International Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Altmann Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Pickles, as others have done, on securing this important debate. I also thank our Government for the tremendous support they have provided to Holocaust remembrance.

It is increasingly important to remember that terrible, dark time. My mother, born in Berlin, and my father, born in Vienna, fled to the UK in the 1930s but most of our families were not so lucky. In preparing for today’s debate, I spoke to my cousin Ellen, who was on the Kindertransport aged eight. She still remembers the taunts of Jew hatred before leaving Berlin, the anti-Semitism and the devastation of Kristallnacht. She wanted me to say on her behalf how grateful she is that England gave her the opportunity to live and how proud she has always been of her British nationality.

The main message she feels we need to learn is the importance of tolerance and respect for all other people, not forcing our own views on others—indeed, Jews have never been a proselytising nation—or looking at people with preconceived ideas about race, religion or colour. Will we learn the lessons of history or are we in danger of repeating them? We must not be complacent. Hatred and anti-Semitism have not disappeared, as the noble Baroness, Lady Anderson, just said in her excellent remarks.

Despite the horrific events of the Holocaust, which we remember today, I believe that there are still memories of the anti-Semitic acts that happened in Europe in the 1930s. For example, just this week, anti-Semitic taunts were used against a Jewish football supporter and her friends in a London pub that was showing the Arsenal v Spurs match. When she asked fellow Arsenal supporters not to use the word Yid, which was one of the Blackshirt Nazi taunts against Jews, she was told to take off her Arsenal shirt and 30 people shouted this at her: “You are a dirty fucking Yid”. Findings this week, which reported the harassment, anti-Semitism and hostility towards Jews in the National Union of Students, remind us that we must not forget where hatred and prejudice can lead.

In 1940, one-third of Warsaw’s population was rounded up and forced into a ghetto comprising 2.4% of the city’s area. How could this have happened? What lessons can we learn? One lesson is that we must not stand by silently while dreadful things are done around us. Death camp survivor Simon Wiesenthal, perhaps adapting from Edmund Burke, said:

“For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”


Yehuda Bauer said:

“Thou shall not be a perpetrator”,


but above all,

“thou shall never … be a bystander.”

This is what we must remember. So today, I am trying, in my own small way, to ensure that we record what happened. We can choose evil, like our enemies have done, and create a world based on hate, or we can try to make things better. We must not take freedom for granted.

Before I finish, I will quote the last testament of Israel Lichtensztajn, writing in Warsaw on 31 July 1942:

“I do not ask for any thanks, for any memorial, for any praise. Only to be remembered is what I wish, so that my people, my brothers and sisters overseas, should know where my bones have been taken to.”


He also asked that his wife, Gele, and his 20 month-old daughter, Margalit, be remembered. Today, Israel, we remember you.