Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Brown of Silvertown Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)]

My noble Lords, it is an absolute privilege to follow on from the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and so many of the exceptional speeches we have heard today. I pay tribute to the maiden speeches of my noble friends Lord Katz, Lady Levitt and Lord Evans. They were powerful speeches all, and I hope noble Lords will agree that they will be influential and strong voices in this place.

As we have heard today, the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was “For a better future”. Today I want to pay tribute to an organisation and the people within it who are seeking to create a better future for us all by educating our ever-changing world about the horrors of the past so that we do not replicate them in our futures.

Generation 2 Generation is a charity that enables descendants to tell their family Holocaust stories to a range of audiences across the UK. It currently has 41 speakers and is recruiting more. This academic year to date, the speakers have been booked to deliver their family stories to more than 390 audiences, reaching over 45,000 people. I am sure noble Lords will agree that that is impressive. Its key aim is to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten or denied, and to challenge racism and discrimination in all its forms.

Last Sunday, I was privileged to speak to some fabulous volunteers who wanted the stories of their families to be told and not to be forgotten, to be an education to a world where propagation, propaganda and misinformation is rife. So, let me tell your Lordships about Sabina Miller.

Sabina was born in 1922. She was Jewish, one of five, and she grew up in a warm, comfortable, loving and happy home in Warsaw. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, their home was taken from them and the family was forced to relocate to the ghetto. Some 400,000 people were crammed into just over one square mile. Hygiene was impossible, food was so, so scarce, and disease was rampant. Like many, Sabina contracted typhus. She was overwhelmed with the disease and was unconscious for 18 days. She remembers her mum standing at the end of her bed saying, “You’ve got to live. You will live. You must survive”. But when she awoke, both her mother and her father had died.

The situation in the ghetto was desperate, so Sabina covered her star of David and effected an extraordinary escape. She found illegal work alongside other Jewish girls on a farm—20 years old, digging potatoes, cleaning out stables and forced to sing anti-Semitic songs while they worked. While she was there, she received a postcard from her beloved sister Esther. It said, “I’m on a train. I don’t know where I’m being taken. If anyone finds this card, please send it”. Esther must have thrown that card from a train, and someone, in a simple act of kindness, delivered it. Those were the last words that Sabina’s sister would ever address to her. Shortly after, Sabina heard that the Sokołów and Węgrów ghettos where the remainder of her family had been taken, had been, to quote the Nazis, liquidated. Her siblings, her parents, her cousins, her aunts, her uncles, her grandparents—all gone. She said later, “The fact that people have families and I haven’t is something which hurts dreadfully”.

That was just the beginning of Sabina’s amazing story of survival. She spent the winter of 1942 living in an ice-cold, small ditch, warily begging for food. She changed her identity many times, was imprisoned, was interrogated on four separate occasions by the Gestapo and was eventually sent to a forced labour camp in Germany, where she remained until the war’s end. I cannot do justice to quite how unbelievable Sabina’s story is, and how unlikely it was that she would survive.

But survive she did, as did Lela Black, born in Salonika and sent to Auschwitz with her husband, her daughter and the rest of her extended Greek family. She was the only survivor. Some 50,000 Jews lived in Salonika before the war; approximately 96% of them were murdered in Nazi death camps.

I also want to mention Tony Chuwen, a Polish Jew who survived two concentration camps, hid in the German army and escaped to Finland, finally skiing for three days over the frozen sea to Sweden. Tony, while he was serving in the German army, at huge personal risk shared his meagre rations with the woman cleaning the barracks, a Jewish woman held in a prison camp. Years later, he attended a Holocaust event and heard that two women had survived their time in a Nazi camp by sharing scraps of food that one of them had been given by a German soldier.

Sandra, Gloria and Jacqueline are the descendants of these strong, extraordinary people. They volunteer for Generation to Generation. All three women told me how their relatives completely rejected any notion of bravery or resilience. Instead, these survivors asked, “Why me?” And they answered, “I was lucky”. Their stories are dotted with unexpected acts of kindness from Jews and non-Jews alike. And perhaps that was part of their luck.

We know, in this place, that anti-Semitism, racial hatred and genocidal violence are still with us. I hope—and I know that the volunteers from Generation to Generation also hope—that by sharing these stories from survivors, one day people will no longer be dehumanised, treated as other, humiliated, terrified or murdered because of their race, creed, nationality or religion. Let us remember the horror and the evils of the Holocaust, and let us not rest until justice is done for the victims in our world where genocide again threatens our humanity.

