Holocaust Memorial Day 2012

Eric Ollerenshaw Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Eric Ollerenshaw (Lancaster and Fleetwood) (Con)]

This has been a highly emotional debate. Sometimes, I suppose emotions are the right things to express. I can remember being taught a saying, which I think is Jewish: “Things that come from the heart speak to the heart.” On this particular subject, that is certainly the case.

First, I obviously congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) on securing this debate. If he ever finds politics boring, I am sure he will find a really good career as a history teacher. In fact, teaching is where I want to start, having been a history teacher myself for 27 years. At the end of the 1980s and in the 1990s, I was involved in the debate about whether teaching the holocaust could fit into the national curriculum. When we make laws in this place, and make demands of Government to make laws, we should remember that somebody lower down has got to carry out those instructions. In the history profession at that time, there was a serious debate about teaching the holocaust. It was due to be taught as a section in the history curriculum, to what I used to call third years—year nine students now—who were 13 or 14.

There were serious concerns among history teachers then about that issue: whether children of that age were capable of understanding the holocaust, and whether the history profession was capable of dealing with the consequent emotional effects when anybody gets near this topic. At the time, I was a strong supporter of teaching the holocaust. I have an anecdote from one of the first classes I taught on the subject. Teachers had to be aware of the emotions that were expressed—a lot of emotion has been expressed by Members in this debate today. I can remember two 14-year-old girls—two Afro-Caribbean girls—who came up to me at the end of the class in tears, and it was not because of my usual poor teaching at the time. They said to me, “Sir, we never knew this happened. We never knew this happened.”

That is why I, like other right hon. and hon. Members, will hopefully talk to the Government and say, “Whatever alterations there are in the national curriculum, the teaching of the holocaust should remain a fundamental part of it, and children of that age, if they are well taught, can understand it.” However, as I said, many children—like the two girls I mentioned—do not know that the holocaust happened.

I was passionate to ensure that the holocaust was part of the national curriculum, because for 17 years I was a councillor in Springfield ward in Hackney, which my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) knows well, and more than 50% of the people in that ward were what I would describe as ultra-orthodox Jews—I do not know the exact term, but they were visibly Jewish members of the Stamford Hill community. I learned so much as a result of that experience. I had left Manchester at the age of 18 to come to London. I do not think that, in my 18 years growing up in Manchester, I ever knowingly met a Jewish person; I did not do so until I moved to Hackney. That just did not happen in Manchester then. So, to be confronted by the Stamford Hill community was something else, and then to stand as a Conservative candidate in Hackney was also something else. I spent years as deputy leader of the Conservative group, and the leader of the group, Joe Lobenstein, was from that Jewish community. He is still alive, God love him. We also had a chief whip; as people can imagine, there were only three of us serving as Conservative councillors in Hackney, but we knew how to spread the offices around. In fact, I think the Leader of the House, in the days when he was a Minister, may have met Joe.

As I said, Joe was from that Jewish community and he had many stories. He was six years old at the time of Kristallnacht and then came to this country as a refugee. He said that one of his earliest memories was going with his father to a swimming pool in Germany and his father suddenly saying, “We’re not allowed there today.” Then there was Kristallnacht, and his family came to Hackney. To this day, Joe has huge pride in this country, for the kind of life it gave him and the other members of his community. At the last count, he had, I think, 64 grandchildren and he has made a hugely successful life for himself. Funnily enough, he always says that he still counts in German. German is always in his mind and he counts in it, even though he speaks English.

I have to say that Joe first stood as a Liberal councillor, but then he saw the light and became a Conservative councillor. He has never received any real recognition for the fact that he was a member of this visibly Jewish community, and was the first person from it ever to stand for public office. It was a community whose members, as people can imagine, moved gradually into Hackney and Stamford Hill; they were refugees both before the war and after it. Joe told stories of Shabbos, or Saturdays, in the 1950s when people used to walk down the street and smash the car windows of Jewish people, knowing that, because they were strictly religious, they could not pick up a telephone to report it or do anything else. People need only to step now into Stamford Hill or Bury South to see that anti-Semitism is still alive.

Joe taught me so much. When I was a councillor, we had one of the first applications for mosque planning permission, and Joe’s view was that we should support it, because everyone of faith has a right to worship in their place of worship. We supported the first gurdwara application, near Finsbury Park, and Joe was instrumental in, and is still part of, a joint Muslim-Jewish council, which meets whenever problems from the middle east might impact on youngsters in Hackney. What Joe taught me about the impacts was reflected to some extent in my teaching, and I add to the plaudits for Karen and her team at the Holocaust Educational Trust.

I had taught about the holocaust, and I had electors. I remember when I was canvassing, knocking on doors, as we all do—as a politician I am after the vote, obviously—and for the first time someone suddenly put their hand out and I saw the tattoo there. I could tell Members all kinds of things that that made me feel. The first Auschwitz survivors I met were in Tower Court, Springfield. They were a couple who, as children, had lost their whole families but had managed to get to England. I can always remember one of them saying to me, “Eric, I think I’m an illegal immigrant.” This man had survived the war, lost his family, got married—funnily enough, to another survivor—brought up a family and grandchildren, and was living in a council block in Hackney. I asked him, “Why are you an illegal immigrant after 50 or 60 years?” and he replied, “Because after the war, Britain said it needed bricklayers, and I was trained as a jeweller but put my hand up and said I was a bricklayer, so perhaps I’m still illegal.” I assured him that he was not.

What I am saying is that I did not want to go to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Like the hon. Member for Eastbourne (Stephen Lloyd), I had seen and read all the stuff and had taught history. I was frightened that perhaps the visit would lower the emotional impact, and I was worried about seeing the museum. In the end, I think it was Karen’s nagging, which she is extremely good at, as we all know, that convinced me to go, and I had the honour of going with the Chairman of this debate. What hit me more than anything else was the sheer size of Birkenau.

I now find myself as the Member of Parliament for Lancaster and Fleetwood, where there is a minuscule Jewish population. I would like to put on the record my thanks to a previous Labour Member of Parliament, who is still alive and in Lancaster, Stanley Hoenig, and a lady called Liz Meet, who even in that minuscule population have kept the pressure on for a Holocaust memorial day ceremony, which I will be pleased to attend yet again this year, next Thursday. Having taught the subject, represented people of the Jewish faith, been in Srebrenica and seen the other massacres, what I will say in conclusion is the phrase we see on war memorials: lest we forget.