Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I very much welcome this debate initiated by the Government during their presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and I congratulate the Minister on his speech. It is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, as it always is to work with him. We are blessed today by three maiden speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Evans of Sealand and Lord Katz, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, who are all on the Bench opposite.

Only the noble Lord, Lord Katz, has spoken before me; the chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement has shown what a great contribution he will make to this House. If I may squint at my phone, I found an interview he did with Jewish News in which we explained how his family originated in Białystok—then in Russia, now Poland. He recounted his preparation for his introduction to this House:

“I was asked by this very nice man ‘We just wanted to check whether any of your family has been ennobled?’ I thought to myself that in the past some of my family may well have been on the run from Russian nobility!”


I thought that that encapsulated a bit of his history.

This year, we mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in January 1945. I was grateful to be invited to the ceremony led by the Foreign Secretary David Lammy at the FCDO, where we heard both from a Holocaust survivor and from a young woman, among many others. She, like myself, is not Jewish, but she spends a lot of her spare time on Holocaust education because she can see how vital it is to all of us.

I recognise the special pain for the Jewish community, but as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said:

“The Holocaust threatened the fabric of civilisation … prejudice and the language of hatred must be challenged by us all. Holocaust Memorial Day is for everyone”.


The Holocaust Educational Trust, another trust that does such great work, noted:

“As the Holocaust moves from living memory to history, this Holocaust Memorial Day presented a key opportunity to bring the Holocaust to the fore of our national consciousness”.


This was a seam emphasised by His Majesty the King, who said:

“As the number of Holocaust survivors regrettably diminishes with the passage of time, the responsibility of remembrance rests far heavier on our shoulders, and on those of generations yet unborn. The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task and in so doing, we inform our present and shape our future”.


My Liberal Democrat colleague, Vikki Slade MP, made a similar point in the debate two weeks ago in the other place,

“as the living memory of the Holocaust reduces, it is more important than ever that each of us keeps it alive through our own annual acts of remembrance and in calling out antisemitism and all acts of discrimination and hate against groups because of their faith, nationality or identity”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/1/25; col. 1163.]

Last October, we sadly lost 100 year-old Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert, to whom the Minister referred. She did so much work to ensure that the Holocaust would not be forgotten. I am delighted that her mantle has been taken up by her impressive great-grandson, Dov Forman.

I was struck by a comment by the Prime Minister about how in Auschwitz he saw,

“photographs of Nazi guards standing with Jewish prisoners staring at the camera – completely indifferent – and in one case, even smiling”.

The Prime Minister said:

“It showed more powerfully than ever how the Holocaust was a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary individuals utterly consumed by the hatred of difference”.


The Holocaust was not only a crime wider than the SS; it also did not come out of nowhere. Preceding it there were years, centuries and millennia of discrimination and persecution of Jews, both as groups and as individuals. As my colleague, Vikki Slade, said, before the Holocaust there was,

“a decade of dehumanising a whole community”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/1/25; col. 1163.]

Dehumanisation of people—which has been called the fourth stage of genocide—is the key to enabling not only persecution but extermination. Amid all the terrible bleakness and horrors of Auschwitz, I found the arch over the entrance gate emblazoned with, “Arbeit Macht Frei”, — “work makes you free”—the most chilling in its utter cynicism.

When I go to Jewish and Holocaust museums, or indeed to Yad Vashem, which I have visited twice, I not only find the photographs of persecuted Jews subjected to pogroms, and other victims of the Nazis, hugely emotional; I also find desperately poignant the photos of hard-working, bourgeois and successful Jewish families in German and other towns and cities who strove to fit in, to do everything to become respectable citizens of their home country. They sought to belong, and they were still destroyed.

On my bookshelf at home, I have a book that I have had for about 20 years—I think I bought it in New York. It is by Vienna-born Amos Elon and called The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch. It describes how, in the two centuries from the entry of penniless 14 year-old Moses Mendelssohn, later of course a famous philosopher, into Berlin in 1743—entering through the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate permitted to Jews, and cattle—until 1933, the German Jews increasingly and hugely contributed to Germany's intellectual, political and economic development. The Weimar Republic was the high point of the assimilation and integration of German Jews into German life. The writer notes:

“Alongside the Germany of anti-Semitism there was a Germany of enlightened liberalism, humane concern, civilised rule of law, good government, social security, and thriving social democracy”.


But none of that saved Germany’s or Europe’s Jews, because the continuing discriminatory attitudes of their fellow citizens had never been removed and were there to be exploited.

I was sorry that London’s Jewish Museum closed in 2023. We do, though, have the impressive Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum and the Wiener Holocaust Library. We are privileged to have, as a Member of this House, the Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein—the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein—the grandson of German-Jewish scholar and anti-Nazi campaigner Alfred Wiener, who founded the Wiener library in 1933 in order to warn the world of the Nazi threat. I hope the noble Lord does not mind me referring to him and quoting him in his absence. Within weeks of the appalling attacks by Hamas on 7 October, graffiti was daubed on the Wiener Holocaust Library. The noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein—still, like me, tweeting—understandably reacted, tweeting as @Dannythefink:

“I’m so upset by this graffiti attack on my grandfather’s library. Alfred Wiener had a PhD in Islamic studies and cared deeply about Arab people. To see his Holocaust archive vandalised in this way suggests an attack on Jews not a critique of Israel. It’s dismaying”.


I will finish, as I must, by saying that since 7 October we have seen a distressing rise in anti-Semitic speech and attacks, with hostility to the very existence of the State of Israel. When people chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, this is a call not for two states but for the destruction of Israel, based on not only anti-Zionism but anti-Semitism. We have pledged “Never again”, but political developments around the world, not least in Germany, are deeply troubling. Our vigilance must be constant, vocal and vigorous.