was the Jewish community, and guess what that community did? It tried to help other people. I pay tribute to that.
Stephen Lloyd
I appreciate the hon. Gentleman’s intervention, as he makes such a powerful point.
So where are we at? Human nature is never going to act in a way that means these things will never happen again—we all know that. The reason for this commemorative day and the reason it is so important that the mother of Parliaments keeps having this debate year after year, even though it is 40, 50, 60, 70 years since these tragedies took place, is that it is a small way of holding the mirror up to man’s bestiality. That small attempt, that bit about knowledge and that emphasis on trying to ensure that the memory never disappears goes some way in helping us to challenge bigotry, of whatever type. Wickedness is not specific to any particular character or race; it covers humanity generally. So I am proud and privileged every year when I take part in these debates, even though I am not Jewish and have no personal family connection with the holocaust; I was always determined that if I had the privilege to be elected I would be here to do what I can in a small way to support this.
I pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust, which does a fantastic job. I also pay tribute to the right hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown), as I know through my involvement with the trust that he was immensely important in getting the resources to ensure that the trust went on. All in all, this is a powerful annual debate, and it is a privilege to be here and to listen to the real, powerful experiences set out by some of my colleagues.
Mrs Anne McGuire (Stirling) (Lab)
May I start with an apology, Madam Deputy Speaker, because I have to be in Scotland this evening so I may not be able to be here for the wind-ups? I apologise to the Front Benchers and to other colleagues for that.
I thank the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd) for his generous recognition of the role played by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown). Sometimes, in the rough and tumble of politics, things can be forgotten, and those of us who were in the House at that time remember the tenacity with which he pushed for the memorial day. He was also a driver of the Stockholm declaration of 2001, and I thank him for that. I also want to thank the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who laid out the justification and rationale for today’s debate, and told us of his own journey—such journeys are the theme of this year’s memorial day.
Like other Members, I have visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and, although I grew up knowing about the holocaust—I was born in the last year of the 1940s and so am slightly nearer the end of the second world war than some of my other colleagues—nothing that I knew or had learned about it prepared me for the experience. The word “industrialisation” has been bandied about, but the whole programme is almost beyond comprehension. There was a trial and error approach. Initially, it was, “Let’s try and shoot the Jews.” Well, that was not fast enough. Then it was, “Let’s look at portable gas chambers”, but that was not efficient enough. Then they looked at how to dispose of the bodies. All that energy and entrepreneurship—if I can put it in such a way—went into an extermination programme, the sole purpose of which was to eradicate the Jewish community from Europe.
Like others who have spoken, I cannot comprehend the evil philosophy that underpinned the holocaust, and I will not understand it for as long as I live. As my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Mr McCann) said, it is difficult for us to appreciate what happened in those reasonably civilized cultural communities that produced philosophers and musicians. When it came to it, 6 million Jewish people were murdered, 1.5 million of whom were children. Like the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire, I will never forget the first time I went through the children’s memorial at Yad Vashem.
We must also recognise the other groups of people who were murdered by the Nazis. Gypsies, disabled people, trade unionists, homosexuals, Poles, Russians and prisoners of war were all murdered as part of their ethnic cleansing programme.
When we visited Auschwitz and looked at those piles of glasses and children’s shoes—I will never forget the children’s shoes—there was a realisation among most of us that that could just as easily have been us. That is what made it all the more evocative. There was one young woman on the tour who said, “I don’t believe it.” She was not a holocaust denier in a political sense. She just could not comprehend that human beings could do that to each other. The Holocaust Educational Trust should be congratulated on, among all the other things that have been mentioned, encouraging, allowing and supporting young people to face up to the fact that human beings can do awful things to each other. I am sure that the young woman, once her colleagues had spoken to her, came to her understanding of the events. None the less it shocked us that there we were seeing what had happened, and it was just too awesome—in the correct sense of the word—for her to understand.
We must continue to support the Holocaust Educational Trust and other organisations and all the visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other centres. I have visited Theresienstadt, or Terezin as it is often called, which is a town that was evacuated and filled up with people who were on their way to Auschwitz.
As the right hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr O'Brien) said, genocidal murder has not stopped. We can see that in our most recent history. In 1994, 1 million Rwandan people were killed in a matter of 100 days. How is that comprehensible? We must all understand that we, as part of the international community, stood back and watched it happen.
