Holocaust Memorial Day

Fabian Hamilton Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

I rise, of course, to support the motion on Holocaust Memorial Day and to tell the House how proud I am to represent one of the largest Jewish communities in the United Kingdom, who have done so much over so many years—indeed, almost centuries—to enhance our city, benefit its people, and to work above and beyond just their community. There are about 8,500 Jewish people in Leeds, almost all of whom live in north-east Leeds.

In 2014, I did one of my charity bike rides—many Members may remember that I do one every year to raise funds for a good cause—to raise money for Donisthorpe Hall, which is a Jewish elderly persons’ nursing home in the constituency, and very wonderful it is, too. It depends very much on voluntary donations, so the purpose of my ride was to do a kind of Jewish pilgrimage, going from Donisthorpe to Drancy in Paris. Many Members may have heard of Drancy—it was the place from which the French Jews were deported to the concentration camps. Shortly before my epic ride to Paris from Leeds, I learned that my great-grandmother, Reina Sevilla, was deported from the Vél d’Hiv via Drancy to Birkenau concentration camp, where she was murdered in the gas chambers—a direct personal connection to the holocaust.

[Jeff Smith (Manchester, Withington) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a very powerful speech. My great-grandmother, Rosa Simonson, came to Manchester, originally, having fled an earlier manifestation of antisemitism—the anti-Jewish pogroms in eastern Europe in the 1880s. Most of the Jewish population of the area she came from in what is now Poland perished in the holocaust, and I often think about what happened to her family. Does he agree that the fact that antisemitism can keep emerging again and again makes Holocaust Memorial Day so important, and that we have to be always mindful of that danger?

[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.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Rosie Winterton)]

It is a pleasure to call Brendan Clarke-Smith to make his maiden speech.