Holocaust Memorial Day

Bob Stewart Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

I want to talk about my personal experience of genocide—I am afraid that it was up close.

In 1992, I was commanding a British battalion—the 1st Battalion, Cheshire Regiment—in Fallingbostel, Germany. I rang my mother and said, “We are surrounded here by disgusting locations—concentration camps, not just Bergen-Belsen, but others that held British and Polish soldiers.” There was a graveyard opposite my house that 50 babies were buried in after liberation. I said, “It is incredibly disgusting to go to Bergen-Belsen to see these mounds covered in heather with just a little sign that says, ‘Here lie 5,000 bodies.’” My mother said, “I know, Robert.” I said, “What do you mean, you know?” She said, “I was there.” I said, “I can’t believe it—how were you there?” She said, “I went there in 1945.” I said, “You’ve told me you remember the Special Operations Executive”—she was a special agent. She said, “I was with the British Expeditionary Force”. Surprisingly, my battalion—the one I commanded—was one of the battalions that was there when Bergen-Belsen was liberated. My mother said, “I was there.” I said, “You never told me that. You never said to me that you were here—why didn’t you tell me?” She said, “I was ashamed.” I said, “How can you have been ashamed? You were a young woman in your 20s, and you had volunteered to take incredible risks. You were an SOE officer. You knew how to parachute and, dare I say it, kill people.” She said, “I was ashamed,” and I said, “Why?” She said, “Because it happened in my lifetime and I am responsible for what happens in my lifetime.”

I did not understand why my mother would say that until later that year, when I was sent to Bosnia. I took my battalion, the Cheshire Regiment, into Bosnia and became the de facto British commander for the UN in central Bosnia. We saw quite a lot. It was bad— there was quite a lot of killing. On 22 April 1993, in particular, I was with my soldiers in the hills north of the River Lašva, trying to stop the battles—trying to stop Bosnian Muslims fighting against Bosnian Croats—because so many people were being killed. My job was to try to stop that.

I was with the Bosnian Muslim commander. I said, “You’ve got to stop this. This is madness. You’re killing innocents—all sides are. Stop fighting!” He said, “We’re not stopping fighting. In the village of Ahmići, a large number of women and children have been murdered.” I said, “No, not a large number. It cannot be.” He said yes. I said, “If I go there and discover that that is not the truth, and I come back and tell you that, will you stop fighting?” He said yes.

What I was doing that day changed. I came off the mountains in my armoured vehicle; strangely, it was called Juliet—my second-in-command’s was called Romeo, which I resented deeply, but he had named them. That apart, Juliet led the way off the hills, towards Ahmići—I had never been there before. We got attacked a couple of times, and as we approached the place we called the Swiss house, the Bosnian Muslim special forces on it opened up on us. We skirted round that, although we were in armour, so it did not really matter.

I then went into the village of Ahmići. The mosque’s minaret had been blown up—it was lying across the building. I took Lieutenant Alex Watts’s platoon with me, in four armoured vehicles, and we drove all the way through the village. It was a linear village. It was about a mile, and the road was quite small, but we got through with our armour. At the far end, I said to Alex, “One section left, one section right—sweep. Let’s find out what happened here.” The vast majority of the houses had been destroyed, although some had not been—later, people told me they had apparently been marked so that they would not be destroyed, because they belonged to Bosnian Croat families rather than Bosnian Muslim families.

As we went through the village, some of my soldiers shouted, “Colonel Bob! Over here!”—they always called me that; there was a lack of discipline in my battalion. They showed me a man and a boy who were burned. Their clothes were off. The boy’s hand was in a fist. They were in the door of a house. I suppose they had been shot—we were standing on empty cases—and burned.

Round the back of the house was worse. I went into a cellar, as directed by my soldiers, and I could not believe what I saw. When my eyes grew accustomed to the dark, I saw flesh—a head. Then I realised that I was looking at the remains of perhaps two women and some children. I am sorry, but that is what it was like; we are talking about the holocaust, and this is a kind of holocaust. All of them had been burned. The head of one was arched back, and it was burned, but, my God, the eyes were still there. I could not believe what I was seeing. I ran out with the men. Some were sick. The smell was appalling.

I immediately decided we had a duty to explain what had happened. I called a press conference. Then I informed the Ministry of Defence that was I was going to give one, because I suspected it might not be too happy. At the press conference, I explained what we had found. It went viral—all over the place. People tried to stop me. Some Bosnian Croats stopped me, and I remember saying to them, “Get out of my way. I am from the United Nations. That is my authority.”

