Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between Lord Coaker and Joan Ryan

Thursday 19th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Joan Ryan (Enfield North) (Lab)]

Holocaust Memorial Day marks a crime that we must never forget. We must never forget the genocide committed by Nazi Germany, and we must always remind ourselves of the horrors that anti-Semitism can produce.

At 10 am on 27 January—Holocaust Memorial Day itself—the Holocaust Educational Trust will host a live webcast with holocaust survivor Mala Tribich. The webcast will be livestreamed to schools across the UK, and more than 600 schools have signed up so far. The filming will take place at Kingsmead School in my constituency. I am very proud that it is happening there, and I commend the school for hosting it. The event at Kingsmead is very important, and it will have a significant impact. We thank Mala for being willing to share her terrible experiences and give her testimony to educate our young people. We also thank the Holocaust Educational Trust for organising the event.

Even when it makes for difficult hearing, we have a moral duty to listen to holocaust testimony. Survivors speak not only for themselves but for those who did not survive to tell their story. Arek Hersh is one such survivor. When he was 11, the Nazis invaded his home town in Poland and transferred him to the Lodz ghetto. He was then taken to an SS camp called Otoschno, near Poznan. After 18 months, Arek was one of only 11 of the original 2,500 men left alive.

Arek escaped transfer to the gas chambers at Chelmno twice, before being transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau. At Auschwitz, he was selected for death by Dr Josef Mengele, but when he saw that healthier and fitter people were in the other line, he ran across while the SS guards were distracted. Arek was a slave labourer in Auschwitz, before being forced on a death march to Buchenwald. He was then transferred to Theresienstadt, where he was liberated by the Russian army.

Arek describes life at Auschwitz and the death march:

“We were chosen to work on agriculture for the SS. First with two horses they ploughed the field and for fertilisation they bring us ashes from the crematorium and”

we

“strew it on the ground and the bones, you could feel the bones.

We marched out on the 18th January 1945, the death march, and we walked for about 3 days without any food in the striped pyjama, we were freezing, it was so cold.

It was terrible.

And we arrived at the station and we were loaded on the station and we were taken to a place called Buchenwald next to Weimar in Germany.

The camp was about 8km from Weimar in a forest. And there we were more dead than alive when we arrived.”

Arek lives in Leeds today, and is now 88 years old. His first-hand testimony reminds us of the brutality of Nazi anti-Semitism. His testimony is also a powerful rebuttal to those today who continue the awful practice of holocaust denial. Let us be clear: those who minimise, trivialise, distort or deny the horrors of the holocaust do so to legitimise the anti-Semitism that fuelled it. We must recognise that whenever people claim the gas chambers are a myth, argue that the holocaust is Jewish propaganda, distort Nazi history, minimise the number of holocaust victims or attack holocaust memorial days, they do not do so out of historical interest or a desire for debate; they do so from nothing but prejudice, bigotry and naked anti-Semitism.

[Vernon Coaker (Gedling) (Lab)]

Do not the testimonies that my right hon. Friend is referring to show the continuing relevance and importance of Holocaust Memorial Day? The vast majority of people in this country are decent, but we have seen a rise in hate crime—41% between July 2015 and July 2016. Although it has since gone down, it is still higher than it was, so the continuing relevance of those testimonies speaks to us all.

[Joan Ryan]

I absolutely agree with my hon. Friend, and I would add that we must never be bystanders.

When Arek wrote his autobiography, he called it “A Detail of History”. He chose that title as a direct riposte to French fascist leader Jean-Marie Le Pen, who disgustingly referred to the Nazi gas chambers in those terms.

Our words of remembrance today will mean nothing if we do not commit ourselves to action. Preserving the memory of the murdered is not a theoretical exercise. We must act to oppose all those who deny, distort or dismiss the holocaust in the present day. As Arek Hersh has said:

“What hurts the most is not the actions of the oppressor, but the silence of the bystander.”

We must support the brilliant work done by groups such as HOPE not hate to counter racism and fascism in our society. Perhaps most of all, we must support the fantastic work done by the Holocaust Educational Trust.

The only way to truly eradicate racism, anti-Semitism and holocaust denial in our society is through educating people. This is what Arek Hersh has devoted his life to for the past 20 years. In his words,

“If you talk about”

the Holocaust

“to people…people learn, and if anything like that could come up again they would stand up against it, so that’s why I talk about it all the time.”

In his words we must follow. We must remember, we must mourn, and above all, we must educate, so that racism and anti-Semitism can never flourish again.