I am pleased that Scotland’s Holocaust memorial day is being held in Stirling. The speakers will include Arn Chorn-Pond, who escaped from Cambodia after being held by the Khmer Rouge, and Alfred Munzer, who, as a Jewish child during the holocaust, was separated from his family and kept in hiding by Indonesian neighbours in Holland.
I will not be with my colleagues, Provost Mike Robbins and others in Stirling because I will be in Auschwitz on Monday with other politicians from across Europe, from Poland, and from Israel, and with some survivors for a special remembrance on the 60th anniversary. We will be in Poland at a site that is symbolic but, sadly, not unique in the history of the holocaust. When we stand on those railway tracks and remember those who were murdered, we will also know that thanks to the endeavours of many there will be communities, children and young people across the world commemorating that day.
The one point of optimism in all this is that the Nazis never achieved their ambition. They did not exterminate every Jew from Europe. If an optimistic message comes out of Holocaust memorial day it is that: the survivors won.
Richard Harrington (Watford) (Con)
I should disclose that I am trustee and director of the Holocaust Educational Trust. I thank all the contributors to today’s debate for the compliments and thanks they have given to the trust. On behalf of the trust, I thank this Government and their predecessors for the support that they have given to the trust, particularly for the programme that takes children to Auschwitz. That has affected many Members’ constituents and it is good that this is a matter with cross-party support.
It would not be right for me to pick out everybody who has spoken today, on both sides of the House. Every contribution has been outstanding. The hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) made a point that was particularly interesting and relevant to me when he spoke about how this country stood up against Nazism. My late father, who was brought up in London in the 1930s, remembered very well that on Sunday mornings the blackshirts marched in their hundreds up and down the streets of this country shouting, “The Yids, the Yids, we’ve got to get rid of the Yids.” That is hard for us to believe in our society, despite the mention today of the Community Security Trust and some unforgiveable anti-Semitic incidents. When I compare that with people watching hundreds of people marching in jackboots in our own country shouting such things about Jewish people, I believe that we have progressed tremendously.
My father, on being conscripted into the Army in this country as a normal 18-year-old boy, was beaten up by the non-Jewish members of his platoon, who said, “You Jews are to blame for this war.” That was a feeling then and the little remnants of that feeling come out in what those people from Hungary say and what people—very few people, but some—say elsewhere, albeit quietly now because of the protection of the law. That feeling is still there.
I feel that today, as the Member of Parliament for Watford, I should particularly talk about holocaust education in one school that is, I believe, a model for schools around the country. It is Watford grammar school for girls, under the inspired leadership of Dame Helen Hyde, the daughter of holocaust survivors. It is a very successful school. It is called a grammar school, but it is actually a state comprehensive school with some selection. In many ways, it is ordinary—it could be any school.
The girls begin their holocaust education in year 9, when they are taught about stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination and where they can lead. They are asked to look at their own prejudices again because, as hon. Members have said, it is in the nature of human beings to have some prejudices. They talk about Anne Frank and her experiences in detail, even at a very young age.
In years 10 and 11, the girls do a detailed study of what took place under the Nazis, the outcome for Jewish people and others. They consider the moral and ethical issues that affect people in general. Further on in the school, they can do GCSEs and A-levels in relevant subjects.
Dame Helen runs the largest student holocaust conference every November, attended by 400 students and members of the public. I have had the privilege of opening the conference and up to 16 survivors have spoken. This school in this small part of Hertfordshire is a model. The girls do very well academically, so it does not in any way prejudice their education. Holocaust education is used as a way of teaching them about so much in life that is relevant to people.
Through my involvement with holocaust education and with the HET, I have spoken to girls and boys in a school two or three miles away from here, in east London, where one of the survivors sent by the HET to speak to them gave, as one can imagine, a very moving story of their experiences in the holocaust. A young lady—a Muslim—told me that the speaker, a 90-year-old lady, was the only Jewish person she had ever met in her life. In certain hon. Members’ constituencies two miles to the north and east of here, that probably would not be the experience. It shows the prejudice that can build up about Jewish people because people do not meet anyone of Jewish faith.
If the theme of my short speech is one thing, it is that holocaust education is not just about the most important thing—teaching about the holocaust—but about the lessons that the holocaust can have for everybody’s life in getting rid of the prejudice that is seen in all our lives. To some people—we heard football used as an example—these things might be harmless fun, but they fuel prejudice and ignorance.
