Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Andrew Bowie Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Bowie (West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine) (Con) [V]]

With the sheer scale of the tragedy, the unimaginable horror and the fact that it happened in Europe—on our doorstep—in the mid-20th century, the holocaust is almost impossible to comprehend. Over the 76 years since the liberation of the concentration camps and the end of the second world war, the destruction of Nazi tyranny and the genocide, we have become numb to the numbers and the facts, but we must remind ourselves over and over again. As the numbers of those who survived sadly diminish each year, it is up to us, a new generation who have heard at first hand from those survivors what happened, to remember and to pass on.

In 1933, when the Nazis first came to power in Germany, there were 9 million Jews living in Europe. By 1945, 6 million had been killed—two out of every three—not through disease or natural causes or war but through a programme of extermination, a cold, calculated effort to wipe an entire people from the face of the continent. While we remember all of that faith who, for their faith alone, were tortured and killed, we cannot on this day forget the 5 million others who did not fit into the vision of a perfect race, or who would not submit to the vicious ideology of Nazism: more than half a million Roma Gypsies; thousands of Christian priests and Ministers who refused to submit to the Nazis; political opponents; resistance fighters; the 15,000 members of the LGBT community who died having first been forced into the ignominy of wearing pink triangles so that they could be easily recognised and even further humiliated; the disabled put to death under Hitler’s cleansing programme; the black children who were forcibly sterilised. For all who suffered and died because of their faith, who they were, who they loved or what they looked like, we must remember and say “Never again.”

It is often asked why we did not do more in the 1930s in the run-up to world war two. Surely we knew what was happening, if not the scale. Maybe we did, but it was harder to know exactly what was happening on foreign shores back then—not so anymore. In this interconnected world, a world that seems closer and smaller than ever before, that argument no longer stands, so I wonder, however well meant, how hollow our words feel to the people of Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia. I wonder, when they hear politicians in the west say “Never again” what they actually think. We knew what was happening in those countries and still we did nothing. We saw on our TV screens the death and destruction, the genocides taking place in our world and in our lifetime. We saw Bashar al-Assad use chemical weapons against children, and this House voted not to intervene. We see forced sterilisation, forced labour and prison camps in Xinjiang for the Uyghur Muslims, and the suffering of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Today, when we say “Never again” let us mean it.