Holocaust Memorial Day

Andrew Stephenson Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Stephenson (Pendle) (Con)]

It is a great honour and a privilege to follow my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), who made an emotional contribution about his time in Bosnia, which I will refer to in my speech. I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) and for Finchley and Golders Green (Mike Freer) and other right hon. and hon. Members who helped to secure today’s debate.

On 25 October 2012, I joined students from Nelson and Colne college and Burnley college on a Holocaust Educational Trust one-day visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The day gave them and more than 200 other post-16 students from across the north-west of England a unique opportunity to learn what exactly happened at Auschwitz-Birkenau, to pay respect to those who lost their lives, and to explore the universal lessons of the holocaust and their relevance today.

On the first day, we visited Oswiecim in Poland, the town where the Auschwitz staff camp and concentration camps were located. As my hon. Friend the Member for Finchley and Golders Green reminded us, before the war 58% of the population of Oswiecim was Jewish. We then visited Auschwitz 1 to see the former camp’s barracks and crematoria, and the piles of belongings seized by the Nazis. Finally, we spent time at the main killing centre of Birkenau, where the day concluded with candle lighting and a period of reflection to remember the 6 million Jews and Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Roma, Sinti, gay, disabled and black people, and other victims of the Nazis killed during the holocaust. It was my first visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau and was all the more poignant in that it came just days before I joined members of the Royal British Legion in Nelson in my constituency to launch the annual poppy appeal.

Before being elected as an MP, I had the opportunity to visit Dachau concentration camp near Munich, which was the Nazi’s first. The one thing that strikes those who visit Auschwitz-Birkenau—it is the one thing most people comment on—is the sheer scale of the place. It was killing on an industrial scale, and not just of Jews, but of anyone who fell short of the Nazi ideal.

The holocaust may have been 60 years ago, but it is important that we continue to teach the lessons of it to the younger generations in order to fight bigotry and hatred today. I join my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale and others who have paid tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust and its fantastic work in the country. It is important to remember, as my hon. and gallant Friend the Member for Beckenham reminded us so graphically, that man’s inhumanity to man still knows no bounds.

Before being elected as an MP in June 2009, I had the chance to visit Srebrenica—a much more recent example of genocide in Europe—where, in July 1995, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in just a 48-hour period. The killing spree took place in front of the eyes of the international community and Dutch UN peacekeepers.

I and a group of others helped out with a range of projects while living with local Bosniak Muslim families. We finished off a newly-built house for a war widow who wanted to return to the area she had grown up in. We refurbished an IT suite at the local secondary school, built a football pitch on a hillside and did other tasks, such as helping to chop firewood for an elderly women too frail to do it herself. While we were working there, we spoke to the widows of some of those murdered and to their children and relatives. We heard the survivors’ testimony and their stories remain with me today.

It was an extremely moving experience which has left a lasting impression. Fourteen years after the horrific violence that took the lives of 8,000 men and boys in Srebrenica, the work of rebuilding homes, lives and a way of life was still not complete. I am proud of the small contribution I was able to make towards that goal during my time there. Bosnia and Herzegovina is a country still tilting uncertainly between its past and its future, and could slip backwards without sustained international attention. Now more than ever, it is vital that the international community does not forget about conflicts that many see as behind us in areas such as Bosnia. We have to keep supporting the country until it is firmly back on the track to lasting stability.

When people in Pendle say they are anti-war or against military interventions overseas—many do—they often forget the huge cost of us not intervening. It was right that we fought the Nazis in the second world war, not just to protect our own borders but to crush a dangerous ideology that led directly to death camps such as Auschwitz and to the holocaust.

I look forward to seeing how the local students who went with me to Auschwitz-Birkenau will communicate their experiences and relate them to things like the current challenges of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the UK. I hope that this will ensure that the holocaust is never forgotten, and that lessons are truly learnt, disseminated and acted on.