International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

Lord Wills Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Wills (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, on securing this important debate. In recent years a huge amount of important work has been done, including by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust remains alive for generations which increasingly have no contact with anyone who lived through those terrible years, and it is important that it does so. However, memorialising can distance and weaken the power of example and of history, and the Holocaust should never become dusty and remote history. The lessons that it teaches us about the fragility of civilisation and the repeated need to shore up protections against savagery need to be taught and learnt generation after generation.

However, that is made harder when open wounds remain and, as we have heard, some still do. Restitution is important because, while nothing can undo the evil that was done, it at least recognises that evil was done. The material recovery of property, as the noble Baroness said so persuasively, matters less than that recognition, the recovery of that heritage and the bearing of witness to the fact that such evil was done. Without it, the wounds will always remain raw.

Of course, the restitution of assets is not the only way for such recognition to take place. The German artist Gunter Demnig, for example, has created the concept of “Stolpersteine”, small memorials positioned in places associated with the victims of Nazism. There are now hundreds of them in Germany, Austria, the Czech Republic, Hungary and other European countries commemorating, among others, Jewish, Roma, homosexual and Christian victims of the Nazis.

However, the restitution of assets still has a crucial part to play in this process, not just for the victims of the Nazis, because the people of central and eastern Europe suffered from not only their tyranny but that of the communists. As the noble Baroness so compellingly argued—and I associate myself with everything she said—it is regrettable that Poland remains the only major European nation without legislation on the restitution of assets stolen during the Holocaust. As we have also heard, more needs to be done to make restitution effective in Romania, Hungary, Croatia and Latvia.

I hope that that will be a priority for our Government during their chairmanship of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, but I hope that it will not be the only one. Of all the crimes against humanity, genocide occupies a unique place because of the way in which it seeks to exterminate entire peoples, their cultures, their society and everything that sustains them as a people. If remembrance of the Holocaust is to fulfil its purpose, we cannot be complacent about what has happened since the Holocaust took place. To the shame of the world, in the past 20 years we have been witness once again to what can only be described only as genocide. We have seen it in Rwanda, Yugoslavia and Darfur and, for all the efforts now to secure accountability for those crimes, the civilised world failed to prevent these terrible crimes against humanity—crimes that have amounted, again, to genocide.

Moreover, we have seen brutal repression in Tibet and systematic attempts to eradicate Tibetan culture, and a savage onslaught on the Mayan people and their culture in Guatemala. No continent can take pride in its record in recent years in preventing these terrible atrocities that remind us that the Holocaust, for all its horrifyingly unique characteristics, was not the last of the ways in which civilisation can be overwhelmed by savagery—savagery that is rendered all the more terrible by the way in which the power of modern technology has been applied to its perpetration. History is harsh on those who, whatever they might say, in the end do little than more than wring their hands.

My father’s uncle and his family lived in a small town in what is now the Czech Republic. The family graves in the Jewish cemetery suggest that the family had lived there since before the 18th century. Ten thousand Jews lived in that town and the remaining population was about 70,000, most of whom were Sudeten Germans who had lived there since the 17th century. My uncle was a second father to my father. The town was a place of refuge for him from a difficult childhood in Vienna, and his first job was in the family firm there.

When the Nazis invaded, my grandmother, grandfather and father managed to escape to London. My grandmother’s brother refused to go with them; Jews had lived through hard times before, he thought, and this, too, would pass. He, and all his family, died in the death camps. After the war, the new state of Czechoslovakia expelled all the Sudeten Germans. In less than 10 years, that pretty little spa town had been entirely depopulated. Such tragedies happened over and over again to millions of people throughout central and eastern Europe. Such brutality still continues all over the world.

Debates such as this help to keep these memories fresh, and help us to remember why we need to remain vigilant—and, I hope, prompt us to do better in future in preventing such tragedies. For that reason, we all owe the noble Baroness a debt of gratitude for securing this debate today.