I am pleased to be part of this debate that takes place in this House every year. I hope it will focus some people’s minds on the holocaust and remembering the 6 million-plus people who died tragically. If their deaths meant anything—if there is one thing they could have hoped for—it is that they helped to eradicate this form of prejudice for generations to come.
Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)
It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Watford (Richard Harrington). We can all join in thanking him for his work as a trustee of the Holocaust Educational Trust. I add my congratulations to my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) on introducing the debate. It is entirely appropriate that we consider this matter on a regular basis. When he summed up last year’s debate, which was led by my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), he said that these debates show the House at its best. Today’s has been no exception, and we should all be proud of that. Last year, I explained that my interest in understanding more about the holocaust had arisen from visits I had made to Rwanda.
In 2012, I went to Auschwitz with students from Rugby high school. Last year, the editor of the local newspaper visited with another school party. In his account, he wrote of the massive impact on the young people who go there. They start off chatty, as teenagers often are, but as they see the horrors of Auschwitz the magnitude of what happened there dawns on them, and they become much more thoughtful and reflective. In addition to having seen what happened in Rwanda and Auschwitz, next month I will be joining a delegation visiting Cambodia, which it is impossible to visit without having regard to the killings that occurred there in the 1970s.
We have heard many emotional and moving speeches. Earlier today, I re-read last year’s debate in Hansard to remind myself of the comments Members made. I vividly remember the remarks of the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton), who spoke about his meetings with holocaust survivors—some of whom were members of his family—what they had seen and gone through, and the fact that it had never left them, not least because of the numbers tattooed on their arms. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) gave an account of what he had seen in Bosnia in 1992. He concluded by saying that we must prevent an event such as the holocaust from ever happening again, which is, of course, one of the reasons for holding this debate and for the programme of events run by the HET. As my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford North (Mr Scott) reminded us, when we read about the horrors of Bosnia, Cambodia, Darfur and Rwanda, we sometimes wonder whether we have learned the lessons of the holocaust. When I visited memorials in Rwanda and spoke to people who wanted to talk about the genocide, one question I was regularly asked was, “Why did the international community stand by and let it happen?” We might ask ourselves whether we are doing enough to bring conflict and bloodshed to an end across the world today.
On Monday, as part of raising awareness for Holocaust memorial day, I will join students from across Rugby at a study day at the art gallery and museum, which has an exhibition exploring the life of Anne Frank. She hid for several years in her father’s business premises in Amsterdam before being found and taken to her death at Belsen. The exhibition consists of paintings by artist Anne Berger, who has visited the Anne Frank house and created a number of images of her life. Using those images, students from schools across the town will take part in workshop groups and explore themes of discrimination, refugees and the journeys they made. I am very much looking forward to joining those students to talk about the issues and understand their perspective of what happened during the holocaust and elsewhere in the world.
I am also looking forward to sharing my thoughts on what I have learned not only from my visits, but from the two debates in which I have taken part in the House. I have learned as much from the speeches of other Members as I have from seeing things. I look forward to celebrating the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust in ensuring that the world never forgets.
Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)
It is an absolute privilege to participate in this debate. I wholeheartedly congratulate the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) not only on securing the debate, but on his deeply moving contribution.
Members on both sides of the Chamber have made some incredibly powerful contributions reflecting on the events of decades ago and pondering their relevance today—and I certainly believe that they are relevant today. We said then that never again would the world stand by while a state killed its own citizens in such a planned and systematic way. Today, and even then, it was unimaginable—completely and utterly incomprehensible —that a state could inflict such suffering and despair by exterminating its own people and those of other countries simply on the basis of a perceived difference.
Yet, as we reflect on the holocaust, how can we not also consider, as has been said, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, where we have seen communities systematically dehumanised and killed because of a perceived difference, whether it be one of race, religion, ethnicity or belief?
Lyn Brown
With the help of the Commons Library, I have looked at some of this place’s wartime debates about the holocaust. They make it absolutely clear that there was a high level of awareness of the situation. In a debate on refugees on 19 May 1943, a Home Office Minister said that since the outbreak of the war, 8 million people in Poland had suffered barbarous punishment or death, and many others spoke knowingly of the Nazis’ intention to exterminate the Jewish people.
There is also a palpable sense in these pages of powerlessness with regard to tackling the problems, which were known about, and saving lives. Perhaps that sense of powerlessness has been echoed in this Chamber throughout the decades since. Indeed, I remember the debate on Syria.
