Holocaust Memorial Day

Cameron Thomas Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Cameron Thomas (Tewkesbury) (LD)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker.

“We had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so. Nothing belongs to us any more; they have taken away our clothes, our shoes, even our hair…They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains.”

“He who loses all often easily loses himself.”

“My number is 174517; we have been baptized, we will carry the tattoo on our left arm until we die.”

Prisoner 174517 was liberated from Auschwitz concentration camp in January 1945, one of only 20 surviving members of the 650 who had arrived on his transport 11 months earlier. He was liberated strictly in a physical sense, but remained tortured by what he had experienced until his death in 1987. Before his death, Italian-Jewish liberal Primo Levi wrote extensively about his experiences. I recommend his collection of essays, “The Drowned and the Saved”, as one of the bleakest—yet most compelling—books I have ever read.

My past visits to Dachau and Sachsenhausen camps cast long shadows in my memory. We are fortunate that those relics of this horror continue to haunt their landscapes as foreboding reminders, but with the surviving voices fading year on year, we must guard against the path that led to Auschwitz. The Holocaust was unique in its industrialisation of genocide; nothing so terrible at such scale had happened before, nor since. We must not delude ourselves that it could not. As the hon. Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky) said, “never again” must mean never again, and as the hon. Member for Brent East (Dawn Butler) said, genocide does not occur overnight.

The black shoots of fascism were intolerance. It was then—as it is now—spread throughout a frustrated population, appealing to their sense of national identity and stimulating a feeling of injustice. In this environment, nationalism festers and larger groups are mobilised by divisive populism that validates them as superior, but oppressed by an imagined elite and undermined by minorities. In 1920s and 1930s Germany, the Jews were both the imagined elite and the minority. Today, we see various groups demonised, including Jews, Muslims and refugees—it depends on the source.

I recommend that Members read a compilation of Nazi propaganda, “The Jewish Enemy”, by Jeffrey Herf. Those who choose to read it will observe very clearly the parallels between such propaganda then and now. It is not a coincidence; it is learned and it is finessed, with the same stereotypes, the same accusations, the same divisive rhetoric, and the same risks of following that same terrible path. We must not be fooled by those who mislead us—who minimise, normalise and amplify the actions and the rhetoric of division and fascism. Those who do must be challenged, outed and comprehensively defeated. I associate myself with the Minister’s statement that remembrance without resolve is not enough. Let us honour the memory of those who suffered the Holocaust by standing vigil to stave off its repeat.