Later, we found a family. My God. The family were stretched out in front of their house, dead: mum, dad, boy, girl. The little girl was holding a puppy. The bullet that had killed her had probably gone through the puppy beforehand. I really did not know what to do. By the way, we took that family to the local morgue. The next day we went back, and they were back in front of the house, because we had taken them to the wrong morgue. It was a Croat morgue rather than a Muslim morgue. A soldier of mine said to me, “Sir, this is 1993, not 1943. What the hell is happening?”

I used my satellite phone to speak to New York. I spoke to the Security Council, and the Security Council came to visit us. I took them to the site of this massacre. The Venezuelan president of the Security Council was deeply shocked, and some of the members were sick. I said to them, “How are we going to have justice for these people?” Well, I do not know whether it was because of that, but a month later they set up the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Republic of Yugoslavia, at which I have given evidence in five trials.

I will stop shortly, but I just want to end by saying that we had to dig a mass grave. We—your soldiers—did that. In that mass grave we put more than 100 bodies, mainly women and children, all of them Bosnian Muslims. My wife, as she is now, was the delegate from the International Committee of the Red Cross. She came to witness what we were doing, because the Red Cross had to know what was going on. She said, “You cannot bury people in body bags.” I did not know that. So, led by her, my soldiers emptied the bodies out of the bags into the ground.

This Holocaust Memorial Day is terribly important. We are going to speak about this, and every year we will remember this. It is going to happen again. We have got to try and stop it, but genocide has continued and will continue, and it is our duty to try and stop it as much as we can.

--- Later in debate ---

[Daniel Kawczynski (Shrewsbury and Atcham) (Con)]

I would like to address colleagues, not as the MP for Shrewsbury, but as the only Polish-born British Member of this Parliament. A lot of the killings during the second world war took place in the country of my birth. Of course, we could not go back to Poland after we had left, because of communism, and the martial law that General Jaruzelski imposed to suppress the Solidarity movement.

When we finally managed to get back to Poland and I could see my beloved grandfather, he never spoke to me, when I was a child, about what he went through, and the terrible devastation that the Germans brought about in Poland, and in Warsaw, the city of my birth. Subsequently, though, I found out that his brother, Jan Kawczynski, hid eight Jewish families on his estate. We have already heard what would happen to a Pole if they took the risk of helping a Jewish friend or neighbour. He was coming back to his estate one day, and a friend said to him: “Don’t go back—your property has been surrounded by the Germans. Just flee: escape and save yourself.” He said to his friend, “I have to go back; my wife and daughter are there.”

First, the Germans made him take off his officer’s boots. Then they made him dig a grave. Then they made him watch as they shot his 12-year-old daughter. Then they shot his wife. Then they shot him. And his only crime was hiding his Jewish friends and neighbours.

I related that story, for the first time after 30 years, to a friend of mine who is called Jonny Daniels, who runs a wonderful organisation called From the Depths, which seeks to bring Poles and Jews together. He investigated the story, and subsequently I went to an awards ceremony at Warsaw zoo with the Polish Prime Minister, Mr Morawiecki, and others, to be presented with an award on behalf of Jan Kawczynski for the sacrifices that he made.

It was so counter-intuitive: that is the thing. Anybody in this Chamber who is a parent, like me, will know that we are programmed instinctively, in our DNA, to protect our children. And yet what did these people do? They knew that if they protected Jews it would not be just they who were shot; they would have to watch their children being shot before they themselves were killed.

I say all these things because I am so upset about the second world war revisionism that is now taking place. As the people who took part and survived the second world war die, the next generation know so little about what happened during the second world war.

Last week President Putin accused Poland of being somehow jointly responsible for starting the second world war, and Members can imagine how aggressively confrontational that is for any Polish person. As we all know, it was the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, entered into by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, that led to the invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and the subsequent butchery.

The first thing that happened to me today is that my partner handed me an article from The Independent—I have to say I never read that left-wing rag—by Rivkah Brown, whose Twitter account shows her wearing a “Vote Labour” sign on her hat. The article was headlined, “Poland is in denial about its role in the Holocaust—it was both victim and perpetrator.” This young lady from The Independent is trying to suggest that Poland is equally to blame and somehow just as much a perpetrator of these atrocities as it was a victim, but in her article she could reference only the famous tragic case of Jedwabne, a small Polish town where it is alleged that the local Polish villagers rounded up 300 Jews, put them in a barn and set the barn alight. It is a very, very tragic, brutal and well-known case that we Poles struggle with, but to compare that one incident to the systematic extermination of 6 million people in Poland through a series of concentration camps is highly distorting of the facts and is deeply regrettable.