In 1939 the merchant ship St Louis set sail from Hamburg with 937 German-Jewish refugees on board, seeking asylum from Nazi persecution. Despite setting off with visas to allow them into Cuba, they were denied access. They set sail for the US and Canada, where access was also denied to them. The St Louis returned to Europe, and at that point the UK agreed to take 288 of the passengers. Others went to Belgium, France and the Netherlands, but following the German invasion of those territories, they were again at risk, and historians estimate that 227 of the asylum seekers on that boat subsequently perished in the holocaust.
What makes the holocaust stand out is not only the sheer number of victims, but the concrete evidence of how the killing was organised and implemented on such a scale. Of great significance is the fact that every Jew was defined not by their religion or their own definition, but by the perpetrators’ definition. Jews were singled out and registered on a central database—its purpose was to expedite their murder—before being publicly marked, stripped of their citizenship, forced to hand over their possessions, dehumanised and, ultimately, deported to their death. I am astonished that the Nazis intended to expand the final solution beyond their borders: they drew up lists of Jews in the USA, Great Britain, Israel and so on. There has never before been such an event in history.
Our political forebears in this place did something, but we have to admit that it was not enough. Debates at that time referred to quotas or the numbers that should come here or go elsewhere in our empire. I am sure the Government of the day thought they were acting for the best, but it simply was not enough. Edmund Burke is attributed with saying that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men—and, indeed, women—to do nothing. We said, “Never again,” and we set up the United Nations to promote world peace, but we have still seen enormous inhumanities unfold in front of our eyes. Even today, we see credible evidence of the organised murder on a horrendous scale of the people of Syria by the state.
In preparing for this speech, I was reminded of one by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) in 2008. In it, he reflected on a visit to a museum in Rwanda that commemorates the millions who lost their lives as the world looked the other way. There is a picture of a young boy called David, a 10-year-old who was tortured to death. His last words were, “Don’t worry—the United Nations will come for us”. But, as my right hon. Friend said, we never did. That child believed the best of us, only to discover that the pieties repeated so often, over and over, in reality meant nothing at all. The words “Never again” became a slogan, rather than what they should be—the crucible in which all our values sit and are tested.
My mother, like many of her generation, watched the liberation of the camps on newsreel footage. She was so profoundly moved by what she saw that she ensured that I was educated about it, and she gave me a copy of Anne Frank’s diary when I was about 10 years old. I devoured that book—trying to imagine myself in Anne Frank’s shoes—and I gained a tiny insight into the injustice and inhumanity to which she and her family were subjected. It was a lesson that I hope I have not forgotten. Years later, my mother and I visited Prague. We went to the ghetto, and saw the walls with the names of the 80,000 Jewish victims and the piteous paintings by the children.
I hope that hon. Members will allow me to say that I am neither a moral nor a political coward, but I know myself: I know how that visit, and the ones to Anne Frank’s house and to Dachau, affected me. I have therefore baulked at making the trip referred to by many hon. Members today, but in the light of this debate, I will face up to the challenge and visit Auschwitz-Birkenau before the end of this Parliament with, I hope, the support of the Holocaust Educational Trust.
This year, we mark the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war—the great war, as it was labelled at the time—and we should use the tone of this debate, which I commend, to fend off the revisionism that such occasions sometimes engender. It is widely believed that the treaty of Versailles created the conditions in which fascism emerged into the 1930s, and from which the horrors of the holocaust unfolded. Let us bear that in mind when we assess the events of 100 years ago and let us apply the lessons to our foreign policy when we encounter inhumanity in today’s world.
We know so much about the holocaust. We should be immensely grateful to the Holocaust Educational Trust for providing the resource that we all need. I join others in commending its work and that of Karen Pollock in particular. I am sure that the trust will rise to the challenge of keeping alive and accessible the stories and lessons of the holocaust as the number of survivors sadly dwindles over time. I commend the Government’s continuing commitment to ensuring that the holocaust is never forgotten, including through their funding for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust under the admirable leadership of Olivia Marks-Woldman. Both trusts play their part in humanising the holocaust. In my view, that is the only way in which we can begin to comprehend such a vast and enduring tragedy.
In the Chamber today, we have heard how Members have comprehended the horror through seeing the piles of shoes or treading the steps into death chambers. For me, it is those paintings by the children in the Prague ghetto. We know so much, and yet we seem to learn so little. As we pause in the week before we mark Holocaust memorial day on 27 January, with its theme of journeys, we should take time to reflect on our global shortcomings and on our tendency to recognise the absolute horror of the holocaust, and yet to allow subsequent genocides to happen with such depressing frequency.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Stephen Williams)
I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) for leading us in this debate. Many of his remarks had a profound effect on me. To summarise, he said that although the holocaust is in many ways a story of hopelessness and humiliation, it also provides many examples of courage, stoicism and, ultimately, the triumph of the human spirit.
