International Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Greenfield Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greenfield (CB)]

My Lords, it is an honour and privilege to contribute to this debate, and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for making it possible. My father, born into an Orthodox Jewish family, married out, and early on I learned that I was not “actually” Jewish. However, had I been born 10 years earlier and on the other side of the Channel, my fate would probably have been no different from that of those individuals whom we commemorate today.

Moreover, despite my lack of religious qualification, I have been able to explore my Jewish ethnicity. First, before university, I worked for four months on a kibbutz and for a subsequent two months in an old-age home in Haifa. Much later, my ties with Israel were renewed when, in 2002, as a scientist, I served as a member of BRITech, an Anglo-Israeli investment fund promoting technologies that could not have been developed by either country unilaterally. I also declare an interest as a member of council of the Weizmann Foundation from 2000 to 2004 and as a recipient of honorary degrees from the Hebrew University and the University of Haifa.

It is as a neuroscientist that I am particularly interested in the theme today of ordinary people. From a biological perspective, none of us is ordinary. The wonderful thing about being a human being is that, although we are born with a full complement of brain cells, it is the growth of connections between the cells that is crucial after birth. Even if you are a clone, an identical twin, you will have a unique configuration of constantly evolving and dynamic brain cell networks that make you the individual you are. You are a one-off who has never before existed, nor ever will again.

Each brain, and thus each life story, is gradually shaped by the next encounter, the next vicissitude and the next achievement, so that this accumulation of experiences over time gives us an evolving frame of reference to interpret the world, a way for others to see us and, most importantly, a way for us to see ourselves—our identity.

In the Holocaust, ordinary individuals who were extraordinary to their loved ones, their friends and their colleagues, and who would have made a unique contribution to the world, were prevented from doing so. What of those who did the preventing—the ordinary perpetrators who were “just obeying orders”? They too would have had unique, individual minds, but they shut them down in favour of conformity to the Nazi regime. They made themselves ordinary.

Such voluntary abandonment of an open mind is eloquently described in Defying Hitler, a memoir by German journalist Sebastian Haffner. Written in 1939 and published posthumously in 2000, it is a first-hand memoir of ordinary German citizens living between the wars. A central argument is that decent, compassionate people suffered none the less from a weak self-image, and were thus vulnerable to a collective identity imposed externally by powerfully effective indoctrination. The consequences were, as we reflect on this special day, devastating. Only by respecting, curating and celebrating the extraordinariness of the human mind can we be sure that the horrors of the Holocaust will never be repeated.

I make the case, rooted in science, for providing an environment where the mind remains open, where learning is prized and thus where individuality and ingenuity can flourish. That is surely in the Jewish tradition and would be a fitting memorial to those who perished.