Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Ludford Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ludford (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister and the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, for their impressive speeches. I very much agree with the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, that we must do more than light candles. I too look forward to the maiden speech of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry.

I want to talk about the need, based on the experience of the Holocaust, for not only constant vigilance against antisemitism but the perception and courage to swim against a tide and stand up to the mob. That vigilance and resolve must, of course, extend to all prejudice and hate based on race, religion, ethnicity or any other characteristic. But there is something unique and specific about the 2,000-year history of demonisation of Jews and the depths of antisemitism which led to the Shoah, which must not be overlooked or forgotten.

How can we forget, in fact, when we are holding this debate not only two and a half years after the massacres of 7 October 2023 but shortly after the terrorist atrocities at Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester and in Sydney, the dishonourable conduct of West Midlands Police towards Israeli football fans, and numerous antisemitic incidents?

I attended the event this morning to mark this year’s International Holocaust Memorial Day, hosted by the FCDO and the embassy of Israel, and I will come back to some of the words spoken at that event. I fell to wondering how many of those attending marches and demos supposedly in favour of Palestinians in Gaza and who chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestinians will be free”, which implies the destruction of the State of Israel, and “Globalise the intifada”, which implies worldwide violence against Jews, actually felt uneasy about one or both of those chants but suppressed their doubts to be in the in-crowd.

I have watched three films about the Holocaust within the last 10 days. I belatedly caught “Nuremberg” at the cinema; “Schindler’s List” and “The Zone of Interest” have both been on the television, and I watched them again. In my speech on this day two years ago, I quoted Dov Forman, great-grandson of the late, great Holocaust survivor, Lily Ebert, and I do so again. He said that

“this dark chapter in history wasn’t only about mass murder. It was the destruction of a rich Jewish culture and civilisation that had thrived for thousands of years. To remember the Holocaust is to acknowledge both the Jewish lives and the Jewish life that was lost”.

I noticed to my surprise that “Schindler’s List” was not only broadcast pretty late, finishing at nearly 2 am as it had to wait for the live snooker to finish, but classified 15, along with “Nuremberg”, by the British Board of Film Classification. The justification for a minimum age of 15 for “Nuremberg” included that it contained

“images of real dead bodies”,

while for “Schindler’s List” it was that

“based on a true story, younger viewers may find the film’s depictions of persecution and the Holocaust emotionally upsetting”.

Well, yes, that is the point of Holocaust education: to teach people what happened in terms of dead bodies and physical and emotional horror. If they are not, in consequence, upset, distressed, outraged, and despairing at what inhuman persecution, murder and destruction people are capable of perpetrating against their fellow human beings, the basis for action to stop indifference is not laid. I think at least all secondary school-age children should watch these films at school, as well as at home, as the basis for a discussion about the horror of the Holocaust and other genocides.

I was six years old when I watched a serial on the TV called “The Silver Sword” from 1958 about child refugees from the Nazis. This is the synopsis I found online:

“On a cold, dark night in Warsaw in 1942, the Balicki children watch in horror as Nazi stormtroopers arrest their mother. Now they are alone. With the war raging around them, food and shelter are hard to come by. They live in constant fear. Finally, they get word that their father is alive. He has made it to Switzerland. Edek and Ruth are determined to find him, though they know how dangerous the long trip from Warsaw will be. But they also know that if they don’t make it, they may never see their parents again”.


I do not remember much of the plot, with only snatches remaining imprinted on my memory; and, unlike so many histories of the period, this fictional story had a happy ending. Notwithstanding that, what has persisted with me is the sense of fear and desperation, or, in the words of one online comment:

“Just an image—an image of devastation and loss—and a knowledge that this was something powerful and important”.


This is, of course, nothing compared to the ghastly memories of those who endured the Holocaust or the real and terrible losses of those whose families perished in it, but it is important that those deep feelings of fear, devastation and desperation continue to strike a chord with people of all kinds, both within and beyond the Jewish community, if the pledge of “never again” is to have any meaning. Hence the essential need for Holocaust education. I am grieved and disappointed to hear that fewer schools are delivering that.

