Holocaust Memorial Day

Christine Jardine Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Christine Jardine (Edinburgh West) (LD)]

I thank the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) for securing this debate and congratulate everyone who has taken part on their powerful and moving speeches. It is an honour to take part in this debate in remembrance of an event that, in its own way, challenges the power of words adequately to express the horror and sorrow of the holocaust.

Three years ago, I visited the Yad Vashem memorial in Israel. As I was taken around that remarkable monument, the experience was at times emotional, as well as inspiring and thought-provoking throughout. It is a dark, oppressive space—a tunnel in a hillside—and as we travelled through it, guided as we were by a holocaust survivor, the personal testimonies we heard and the things we saw represented to me one of the bleakest periods in modern history—indeed, human history.

When our tour focused on the concentration camps, my mind was flooded with thoughts of the survivors I have been privileged to meet as we heard the testimonies of the suffering. I also thought about the young people I know who have visited what remains of the concentration camps across Europe, and about their reactions.

My daughter, who was born more than half a century after the war ended, visited because she felt she had to but, unlike other places of historical importance she has visited, it is something she rarely talks about. Like many, we took her as a child to Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, and she was fascinated. When we came home, she fell in love with the words of that youngster who lived her life hidden because it was the only life she was allowed. Hers were informative, moving words.

When my daughter has visited other memorials, she has talked about them, but not when she came home from visiting Theresienstadt, which represented something more. She faced up to the fact that it was all real; that this was where so many stories, like that of the little girl living in a loft whose powerful words she had fallen in love with, had ended; and that if that horror were ever to return, many of the people she loved would meet the same fate. Perhaps it was a similar feeling that moved Andrew Dismore on his visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and we should thank that visit for enabling us to dedicate a day to holocaust remembrance, but how do we adequately remember an event when its sheer horror challenges everything we want to believe about humanity and ourselves? How?

Perhaps Yad Vashem points the way. It is a tunnel in a hillside through which visitors proceed. In near darkness, they hear and see the emotionally numbing truth and heartbreak of the holocaust, but then, like all tunnels, the light at the end begins to grow until they emerge into the sunlight—it is a completely apt and quite deliberate metaphor.

In remembering the holocaust, we should take that metaphor to our hearts and remember that, unlike the many millions who hid in darkness or died in the bleakest of circumstances, and unlike the many victims of war and genocide in the past and in the current day—like those in Srebrenica and the Rohingya—we live in the sunlight. We should cherish that, and we should think of them every day that we enjoy it.