Holocaust Memorial Day

Daniel Kawczynski Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Lab)]

This year we mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. I thank the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for everything it does to ensure that the whole country remembers the 6 million Jews murdered during the holocaust, as well as the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution and in subsequent genocides. My hon. Friend the Member for Hampstead and Kilburn (Tulip Siddiq), who joins me on the Front Bench, is a trustee of that trust.

I also pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust and the work that it does to ensure that the UK plays a leading role internationally on holocaust education, remembrance and research. One of its earliest achievements was ensuring that the holocaust was included in the national curriculum for history, and it continues to play an important role, working with teachers, students and policymakers to ensure that we are equipped to speak out against intolerance. Its “Lessons from Auschwitz” programme is not only about taking young people to see with their own eyes the evidence of the lives that were taken at Auschwitz; it is also about ensuring that the human stories of the holocaust are not forgotten.

Finally, I pay tribute to the survivors and the many who lost loved ones. Although it is now 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, the physical and mental scars of the horrors that holocaust survivors have had to endure have not necessarily faded with time. It is therefore all the more incredible that so many survivors dedicate their lives to sharing their experiences and educating young people about the horrors of that era, and the need to oppose antisemitism and any form of racial or religious hatred. These survivors—now of a generation who were just young children when they went through some of the most awful experiences that any of us can imagine—have collectively helped to educate millions of schoolchildren against the hatreds that are tragically still too prevalent in society. I want to put on record my gratitude for their work, the benefits of which I am confident will endure for many decades as today’s schoolchildren become the adults of the future.

I highlight the words of one survivor, Mindu Hornick, who was recently awarded an MBE for her holocaust education work. She was just 13 when she was taken with her family from Prague to Auschwitz. After living through tragedy, she made a home here in the UK, in Birmingham, where she married and raised her daughters. In December she said,

“with everything that is going on in the world today—with Islamophobia, anti-Semitism and other unacceptable things that are happening—I think it is important to educate young people… it is very important to educate young people to love each other and to appreciate each other’s faith and beliefs.”

Holocaust Memorial Day is a reminder that we all have a duty to ensure that such an event can never happen again, but also that the hatred that culminated in the genocide did not start with the biggest of crimes. It emerged from a climate of scapegoating and victimisation of minorities—primarily Jews, but also Roma, Sinti and others—which is much closer to the racism that we know still scars our society today. Words never seem able to capture it, so I need to borrow from Primo Levi. As he recalled his time in Auschwitz, he set out why we must always fight the evils of racism, because far from being an aberration totally set apart from the rest of history, the holocaust is most tragically something that could happen again. I share his words with the House:

“it is the duty of everyone to meditate on what happened. Everybody must know, or remember, that Hitler and Mussolini, when they spoke in public, were believed, applauded, admired, adored like gods…And we must remember that their faithful followers, among them the diligent executors of inhuman orders, were not born torturers, were not (with a few exceptions) monsters: they were ordinary men.”

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

The hon. Lady is making a very eloquent speech. Is she aware that 75 years on, Germany still refuses to pay victims of its atrocities in Poland—Poles and Polish Jews—while hiding behind an agreement that it signed with the illegitimate communist-era Government imposed on Poland by Stalin? Does she agree that the time has come for Germany to make war reparations to Poland and those who suffered at the hands of the brutal German oppressors from ’39 to ’45?

[Cat Smith]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point and I hope that it is one of the points that is explored during the debate, but if he will forgive me, I would like to get on with my speech.

As Primo Levi said, monsters do exist in our world, but they are too few to be truly dangerous; more dangerous are those who are willing to follow their evil without asking questions. It is our job in this place to ensure that those questions are asked, and clearly we need to do more.

Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust has suggested that the recent rises in antisemitism are not just about attitudes to Jewish people but are the results of our society weakening as a whole. Extremist movements in the UK and abroad have given confidence to those that previously hid in the shadows. Antisemitism always flourishes when extremism takes hold, and our current times are no different. This is a problem that all British society must confront, and it demands leadership that is prepared to turn its back on inequality and division. Prejudice and hatred of Jewish people has no place whatsoever in society, and every one of us has a responsibility to ensure that it is never allowed to fester again.