[Bob Stewart]

My very good and hon. Friend mentions the 6 million people killed in Poland. I thought several million of them were actually Polish. How many Poles are reckoned to have been killed by German soldiers and the Gestapo?

[Daniel Kawczynski]

I do not have the exact figure to hand, but at least 4 million Poles, if not more, were killed. Of course, it is not just the killing of millions of Poles. As my hon. Friend will know, in 1944, when we had the temerity to try to drive the Germans out of Warsaw, Adolf Hitler insisted on the systematic destruction of Warsaw so that it would be wiped off the face of the earth. Ninety-seven per cent. of Warsaw was destroyed. When I take delegations of British parliamentarians to Poland on all-party group visits, the first place we go to is the Warsaw Uprising Museum so they can see at first hand the complete destruction, the extermination, of an entire city that took place in 1944 in Warsaw.

I have a thick file in my office of my correspondence with the BBC. I write to the BBC year after year with the same letter asking it not to refer, as it always does in its programmes, to “Polish death camps,” and year after year I get the same reply. I tell the BBC that there is no such thing as a Polish death camp. These were concentration camps set up by the Germans and run by the Germans in German-occupied Poland. I just wish the BBC, a taxpayer-funded organisation, would understand the sensitivities of these things, rather than repeatedly referring to Polish death camps.

I intervened on my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) earlier to ask why he had used the term “Nazi.” Many hon. Members have used the term “Nazi,” and I am very worried about that term. It is almost like a firewall in front of the responsibility of the German nation and the Germans. It is almost as if Nazis are some third party who descended on us temporarily. They were not Nazis—the Nazi party was a political party—most of the people who carried out these brutal attacks in Poland were German soldiers and German Gestapo officers who were not connected with the Nazi party. They were Germans. When I talk about the revisionism that is taking place today, we must remember who the perpetrators of these appalling crimes were.

I was invited to a German-Polish conference at the Polish presidential palace—the Belvedere palace—a few years ago. The Körber Stiftung invited me to a German-Polish conference, and I asked them why the German Government had not given war reparations to Poland. Poland is the only country that has not received any reparations resulting from the second world war, yet it was brutalised the most and had the most people—the highest percentage of citizens—eliminated and destroyed. The German Government always say to me that they will not pay reparations and they hide behind an agreement they signed with a Polish Government in 1952—they signed an agreement with a mafia-type, illegitimate Government imposed on Poland by Stalin. Bolesław Bierut was the communist stooge imposed on Poland by Stalin, who instructed Poland at that time, “You will have nothing to do with those capitalists in Germany. You will sign an agreement. You don’t want any war reparations.”

It is good that we are speaking here in this Chamber, but we need action for the millions of Jews and the millions of Poles who were killed, butchered and persecuted in Poland and never received any compensation from Germany whatsoever. I talk to the Polish Government often about whether or not they are going to implement a tribunal or a prosecution in an international court against Germany. They talk about it from time to time, but very little happens. I want Members to know that I am in discussions with barristers to see whether we can find Polish and Polish-Jewish survivors living here in the United Kingdom and implement a private prosecution against Germany on behalf of Polish and Polish-Jewish survivors who are British citizens.

A young Polish girl from Oxford University came to see me because she wanted to do a research programme in my office—an internship—and I asked whether she would help me write a paper on why Poland today should ask for war reparations. This young lady, who was 25 and desperate to work in the House of Commons, said, “No, I won’t do it.” I said, “Why won’t you help me with this?” Her reply was, “No, I am not doing it. I have a German boyfriend, who would be upset if I did it, and it is ancient history. It is gone, forget it.” My generation is the last generation who will do anything about this, because we sat on the laps of our beloved grandparents, and we heard about what happened to them. When we are gone, that is it, it is finished; no subsequent generation will want to stir this thing up again. But what message does this send to the hundreds of thousands of people of Polish and Polish-Jewish origin still living in this country who are now British citizens? What message is sent to them by saying, “No, this is too complicated, it is too long ago. We are not interested in the fact that the Germans did not pay war compensation to you. We are going to move on.” No, as long as I am a Member of Parliament, I will continue my fight and struggle to make sure that the Germans account for the brutality that they implemented against Poland.