I have always believed that Nazism, fascism and their like, with the combination of obedience to authoritarian rule and callousness towards human suffering, are viruses that can be caught anywhere, in any country. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney last week quoted in his speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos from Václav Havel’s 1978 essay, The Power of the Powerless, which was about how the communist system sustained itself. He said:

“And his answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ He doesn’t believe it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists. Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false. Havel called this ‘living within a lie’. The system’s power comes not from its truth but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true”.


Rudolf Hoess, the commandant of Auschwitz, apparently saw himself as

“a cog in the wheel of the great extermination machine created by the Third Reich”.

American military psychologist Gustave Gilbert wrote of his discussions with Hoess during the Nuremberg trials, at which Hoess testified, that:

“In all of the discussions, Höss is quite matter-of-fact and apathetic, shows some belated interest in the enormity of his crime, but gives the impression that it never would have occurred to him if somebody hadn’t asked him”.


In a remark this morning at the Holocaust Memorial Day event at the Foreign Office, Meg Davis, a Holocaust Educational Trust young ambassador, struck a similar note, when she talked of how “compliance is the enabler”.

To my mind, Holocaust education needs to encompass not only the terrible history of antisemitism and where it led but the importance of an instinct and resolve against compliance and conformity. People who refuse to go with the flow, who have the guts to say, “This is not right”, and who are difficult and even objectionable to some minds are essential grit in our pledge of “never again”.

The warning signs tend to come long before the atrocities. The grandfather of the present noble Lord, Lord Russell of Liverpool, was the second Lord Russell of Liverpool. He was a deputy Judge Advocate-General to the British Army of the Rhine and one of the chief legal advisers during the war crimes trials in Nuremberg, and he wrote a book, The Scourge of the Swastika, on his experiences.

With the kind agreement of the current noble Lord, I would like to quote some passages from that book. First, the author noted that, a few months before the outbreak of war, a

“menacing German Foreign Office circular must have clearly pointed out the course of future events to all but those who did not wish to see it”.

That circular read:

“‘It is certainly no coincidence that the fateful year of 1938 has brought nearer the solution of the Jewish question simultaneously with the realization of the idea of Greater Germany … The advance made by Jewish influence and the destructive Jewish spirit in politics, economy and culture; paralysed the power and the will of the German people to rise again. The healing of this sickness among the people was therefore certainly one of the most important requirements for exerting the force which, in the year 1938, resulted in the joining together of Greater Germany in defiance of the world’”.


We were warned. The second Lord Russell of Liverpool thus observed quite rightly that:

“Persecution of the Jews in the countries which the Nazis invaded and occupied”


between 1939 and 1945

“was indeed on a stupendous scale, but it cannot have taken by surprise anyone who had followed the rise of the Nazis to power in 1933 or their Party program. Point Four of that programne declared: ‘Only a member of the race can be a citizen. A member of the race can only be one who is of German blood, without consideration of creed. Consequently, no Jew can be a member of the race’”.

That was six years before the outbreak of the war.

These reflections strike a deep chord in me after the period since 7 October intensified the fears about how an attitude explained as anti-Zionism and opposition to Israel—the blood libel of our times—transforms so easily into raw antisemitism and the dehumanisation of Jews. An interview in today’s Telegraph with Professor Sir Simon Schama notes that his TV programme about the Holocaust, “The Road to Auschwitz”, was rigorous in its examination of how the Nazis found willing accomplices in mass murder while others looked away. The journalist notes how Marian Turski, one of the last survivors of Auschwitz, said:

“Auschwitz did not fall from the sky. Evil comes step by step”.


Professor Sir Simon Schama says:

“There has been a qualitative shift towards the sense that the Jews are kind of enemies among us. I think there’s been a shift from the fury about what Israel’s said to have done in Gaza, to essentially dehumanising Jews generally”.


Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich told us this morning of her experience at Ravensbrück:

“We were stripped of our identifiers and totally dehumanised”.


Let us react this time before we know precisely how bad it can get.