Holocaust Memorial Day

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker, for calling me to speak in this important debate, and one that is very close to my heart. As part of this country’s vibrant and diverse Jewish community, I have had the honour of knowing a number of holocaust survivors at first hand—like Marianne, who came to this country on the Kindertransport, and who taught me and so many others in my community Hebrew. I will be forever indebted to her for helping me to access the Torah much more deeply. Our tradition teaches that the Torah is the tree of life to all who hold fast to it, and I thank and cherish Marianne for giving me that opportunity. With the passage of time, as the holocaust fades from living memory, this is something I will never take for granted.

I pay tribute to the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for their work in providing more people, particularly young people, with opportunities to hear powerful first-hand testimony from survivors and to learn about the holocaust. I also pay tribute to the survivors for their bravery and for their generosity in educating others, reliving again and again some of the most traumatic personal experiences that many of us can never even begin to comprehend.

There is something about the sheer scale of the holocaust that makes it so hard to comprehend; it becomes almost an abstraction. Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau as a teenager, the part that really brought it all home for me was standing in one of the gas chambers and realising how small it was, how many people had been murdered inside it, and in such a relatively short timescale. It began to dawn on me how mechanised the holocaust was. It was a whole system, designed with the goal of murdering Jewish, Roma and Sinti, disabled and LGBT people on an industrial scale. Civilians from across Nazi-occupied Europe and political prisoners were also murdered in great numbers. As someone raised with the belief that humans are inherently good, facing up to the reality of man’s capacity for evil towards his fellow man totally shook my world view.

In the midst of the horror of the holocaust, however, there were some glimmers of hope that should stand as an inspiration to all of us in upholding the diversity of this country, which is its strength, and not being bystanders to evil and to fascist tyranny. I encourage all Members of this House to research the story, for example, of the Sarajevo Haggadah—a priceless artefact and a keystone of Bosnia’s Jewish heritage. The Haggadah escaped the Spanish inquisition and migrated east along with the Jews expelled from Spain, and in 1894 it was obtained by the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina. During the Nazi occupation of Sarajevo, it was saved from destruction by the museum’s chief librarian—a Muslim man named Derviš Korkut, who risked his life to smuggle this priceless, sacred artefact from the museum, giving it to an imam who hid it under the floorboards of a mosque outside Sarajevo, then returning it to the Jewish people after the war. Derviš Korkut is now recognised by the Yad Vashem world holocaust memorial centre as a righteous gentile to whom the Jewish people owe a huge debt.

Holocaust Memorial Day also commemorates the post-war genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia. Four years ago this month, I took part in the Lessons From Srebrenica programme organised by the charity Remembering Srebrenica with an inter-faith delegation of 21 women from Greater Manchester. Our trip had a specific focus on the women of the Bosnian genocide, learning about the use of rape as an act of genocide, including in camps set up specifically for this purpose—on European soil, in my lifetime. I met the mothers of the Srebrenica and Žepa enclaves—women like Munira Subašić, who has shown such unimaginable resilience and empathy. I was particularly struck when speaking to her about the trials taking place and her saying that she had pleaded for clemency for a Serb soldier who had been directly involved in the murder of her family because he had recently had a young family and she did not want anyone else to have their families taken away from them like hers was from her. It was a harrowing experience and one that will stay with me forever.

This experience has hardened my resolve to bring all our communities together so that never again can such horrors take place. We cannot allow our communities to be pitted against each other. Our oppressions and our destinies to overcome these are inextricably linked to one another. The Bosnian genocide was within my own lifetime. I am determined that my generation will carry forward the memory of the holocaust and subsequent post-war genocides for the generations that come behind us. As Elie Wiesel, of blessed memory, wrote, we now have

“a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.”

We must not allow these atrocities to fade from the public consciousness, nor our commitment to standing against hatred and division to be dulled by time. We must stand firm against fascism and confront it by any means necessary to stop this vile poison from again taking root. If you will forgive my bad Yiddish, mir veln zey iberlebn—we will outlive them.