International Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Thornton Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Thornton (Lab)]

My Lords, I join everyone else in the House in congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, on the choice of this debate today and the wonderful way in which he opened it.

As we all know, Holocaust Memorial Day is 27 January, a day when we all remember the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and the millions of other people murdered by the Nazis, and the more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. I join others in congratulating the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust on choosing “ordinary people” as the theme for this year. As it says, this

“highlights the ordinary people who let genocide happen, the ordinary people who actively perpetrated genocide”,

the ordinary people who became rescuers during genocide,

“and the ordinary people who were persecuted.”

It highlights things such as the choice of language. All of us who have the privilege of public platforms need to be aware of the language that we use. When a Holocaust survivor asks us to consider the effect of our use of language to describe asylum seekers, she tells us that it is the language that was used to dehumanise and justify the murder of her family; in this case, words such as “swarms” and “invasion”. That echoes the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, who said that, when the Nazis moved into certain parts of Europe, they did not have to argue the case for anti-Semitism because it had already been made. That places on all of us the need to be careful of the language that we use. As he says, this is a journey, and that starts with the language that ordinary people use. We in the Labour Party have had to learn and relearn this lesson over this most painful time of dealing with anti-Semitism in our own ranks.

Preparing this speech made me wonder what led me to take part in this debate. I reflected that my left-wing parents sent me on an international youth camp in East Germany when I was 13 years old. We had a day trip to Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which of course was a huge shock and a revelation to me, and probably not what my parents expected I would be doing.

When I was 16, the Jewish lady who was attempting to tutor me for my German O-level—which was a bit of a lost cause—gave me a book called Five Chimneys by Olga Lengyel, which I read and reread in the years that followed. It is a woman survivor’s tale of Auschwitz which does not retreat into self-pity or sensationalism, and a stark reminder that the unspeakable can happen in all kinds of places.

I married into a family half of which is missing, because they were lost in the Holocaust. My beloved father-in-law, Henry Carr, was a survivor. He escaped from the Łódź ghetto at 13, making his way across Europe. They lost everyone except Henry and his brother Nathan, who ended up in Israel, and a cousin in the USA. I feel the need to declare an interest because my husband, John Carr, has written a book about his father’s odyssey. What it really tells me is that the story of the Holocaust for my family is about the need to make sure that our children and great-grandchildren never forget.