Renters’ Rights Bill

Baroness Brown of Silvertown Excerpts

Tuesday 4th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab) (Maiden Speech)]

My Lords, I draw attention to my interests in the register. It is an absolute pleasure to be part of this very well-informed debate this afternoon, and to follow on from the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull. I am not sure that we are going to agree on the clauses within the Bill about pets, but I can inform the House that Cara the dog is going to be delighted by the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Fookes, and I intend to tell her all about it when I get home tonight.

I am very grateful to my sponsors, my noble friends Lady Smith of Basildon and Lord Kennedy, for their enormous support. I thank the House staff most sincerely for their help in getting me around the place; they have all been so massively kind.

I grew up in Silvertown in east London. My parents both worked on factory floors and my home was a council flat overlooking the dying docks. All the opportunities I had as a child were founded on that security of tenure, the affordable rent, the stable school and the local library, from which I borrowed and read incessantly. These resources were just vital. They shaped my life and they have informed my career.

After being the first in my family to go to university, I worked as a residential social worker, which gave me some invaluable insights into the vulnerabilities of young people. I then went on to work for the London Borough of Waltham Forest in a number of social policy roles.

I became a councillor in the London Borough of Newham in 1988 and held that role until my election to Parliament in 2005. During that time, I focused on culture. I saw it as a way of providing opportunities for young people that might not be available to them at home. I fought for the Olympics to come to Stratford, which at that time was blighted by swathes of disused industrial land. I cannot say that all the changes have been positive—there has been a severe lack of affordable homes—but there are also genuine opportunities to combat social exclusion that have been created too, particularly by the cultural offer.

Following my election to the other place, I argued constantly for social homes and action against child poverty. Since 2017, I have been highlighting the appalling exploitation of children by organised criminals, particularly in county-lines drug dealing. We simply must recognise that the same child can be both a perpetrator of appalling violence and a victim of grooming and exploitation. It was therefore music to my ears to hear our new Government committing to take strong action on this with the forthcoming crime and policing Bill.

As we know, Parliament is not only about representing but also about governing. My career on the Labour Front Bench began as a Whip. I was in fact the Whip in charge of the landmark Equality Act 2010. I remained a Whip in opposition and joined the Home Office team, working on fire and then policing but also on topics I knew embarrassingly little about, such as recreational drugs. I recall one very memorable occasion when our now Prime Minister sat alongside me chortling as I was enlightened about the various uses of poppers. He suggested I went away and watch “Breaking Bad” as homework.

It is hard to speak about this period without reflecting on Brexit and the threats that assail us from Putin’s far-right Russia and the rise of divisive authoritarian nationalism, around the world and here at home. My only notable rebellion was to vote against the triggering of Article 50, but, as we know, it passed and plunged us into a maelstrom of chaos, insecurity and vulnerability. I simply could not bring myself to vote to make the people I represented poorer. Now I intend to do all I can to mitigate the damage Brexit has caused and to get us working again on shared challenges alongside our European partners.

After 2019, I took the prisons and probation brief, focusing on issues affecting women that are now being ably taken forward by my noble friend Lord Timpson. My next reshuffle was the luckiest because it brought me to the role of shadow Minister for Africa. My focus was twofold: to address the serious problems of Africa’s present, including the brutal generals’ war in Sudan, the Horn of Africa drought and the conflicts in the Sahel and the Great Lakes. But I also wanted to ensure that we were not distracted from the resourcefulness and leadership of Africa’s people and from the massive opportunities for progress. I want to pay tribute to my dear friend the Foreign Secretary and to my noble friend Lord Collins for their passionate commitment to this very agenda.

I believe that Africa is rising, despite all the challenges of insecurity, despite climate heating and despite unfair treatment by the global financial system. I genuinely believe that historians will look back on this century and say that it was Africa’s. I believe that we as a country will be stronger, fairer and more prosperous if we act as a valued partner to our African friends and not behave like a blinkered patriarch who thinks themselves noble for offering crumbs from the table.

I intend to continue to work on the causes that have defined my career and life, a flavour of which I hope I have given today. I hope you will agree that it is utterly fitting for me to make my maiden speech on this Bill, which promises to deliver a sea change in the balance between renters and landlords.

Sadly, the housing crisis has deepened in Newham, even as our borough has grown massively. Much of that blame lies with policies that encouraged a poorly regulated and unaffordable private rented sector to expand without limit. The damage done by housing insecurity and disrepair is life-shaping. It disrupts education, employment and both bodily and mental health. It is why ending child poverty remains more of a rallying cry than a reality. Families cannot access good work and contribute fully as equals in our society without a decent, secure home like the one that we had in Silvertown. That base was essential for me getting here today, and I support the rapid progress of this Bill into law so that many young people have these very same opportunities in future.