--- Later in debate ---

[Andrew Percy (Brigg and Goole) (Con)]

I want to thank the Minister and the shadow Minister for their approach to today’s debate and what they said. I consider it an honour and privilege to take part in this debate every single year. It is sad that we have to continue to have it, but we absolutely must continue to do so. I am delighted to stand here as the newly elected co-chairman of the all-party parliamentary group against antisemitism and to continue with what I did before I came here, when I served as a history teacher, which is the necessary education on the holocaust and the hate that drove seemingly developed nations to do what they did. The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day this year is “stand together”, and our all-party parliamentary group plans to do exactly that, to ensure that our Parliament is a leader in tackling anti-Jewish racism and hate, as it has been in previous years.

I want to begin by paying tribute to our former colleague, the former Member for Bassetlaw, now Lord Mann, who helped to establish this Parliament’s reputation as a leader in the fight against antisemitism and all forms of hate. He used to go the extra mile in fighting against antisemitism, including the famous incident when he chased Ken Livingstone into a lavatory. As amusing as that incident was for many watching it, antisemitism is no laughing matter. Despite the reputation that John helped to establish for our Parliament, there are, sadly, a few former and current Members of this House who have, on occasion, brought us into disrepute.

Before I say more about that, I want to reflect on the title that John chose to take in the other place: Lord Mann of Holbeck Moor. He picked that because Holbeck Moor was the site in Leeds that Oswald Mosley turned up in, where he was roughly dealt with by the working-class people of Leeds. It has always been working-class people who have been at the centre of the fight against antisemitism. The same happened in my city—when Oswald Mosley came to Hull, it was working-class people who came out and kicked him out of our city and made his experience in our city a short and unpleasant one.

I am sad in one way, but proud in another, that when I knocked on the doors of working-class communities in my area at the election, people referenced the current rise in antisemitism as a concern. We do not have a big Jewish community. I think that I am one of three Jewish constituents. We may be heading for a minyan, but there are certainly not many of us. It was sad but also reassuring to hear people in my area reference the need to do more on this at the recent election. I am very proud of the people in my area for standing as resolutely as they have.

While I am on this subject, I want to pay tribute to Brigg Town Council in my constituency which last year instituted a new holocaust memorial in the town and also to North Lincolnshire Council, which is presently creating a new holocaust memorial in Scunthorpe. As I have said, we do not have a big Jewish community in our region, but we are absolutely steadfast in standing with the Jewish community in this country.

The principle we have set out for the all-party group is that we are going to take on the problems of antisemitism wherever it is found in this country—or indeed in this Chamber, in whichever party it exists. Some of the most successful cases are the quiet successes where we work with Members and candidates to put proper education in place to ensure that colleagues who have erred and said things that are silly, or in some cases offensive, are educated.

To those on my own side I want to say—I am sure that this does not apply to anybody present—that I have no truck with anybody engaging in Soros conspiracy theories, as some regrettably have done, including at the recent election. The Nazis treated Jews as vermin but also alleged that they had a plan for world domination. Sadly, the Soros conspiracy theories we see, which are prevalent on the far-right of politics, are simply an updated version of that disgusting ideology. Using George Soros’s Jewish heritage and puppet-master imagery is antisemitic, and if anyone shares any of these images—if anybody on any side of politics in this Chamber engages in that again—they will most certainly be hearing from me and our group.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

My hon. Friend uses the term “Nazis”. The problem with that term is that it is a firewall between the real perpetrators, the Germans. We are now seeing a revisionism as to who was to blame for the start of the second world war; we heard President Putin last week claim that Poland was somehow partly responsible for starting it. It is very important not to use third-term expressions such as “Nazis”, but to say exactly who started this and who is responsible, which is Germany and the German people.

[Andrew Percy]

I am not going to get into the debate that has been raging in Poland following what President Putin said. All I will say is that wherever the Germans occupied in world war two, there were very brave people who stood against them, and there were also, sadly, people who facilitated and aided their evil and vicious aims. That is true across every single country of Europe. There were people in this country in the 1930s who, as we know and as I have just referenced, gave succour to fascism and to that hateful ideology.

--- Later in debate ---

[Fabian Hamilton]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. Every day in this place—I have been here 22 and a half years—we learn of colleagues who have a connection to a Jewish past, and my hon. Friend has just told us about his.

While I was in Paris, I went to Drancy and met the maire adjoint—the deputy mayor—of that small township. We went to the holocaust memorial centre on the housing estate that had become a concentration camp in 1940. While we were there, there were demonstrations in the small town of Sarcelles on the outskirts of Paris—the very town my great-grandmother, Raina Sevilla, came from. The demonstrations were against the Jewish people there. People were calling on the community to burn the synagogue down. This was in 2014, at the very time I was going to commemorate the death of my great-grandmother in the holocaust.