I echo my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown)—she is my hon. Friend—in saying that it has been a privilege to listen to all the speeches that have been made in this debate. That is not always our experience in this Chamber, but everyone has listened intently to every word that has been said today. I have been moved by many of the remarks that colleagues have made. We have shared our different experiences, the ways in which we have encountered the holocaust and how we have responded individually. Perhaps more importantly, we have resolved to act together.
The British mainland escaped the horrors of Nazi occupation. Although some European Jews were able to flee here, most notably through the Kindertransport, for most of us the holocaust is not a family experience. I note that it is for some Members who have spoken, but for most of us, our witness and understanding has come through history, literature and perhaps film.
My first knowledge of the holocaust was as a 13-year-old watching the TV series “Holocaust” in the late 1970s. That spurred me to read the only book about the holocaust that I could find at the time, which was “Scourge of the Swastika” by Lord Russell of Liverpool, who was involved in the prosecution of Nazi war criminals. I have never forgotten the table of categorisation in that book for the Nazis’ targets for imprisonment and murder. We are all familiar with the yellow star and the armband, but less often mentioned are the colours and symbols that were used for Gypsies, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the disabled. I was most alarmed by the pink triangle for homosexuals, because at that age I was just coming to terms with what I was.
The first reason to remember the holocaust is to understand that minorities are our friends, our neighbours and our work colleagues. In the twisted minds of those who hold a prejudice, the minority could be ourselves. That is why we should be thankful that we live in a society in which human rights are upheld and in which minorities are our fellow citizens, not outsiders who are confined to legal or physical ghettos.
In recent years, mass knowledge of the holocaust has come through the films with which we are all familiar, but literature and celluloid are no substitutes for real-life experience and testimony. We have all mentioned speeches and visits to museums and monuments. I first went to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1992, when frankly it was not usual to do so, during a visit to Poland while inter-railing. I will never forget it. There were very few visitors at that time, and when we followed the line to Birkenau, I climbed the gatehouse tower and looked at the scale of the camp. To those who have not yet been there I say that that is the memory that will live with them; the scale and the industrialisation of mass murder. I was there entirely on my own—no one else—visiting on a hot summer’s day in 1992, and it gave me my own time of quiet contemplation. It is not a visit I have ever wanted to repeat, but like the shadow Minister, I think it is perhaps something I should now do.
I have since been to Amsterdam and the Anne Frank House, and I have also seen the pink triangle memorial in that city—the only known monument to gay people who were murdered by the Nazis. In 2012, I went to Yad Vashem with the Liberal Democrat Friends of Israel, and I was familiar with many of the historical displays there. My right hon. Friend the Member for North East Bedfordshire said that he was profoundly affected by the children’s memorial, and no one could not be. What most affected me was the hall of names, where one looks up at a cone of photographs—hundreds, perhaps thousands, of photographs of people who were wiped out by the Nazis, reflected in a dark pit below. I really could not hold it together on that occasion.
The holocaust is a unique event and must be remembered and understood, particularly by young people for whom it is an historical event that took place long before they were born. It is right for the Government to support that, and many hon. Members have mentioned that they work with the Holocaust Educational Trust, led by Karen Pollock. It facilitates school visits to Auschwitz, as well as talks in schools, such as those that took place in my constituency, to give young people a vivid account and an unforgettable memory. Of course the most powerful testimony comes from holocaust survivors, such as Auschwitz survivor Freddie Knoller, who is still speaking in schools at the age of 92.
Last Monday I joined several other people now in the Chamber—the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman) mentioned this—at the Holocaust Educational Trust annual Merlyn Rees memorial lecture, to listen to Thomas Harding tell the fascinating story of his Uncle Hanns and the arrest of the Auschwitz commandant, Rudolf Höss. Thomas Harding discussed how people can turn from being loving fathers to murderous monsters. We are all familiar with the phrase from that time and the excuse that was often used about following orders, but he said that that was perhaps better described as people surrendering their capacity to think to others.
