Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I want to share a few thoughts on the question of the Holocaust memorial. However, before we talk about it, we need to ask: why do we want to remember the Holocaust? What do we wish to remember? What is our assessment of it? These are the questions that this debate was and is expected to answer.

Is the Holocaust in some sense unique in human history, or have there not been cases of collective killings and mass suffering? The first thing therefore to ask is: what is the specificity, the uniqueness, of the Holocaust? I suggest that it is not merely a question of a large number of people being killed—6 million, 4 million or whatever. What is unique about it are the following four things, and never before or after have these four things come together in the way that they did in the 1940s. First, the Holocaust was articulated through the agency of the state. It was not a question of people going berserk and killing each other, or ethnic tribes springing upon each other; it worked through the state, systematically aiming at particular groups and wanting to eliminate them.

Secondly, the state did it because it was guided by a particular ideology, the ideology of racism—the Aryan race, the pure race, the white race. There are different races, and particular races must be eliminated. Thirdly, race acts as a navigator. It helps you to identify groups that you should get rid of. Fourthly, when you do get rid of them, theirs is not an ordinary death. It is a death that is bureaucratised and treated simply as an impersonal event in the life of the state.

Given those four elements—using the state and mobilising its resources, being based on a particular ideology, using that ideology to identify particular groups and then mobilising the state to kill people whom you have identified as undesirable—the question is often asked in many circles: why are you taking the Holocaust as in some sense unique? Why not see it as simply representative of other kinds of suffering? Slavery, for example, has been a long-lasting feature of human life. Why do we not memorialise slavery? Likewise indentured labour or, if we are considering genocide cases, there have been other genocides in history. Why are we concentrating on the Holocaust?

I think I have already answered that question, but I suggest that the kind of suffering involved in the Holocaust was unique for the following reasons. In the case of slavery, there is human contact; the state is not involved. Death comes rarely and when it does it is generally incidental and not planned. There is a human relationship between the slave owner and the slave. A kind of humanity is there in almost all forms of suffering, except when you come to the Holocaust, where humanity disappears and the individual is not just dehumanised; he is “inhumanised”. The language used is the language relevant to animals—cockroaches, worms and so on. In no accounts of suffering of any kind that I have read or heard about have I seen human beings referred to in that inhuman way. This phenomenon of “inhumanisation” is very peculiar to the Holocaust.

If that is so—and I hope this is so—the questions that we have asked about other forms of suffering, and the lessons we have learned, cannot be applied to the Holocaust. For example, in the common attempt to understand why the Holocaust occurred, people say, “Well, the Nazis hated Jews”. It is not as simple as that because there were Nazis who did not hate Jews; they had Jews as friends or as mistresses. Others have said that they did not just hate Jews; they hated human beings as a whole and were misanthropes. That is not true either, because they had good friends. Or it is said that they were evil, wicked persons. That is not quite right either because the “evil” they display is shallow and superficial. It is not born out of the deep layers of the human soul.

That leaves us puzzled. How do we explain the behaviour of a man who has dogs, loves animals, has friends and a mother and a father going to the concentration camp and knocking off a few people and returning home as if nothing has happened? It is this that needs to be understood. In order to be understood, it is this that needs to be questioned. What kinds of human beings are attracted to this or turn into machines of death? That cannot be answered if you look at the ordinary forms of killing. If you were to look at the psychological theory that it developed from ordinary forms of killing and apply it automatically to the Holocaust, it simply would not work.

To these simple questions—why and how—what answer would you give? Hannah Arendt had to invent a new concept: the banality of evil. She had made a massive study of concentration camps and ultimately came to the conclusion that these people were shallow. There was nothing there. You expect wicked people to have depths of an evil kind, but there was no such thing. My suggestion is simply that we have not even started learning lessons from the Holocaust. If these questions remain unanswered, what are we learning from the Holocaust memorials being set up all over the world?

I want therefore to end with a very simple conclusion. There are many others that follow from this. When we say, for example, the Holocaust is evil, we are making a moral judgment on it. It is evil, yes, but what else? Is that enough for us as a lesson to learn? Here I suggest that in the case of the Holocaust and lessons we can learn, we need to be asking certain questions which are not asked in relation to other forms of suffering. Let me take a simple example, with just one minute left.

We judge it, as in all our discussion today, as being in terms of the Jewish people. Is the Holocaust entirely the moral property of the Jewish people? Is it not an indictment of the entirety of mankind and should it not be seen as a human problem, which addresses all human beings anywhere and not just Jews? Of course, Jews were the primary and intended targets, but so were lots of Poles and others. That is one point.

The other question is of a slightly different nature. The Holocaust has happened, but what are the moral consequences? Does this mean that the Holocaust was the price Jews had to pay to win the State of Israel? How glibly we slip into a certain way of thinking and certainly of talking; “Look, they have suffered so much and therefore the Jewish people have a right to Israel” or “Whatever they do is forgiven”. In that case, we do injustice to other people—namely the Arabs and the Palestinians. The simple thing is that we have a lot to learn, and we have not yet started learning it.

[Lord in Waiting/Government Whip (Lord Cryer)]

Order. I apologise to the noble Lord, but can I ask him to come to the end of his remarks now please?

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

These are the lessons we need to learn, and I hope that we will start learning them fast.