In 1985, I received a surprise phone call from my father, who sadly passed away in 1988. He was doing some research into his family history, and had discovered something quite extraordinary: his family, who he assumed had been murdered in the holocaust—while he was at school here in England and then volunteering for the British Army—had actually survived their incarceration in Bergen-Belsen.

My grandfather was born in Salonica—Thessaloniki in modern Greece. It is important to know that the Nazis invaded Salonica somewhat later than many parts of Europe. That meant that many of the Sephardic community of that great city survived, My grandfather’s brother’s wife, Bella Ouziel, not only survived, but, in 1985, was alive and well at the age of 93. My father asked whether I was free at the weekend, and we flew via Athens to Salonica. We met this magnificent old woman of 93, with her painted fingernails, her Jaeger dress and her coiffured hair. We sat down with her in her apartment, and we discussed the war experience.

My father had not seen Bella since 1934, when he was 12. However, he had kept photographs—Bella’s had been destroyed when she had been arrested with her daughter and her granddaughter and taken to Bergen-Belsen. We discussed at great length. Luckily, we had a shared language, French, which was my father’s first language and the language of many of the educated Sephardic Jews of Salonica—indeed, I speak it fluently as well—so we had a very good conversation. We laid out on the coffee table the photographs she thought she would never see again, but which my dad had kept, and which I have had electronically scanned. At the age of 30, for the first time in my life, I heard a first-hand account of life in a concentration camp. That is something I shall never forget, nor should any of us ever forget it.

The Holocaust Survivors’ Friendship Association was set up in Leeds and covers most of the north of England; indeed, my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) drew attention to its work in establishing the Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre at the University of Huddersfield. It did that by gaining grants from the national lottery heritage fund, the Pears Foundation and the Association of Jewish Refugees, as well as many personal donations. It set up an exhibition called “Through Our Eyes”, for which it interviewed 20 holocaust survivors over several days, many of whom have since died. The idea is that, once their physical presence has left us, their presence will still be felt through a series of interactive holographic videos. Visitors can go to the centre and actually interview some of the people in those videos—many of whom are not with us anymore—and ask them about their life. What a great tribute to the people who survived, and survived for so many years. What a wonderful thing for our children and grandchildren to have when the physical presence of those individuals is no longer with us.

I have to pay tribute to the wonderful Lilian Black. Her father, Eugene, was a survivor from Auschwitz-Birkenau. He was 16 years old when he was there. He died a few years ago, and I remember him well. Lilian has taken the memory of her father and the experience he had, and she has worked with the HSFA and the survivors to create this fantastic centre. If hon. Members have not been there, they should please go—it is absolutely brilliant, as my hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield said.

I also want to pay tribute to the survivors who still live and, indeed, to those who are no longer with us. My constituent Arek Hersh, who lives in the village of Harewood, has a wonderful mix of Polish and Yorkshire when he speaks English—it is a great accent. A room at Yad Vashem in Jerusalem has been named after him. He wrote a wonderful book about his experience, which I recommend. He is 91 now; he was an 11-year-old boy when he was taken off the streets of the Lodz ghetto in Poland. He was then taken to a number of different camps. When I met him at Yad Vashem, he was with his friend Jacob. Jacob and Arek had shared a bunk in every camp they were in from the age of 11 until they were liberated at the age of 16. How they survived is quite a miracle.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Gentleman is making an eloquent and powerful speech. He has referenced Poland on several occasions. I hope he will join me in remembering the millions of Poles who were killed during the holocaust, many of whom, like a member of my family, Jan Kawczynski, were shot by the Germans for hiding their Jewish friends and neighbours. The hon. Gentleman will know that Poland was the only occupied country with the death penalty for helping and protecting Jewish citizens. I would be grateful if he could acknowledge the suffering of the Poles in helping their Jewish friends.

[Fabian Hamilton]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that powerful intervention. I have always believed that the Poles played the most extraordinary role, and paid a high price for it, in the second world war. My heart goes out to all my Polish friends; I have many, and one of my best friends at school was Polish. He could not go back to Poland until after the end of communism, because his parents had fled the communist regime there. The Poles are a wonderful, brave people. They did so much to resist the Nazis and so much to protect their Jewish population—the largest in the whole of Europe before the second world war. My heart goes out to all Poles who played a vital part in protecting their Jewish citizens as well as their own, who suffered so much.