In more recent massacres and genocides we have seen how easy it can still be for people in advanced societies to slip from civilised values into thoughtless barbarity, whether in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur, or the current horrific scenes in Syria, where reporters are using the holocaust as a context in which to explain a tragedy unfolding before our eyes. People can still all too easily be led into acts of cruelty and murder.
That is why it is right that this Government—as did the previous Government—support the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, led by Olivia Marks-Woldman. Its annual act of remembrance on 27 January, the date of the liberation of Auschwitz, will be marked around the country on Monday. This year’s theme is journeys, and those of us who have seen at Auschwitz the pile of leather suitcases will certainly appreciate the resonance. Next year will be the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The Prime Minister has set up the Holocaust Commission, chaired by Mick Davis, president of the Jewish Leadership Council. That is because real-life memories are fading as people who remember the holocaust or who were told stories by their parents die. The work of the commission will be to consider how we can keep that testimony live and real, and ensure that those of the next generation comprehend the history, and also learn how to shape their future.
Next year will also be the 20th anniversary of another horrific episode in the history of Europe: the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica. I was particularly struck by the two interventions from my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), who served with NATO in Bosnia. Last year, my Department supported Ummah Help’s Remembering Srebrenica project. We will continue that support in the next year.
History is not just a moment in time studied for curiosity or even for leisure; it also gives us lessons we should learn. Not learning those lessons is a warning about the future. I will end my remarks by quoting a survivor of Buchenwald and Auschwitz, Elie Wiesel, who went on to win the Nobel peace prize:
“To forget a holocaust is to kill twice.”
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dawn Primarolo)
Before I call Alistair Burt for the closing remarks it would be remiss of me if I did not welcome the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown). I believe it is the first time she has spoken at the Dispatch Box as a shadow Minister. I am sure all Members look forward to future speeches, given the power and commitment with which she delivered her speech today.
Alistair Burt
I am sure all of us echo your remarks, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I will comment on the speech by the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) in a moment. I am probably more proud to be winding up the debate, having heard it, than I was when I started. I will make five brief points.
First, I commend this debate to any of those who watch our proceedings, whether those in schools thinking about Holocaust memorial day, or young people who want to watch something not just on this issue but on how Parliament works. The debate has been exceptional. We have had personal experiences, family experiences, difficult experiences of some horrors and a collective knowledge of the subject that has been brought about by those who work so hard for us outside, including the Holocaust Educational Trust. The debate has been a model of its kind. I am proud to have led it, but even prouder of the speeches we have heard this afternoon.
Secondly, I would say, “Do fix on the hope.” “Schindler’s List” does not conclude with the death of the little girl in the red dress; it concludes with the generations who were saved by Oscar Schindler and the generations still to come. The personal experiences and journeys referred to by colleagues are a reflection of hope. As the right hon. Member for Stirling (Mrs McGuire) said, the survivors won, not the Nazis. In all our reading on the holocaust, we should fix upon the hope.
Thirdly, we must not believe that it cannot happen again. Above all, we should keep in our minds that it could happen again. It is the evil in human hearts, which is reflected the moment one begins, unjustifiably, to separate someone as the “other”, that provides the opportunity: so long as somebody can be “Untermensch”, so long as someone is not like you, so long as someone is not human, they can be disposed of. As colleagues have said, the world is full of examples, even today, of where that is true, so do not believe that it cannot happen again.
Fourthly, reflect on this: we know about the holocaust for a number of reasons, but two are primary. First, people survived. That is how we know about it: people have their stories. Memorial day and everything we have spoken about today depends on the fact that people survive and can tell their stories. The second, and more difficult thing that people have to remember, is that we know about it because it was stopped. The holocaust did not come to a natural end. People did not suddenly wake up and say, “This is wrong and we must stop doing it.” It was physically stopped. It would be wonderful if we lived in a world where there was no physical need to intervene and stop people doing wrong. I do not believe that we do. That is why an international security system exists to protect people. This is something to debate: at what stage do people say, “Enough is enough” and do something about it?
Fifthly, I say. “Do go.” So many of the speeches we have heard today have been influenced and coloured by the fact that we have been to places: the Anne Frank house, Yad Vashem, museums around the world and, above all, Auschwitz. Go and get the sense of what this was about from the physical presence in various places.
It would be the greatest honour for me if I could make my first journey to Auschwitz with the hon. Member for West Ham. Perhaps we could support each other as we go. I would love to take that journey with her.
Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I thank the House for giving us time for this important debate.
Question put and agreed to.
Resolved,
That this House has considered Holocaust Memorial Day.