International Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I declare my interest as a patron of the Traveller movement. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for securing this important debate today and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Library and many others for their excellent and helpful briefings. It is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Kestenbaum, who described the moving experience of his own family.

This year’s theme of ordinary people who let genocide happen is extremely important for all of us at a time when we hear and see rises in anti-Semitism and other discrimination. In the brief time available, I want to make some links with things that are happening today but started in the early 1930s.

Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous comment about remaining silent even in the face of evidence begins:

“First they came for the Communists

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Communist …

Then they came for the Jews

And I did not speak out

Because I was not a Jew”,

and ends:

“Then they came for me

And there was no one left

To speak out”.

Most people do not understand that he spoke from his own experience: he was a pro-Nazi supporter in the very early 1930s. He did not support the Jewish community at all, and he recognised that in his later life.

For me, what happened to the Roma and Gypsy community in the 1930s was appalling. The Porajmos, or the Devouring, started in 1933 with prejudice and discrimination. Tens of thousands of Romani men, women and children across Germany and occupied Europe were first badly treated, and then killed. The human rights commissioner for the Council of Europe has reported this year on compelling testimony she heard about discrimination, a lack of publicly provided sites for our Traveller community and the barriers that people in the GRT community face in developing sites. In particular, she commented on the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, and how it is much harder for our Traveller community to live their way of life.

In that same visit in the middle of 2022, she also commented on addressing the increasingly toxic discourse against trans people. That, too, is how genocide started against the LGBT—particularly the “T”—community in May 1933, when the Nazis raided and looted the Institute for Sexual Science. Some employees just disappeared and were assumed to have been murdered; their archives and research were burned. During the Holocaust, transgender people were deported to concentration camps, and many did not survive.

Much more recently, in this last year there has been a chilling echo of what happened to Polish children in the 1930s after Germany invaded Poland, where they were sent to German families and to SS home schools if they were thought to be of previous Germanic descent. This year, in the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts of Ukraine, we have seen Ukrainian children being removed and sent to Russia and “adopted” by Russian families. That is appalling.

If Martin Niemöller were alive today, he would be asking us to look at and think carefully about all we see and do. It is not just about the horrific end of lives; it is about the slow and gradual movement towards othering particular communities and feeling that they are not part of us and that this is acceptable. He said:

“We preferred to keep silent. We are … not without guilt/fault, and I ask myself again and again, what would have happened, if in … 1933 or 1934 … 14,000 Protestant pastors”


had intervened? He believed that millions of lives would have been saved. We all need to heed that challenge and speak up.

[Baroness Bloomfield of Hinton Waldrist (Con)]

Can I say at this point that this is a time-limited debate? If people exceed the limit consistently, there will be very little time for the Minister to respond. This is a very difficult debate for me to intervene on, but I just make that reminder.