Iby Knill was born in Bratislava. Later, she was smuggled across the border to Hungary, where she spent the first part of the war fighting the oppression of the Nazis, until she was eventually arrested as a communist and taken to Auschwitz No. 2 camp. While she was there, she teamed up with all the other women nurses, doctors and dentists—medically qualified people. She did that because, as she says in her book “The woman without a number”—again, I recommend it to all Members here—if people stayed together in solidarity, it was very hard for the Nazis to pick them off individually. She saw Dr Mengele every single day, but because she went to the camps in 1944, she survived.

Iby married a British Army colonel after the war. After his death, she began to talk about her experiences. She had come to Leeds in the early 1960s, and she taught at universities and worked for the local authority. Now, at the age of 96, my constituent Iby writes, lectures and gives talks. Indeed, eight or nine years ago, she did a talk for Members in Speaker’s House, with the blessing of the former Speaker, John Bercow. Some may remember it; it was a very moving occasion.

Iby has written another book, called “The Woman with Nine Lives”. In her books, she talks about the fact that she never had the tattoo. When people ask her about that, she says, “I do not know why I was not tattooed. Maybe it was because they ran out of ink, or maybe the officer concerned simply had to go to the toilet.” Iby’s first-hand accounts are well worth reading, and it is extraordinary that, at 96, she is still able to go around our schools and educational institutions.

Trude Silman is another survivor. She came from Bratislava during the war, on the Kindertransport. She is 91 now. She is a very close friend of mine and my wife’s: we see her every other week if we possibly can, and I was with her at the weekend. She is a contributor to the exhibition at Huddersfield University, and figures large in it. Eugene Black I have mentioned. John Chillag, who died recently as well, was another holocaust survivor in the city of Leeds. But the person I want to end my contribution by describing is someone who was born on 14 February 1920—two years before my own father was born—and died on 1 January this year, six weeks before his 100th birthday. His name was Heinz Skyte.

Heinz was absolutely extraordinary. He was the founding director of the Leeds Jewish Welfare Board and the Leeds Jewish Housing Association, organisations that have done so much for so many Jewish people who have been so underprivileged and have had so many problems in their own lives in the city of Leeds. He made an incredible contribution. He was also a great supporter of Leeds United football club. But the one thing I remember him for—I will finish with this short anecdote—is that in 1998, a year after I was elected to this place to represent my constituency, he gave a talk on the 60th anniversary of Kristallnacht. We are talking about a number of anniversaries today, Madam Deputy Speaker.

Heinz was a student of the University of Hamburg. He was born in Munich, but he went to Hamburg to study. One evening, he received a phone call on his landlady’s telephone. “You need to get out of there,” said his mother. “They are going to ransack the synagogues. They are going to arrest and beat the Jewish people of Hamburg. Go to the park, and stay there all night.” It was four o’clock in the afternoon. So Heinz stayed there all night. He saw the fires. He saw Jews being arrested, being beaten, being brutally attacked. He saw the Torah scrolls being removed from the synagogues and burnt in the streets. He saw the destruction of Jewish businesses. He told us this from his first-hand experience. It is the kind of thing that you never forget hearing.

After the night of destruction and horror was over, Heinz managed to get through to his mother, and his mother said, “Go and see our family doctor. He has retired from Munich, and he now lives in Hamburg with his daughter. Go to his flat. This is the address.” So he turned up, at six or seven in the morning. He walked through the front door to find the old man sitting on the sofa in his full Wehrmacht uniform from the first world war. If you had been a serving officer in the German army, you were allowed, above a certain rank, to keep your uniform, and there was the old doctor with his pointed helmet with the spike on it, and his Iron Cross First Class.

The Gestapo had broken down the door—they did not knock on the doors, they broke the doors down—to arrest this filthy Jew, and they had found a man with an Iron Cross, in an army uniform, with the rank of major. They did not know what to do. As Heinz said at the time, “Zey didn’t have ze mobile phones.” They could not ring headquarters to get instructions, so they left. The doctor gathered his belongings in shock, with his daughter and with Heinz, and they took the train out of Hamburg. This was in 1938. They went to Denmark, they crossed the sea to England, and they came to Leeds. The doctor lived until the 1960s. I do not know what became of the daughter.

That is a story that I wanted to share with the House because it is a story that Heinz told us from his first-hand experience. Here was one of the last living witnesses of the horrors of the holocaust, someone who himself made a recording, and—I am very proud to hear this—at his funeral on 5 or 6 January at the Jewish cemetery in Leeds, his son Peter said that until his dying day, Heinz was a member of the Labour party. He never lost those values. He was never prepared to give them up, in spite of what he did not like in our party.

So it is with that tribute to Heinz Skyte that I finish my remarks. I thank Members for all the contributions that are being made today, and I thank them for indulging me in talking about my own family’s history.

--- Later in debate ---

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (Brendan Clarke-Smith) on his excellent maiden speech. Given that I was thoroughly entertained throughout and gripped by what he was saying, I am sure he will have a long, prosperous and useful career in this Chamber.

I want to thank and pay tribute to Olivia Marks-Woldman, the inspirational Karen Pollock and all the wonderful people at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust for their tireless work. Among the many things that they do is ensure that, every January, we have pertinent themes and rich resources from which to draw when we stand up to contribute to this poignant, far-reaching and important debate. I really try to contribute something different every year, because I think that that is important. I am very grateful to them. Often, because of the shortness of these debates, we do not get enough time to praise them as we should, so I find myself in the bizarre situation of thanking the Government for making time available today for us to have a proper and fulsome debate.

Today, the theme is “standing together”. We spend months in my office talking about what we are going to talk about in this debate, because it is an annual event and we always buy an extra book or two. One of the things we talked about was the different forms that resistance to the Nazis took. In previous debates in the House, I have spoken about the incredible bravery of Jewish people in the most extraordinary and terrible circumstances, and the extraordinary strength that they displayed when they must truly have felt that there was no hope left. That strength was epitomised in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The Bielski partisans also showed that strength, as did the Sobibor uprising. The strength and courage in evidence there were simply staggering.

Today, because of this theme, I want to share stories of some of the people who stood with the Jewish community despite the grave personal danger to themselves. As we have heard, after the German occupation of Poland in 1939, the Nazis pursued a policy of segregation. The Jews of Warsaw were relocated to a ghetto, and at the outset 138,000 Jews were forcibly transported there, and 113,000 non-Jewish Poles were also forced from their homes. Society was split in two. People were forbidden to bring their possessions into the ghetto, and they were thrust into immediate destitution. Conditions inside the ghetto quickly deteriorated. Eight or 10 people were living in just one room, and the German Administration severely limited food supplies. Jews found trying to escape were murdered. Within the first two years, 92,000 had died of starvation, of disease and of cold; that was 20% of the people imprisoned in the ghetto.

It cannot be denied that some were looking on in satisfaction, gloating that their Jewish neighbours were being forced from their homes and forced apart from them, but thousands of people stood against this awful racism. They shared their food and their shelter, but that had a cost too. As we have heard, a new law in Poland decreed a death sentence for all those who

“knowingly give shelter to such Jews or help them in any way”.

Helpfully, examples were given, just in case anybody was in any doubt. Those examples included taking a Jewish family in for the night or offering a lift in a vehicle. Any of these led to execution.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Lady rightly acknowledges that Poles were killed for helping their Jewish friends and neighbours, but it was worse than that. In the case of my family, it wasn’t just that you were shot by the Germans; first, you had to watch as your children were shot. They made you watch as they killed your wife and children, then they shot you. Your crime was helping your Jewish friends and neighbours.

[Ms Brown]

The hon. Gentleman is, of course, right.

I know I will not be the only person in this Chamber to own a copy of Martin Gilbert’s tremendous yet totally horrific book, “The Righteous”, which documents many stories of brave people who defied that law and similar laws, not just in Poland but across occupied Europe. I do not have personal stories that I can recount, but I would like to use the debate to put on record stories of heroic people, and today I want to talk about two Polish families who stood together with the Jewish people in the Warsaw ghetto.

First, I want to talk about Jan and Antonina Zabinski. Jan was the director of the Warsaw zoo, which was emptied of animals because of the air raids. When deportations to Treblinka began in 1942, Jan and Antonina decided that they had to help. They secretly provided shelter to 20 Jewish people in their two-storey home, and Jan sheltered hundreds more using the only other shelter he had available—the empty animal cages. Jan was employed by Warsaw city council, and he used that privilege to gain access to the ghetto. He used the pretext of looking after small trees and the public gardens inside the ghetto to aid his Jewish friends, and he tried to help them in any way he could.

One of those that Jan helped was Rachel Auerbach. Rachel secretly compiled records of everything that happened in the ghetto. This was an invaluable record of daily life under Nazi persecution, and she entrusted Jan with her precious manuscripts. He buried them inside the zoo grounds in glass jars. When the war was over, Rachel was able to retrieve her book and publish it, and it provides us all with a precious, dreadful insight into her first-hand testimony of the holocaust, as well as her memories of pre-war Jewish cultural life. Unsurprisingly, Jan was a member of the underground resistance, and he was eventually discovered. He was arrested and deported to Germany, but even after that, when Antonina was alone and even more aware of the terrible risks, she continued to provide shelter. The courage of Jan and Antonina was recognised at Yad Vashem as members of the righteous among nations.

Another of those recognised at Yad Vashem—one of the very first—was Dr Felix Kanabus. Felix was a young Polish surgeon, a socialist. He was disgusted, as were so many, by the sight of his fellow Poles aiding the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews, because he had many Jewish friends and he had spoken out publicly against antisemitism. So, when the crackdown began, many of his friends reached out to him for help, and he used his skill as a surgeon to help where he could.

Felix helped several Jews to avoid persecution by performing operations to reverse their circumcisions. In other cases, he provided medical certificates stating that a circumcision had been performed as a medical necessity—anything he could do to throw the Nazis off and stop their attention from falling on those that he could help. Felix protected a colleague and their family when they were summoned to the ghetto, by disguising them as servants, and he and his wife Irena worked with their networks to find safe apartments for many others. Like Jan and Antonina, Felix and Irena risked their lives, and those of their families, to resist the holocaust.

These are truly moving stories; but they are absolutely nothing compared with the scale of the violence—the 6 million Jewish victims and the millions of others who were subjected to systematic disfranchisement, dispossession, detention and murder. These stories of Jan and Antonina, Felix and Irena tell us something about what it means to stand together; because each and every one of us has a role in standing up to hatred, discrimination, persecution and genocide, whatever form it takes. One person’s actions will never be enough, but it is infinitely important to act, rather than do nothing.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a German theologian that I absolutely love; I love the idea of religionless Christianity. He was an anti- Nazi dissident, and he said:

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of the victim beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor and a pacifist, but when he saw what was happening all around him in Germany society, he understood what he had to do. He saved many Jewish lives. This German pastor—this man of God—became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and as a result he was arrested and taken to Buchenwald where, just one month before the Germans surrendered, he was hanged. I can recommend “Letters and Papers from Prison”, which talks about his ministry in Buchenwald and is a remarkable testimony.

Sadly, the reason it is so important to remember these histories is that the poison of racism has not gone away. It is really frightening to see how it rears its ugly head again and again, right around the world; whether it is the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims, who have been put into re-education camps in Xinjiang; the treatment of Indian Muslims in Assam and throughout India—many of whom are being stripped of their citizenship and being attacked; or the attacks on refugees by the President of the United States, who employs the rhetoric of the terrible so-called “great replacement theory”.

In the spirit of today’s debate, let us reflect on what standing together actually means. I believe it is more than just a passive virtue; I think it is an active obligation, and I believe that every single one of us can learn more, and do more, to stand together against hatred wherever and whenever it emerges.

[Stephen Crabb (Preseli Pembrokeshire) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for West Ham (Ms Brown), who spoke very well. It has been a privilege to be in the Chamber to hear so many powerful and moving speeches, especially the contribution by the hon. Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton), who spoke about family connections and friendships. All Members on both sides of the House will have found it very enriching to hear that.

It is a privilege to be called to make a short contribution to this important debate. This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day debate is perhaps the most important yet as we not only mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the other death camps, but recognise that, with each passing year, the living memory of those horrific events among those in our society leaves us. Over the past 12 months, since the previous such debate, here in Britain we have said goodbye to holocaust survivors Rudi Oppenheimer, Harry Bibring, Fred Austin, Judith Kerr, Hermann Hirschberger, Leslie Brent, Edward Guest and Rabbi Harry Jacobi—all remarkable men and women who refused to allow the pain and trauma of the events that they lived through as younger people to define their lives as holocaust survivors. Instead, they chose to spread light—they chose to be a shining light in our society, spreading the light of forgiveness, tolerance and love, and spreading that light as educators as well.

As we have heard, many of the survivors, including many still with us today in our society, have devoted enormous amounts of time to teaching young people about the past, and about the challenge of antisemitism and hatred in our own society. Much of that work, as we have heard, has been done through the Holocaust Educational Trust. I, too, wish to place on the record my admiration and support for its work. I, too, have been to Auschwitz-Birkenau with students on a trip organised by the HET, and seen the powerful learning effect of such visits. Discussing with the young people afterwards what that visit meant to them really demonstrated to me how effective those visits are, and how important it is for us, as a Government, to continue to provide financial and practical support to the HET.

In 2019 we also said goodbye to Ron Jones. Ron Jones was not Jewish, but he did survive Auschwitz; he was known as the goalkeeper of Auschwitz. He was a Welshman from south Wales who found himself incarcerated in a section of the camp that was reserved for British and other servicemen, so the conditions that he experienced at Auschwitz were different. He played a lot of football there, and that is where he earned his nickname. We said goodbye to him last year. He was Britain’s oldest poppy-seller—102 years old. But what he lived through he never forgot; what he witnessed in Auschwitz remained with him forever. He, too, carried that with him into society and did what he could to spread knowledge and understanding about those horrific, dark events.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

My hon. Friend mentions the very important visits to Auschwitz by young British schoolchildren. Sometimes they are just taken to the camp for the day and flown straight back to the United Kingdom the same day, and I have heard from some pupils that they get—obviously—a very negative perspective of Poland, because all they see is the concentration camp. I very much hope that as this programme is developed, children will be allowed to stay a little bit longer and see cities such as Krakow so that they find out what Poland is really like and their camp visit does not represent their only experience of the country.

[Stephen Crabb]

My hon. Friend makes his important point well—it is now on record.

I only learned about Ron Jones, the goalkeeper of Auschwitz, last week, when I attended the holocaust memorial event run by Chelsea football club at Stamford Bridge. Ron Jones is one of three individuals depicted on a huge new mural that stands outside the ground that has been painted by the Israeli-resident street artist, Solomon Souza. The other two figures depicted in the mural are Jewish footballers from central and eastern Europe who did perish at Auschwitz.

I thought that this would be a good moment to place on record my admiration for what Chelsea has done in the field of combating antisemitism. I confess that I am a little bit of a cynic when it comes to premiership football, given the vast amounts of money sloshing about in the game, and the eyewatering transfer fees and TV revenues, but having followed what Chelsea has done in combating antisemitism over the past two years, the leadership that it has shown on this issue and the way in which the club has approached its work, I am very impressed indeed. I think there is an integrity about that work, which demonstrates real leadership in the field of sport.

Recognising that premiership football is probably one of the main cultural leaders in our society and has enormous influence, I think that what the club is doing is incredibly important. It launched its “Say No To Antisemitism” campaign two years ago with a powerful foreword, written by Roman Abramovich, the owner of the club, in its programme notes for a match against Bournemouth. He wrote:

“On 27 January, the world observed Holocaust Memorial Day. The Holocaust was a crime without parallel in history. We must never forget such atrocities and must do our utmost to prevent them from ever happening again. It is my honour to dedicate this match to the victims of the Holocaust and to the Jewish community.”

Those are remarkable words to read in a match programme on a mid-week evening or a Saturday afternoon. That work, and the work that Chelsea are doing with the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Jewish Museum, the Community Security Trust, Kick It Out, the World Jewish Congress and the Anne Frank house, is worthy of putting on record and deserves a lot of support.

At the event I attended at Stamford Bridge last week, we heard from the club captain, other players, including the English defender Ruben Loftus-Cheek, and the club chairman, Bruce Buck. They all spoke with genuine interest, knowledge and integrity. We also heard from the England women’s player, Anita Asante, who spoke powerfully about this subject, which she linked to her visit to Israel last summer with the Chelsea women’s team.

Israel has not been mentioned a lot in this debate. When we discuss antisemitism, or when it is discussed in our society, people often skirt around the issue of Israel. I recognise that there are distinctions, and I put on record that I am the parliamentary chairman of Conservative Friends of Israel, but when we call out antisemitism in our society today it is important to recognise that the mask—the face—worn by antisemitism in 2020 is often a blatant hatred of Israel. People dress up their core antisemitism with a hatred of Israel, thinking it somehow makes their antisemitism more acceptable.