Proposed British Jewish History Month
Fabian Hamilton Excerpts(11 months, 1 week ago)
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Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)
It is a privilege to speak in this debate, which was opened so well by the hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Nickie Aiken). I thank her and her colleagues for securing the debate.
I am proud to represent the constituency with the largest Jewish population in Yorkshire, and indeed on the entire east side of the United Kingdom. For over 150 years, Jewish people in Leeds have contributed so much to our city’s culture, economy and society. They stood at the frontline of the battle against Oswald Mosley’s fascists in the Battle of Holbeck Moor in 1937, and have often been at the forefront of our local political history across the city.
The Jewish community in Leeds has a fantastic history, and it is going from strength to strength in 2024. That is thanks in no small measure to the hard work and dedication of everyone in the community, but I thank in particular the Leeds Jewish Representative Council and the Jewish Leadership Council for their work to strengthen and represent the Jewish community in my constituency, as well as for the fruitful relationship that we have enjoyed for many decades, especially under the current leadership of Simon Myerson KC and Laurence Saffer, who have done a brilliant job.
In Leeds, we have Reform and Orthodox synagogues, flourishing kosher bakeries and butchers, and the world-renowned Marjorie and Arnold Ziff community centre. For more than 100 years, the Leeds Jewish Welfare Board and the Leeds Jewish Housing Association have supported at least 20% of the Jewish community in Leeds, providing mental health support, residential care for people with learning disabilities, practical help for struggling families and much more. Given the current cost of living crisis, that work could not be more important than it is today.
I want also to reflect on the legacy of a woman I had the privilege of knowing as a close friend for many years: Sheila Saunders, who died nearly 10 years ago. She was chief executive of the welfare board and the housing association, and, along with her friend Elaine Grazin, helped to found in the 1980s the Leeds Jewish Women’s Aid, the only specialist organisation in the United Kingdom supporting Jewish women and children affected by domestic abuse and sexual violence. I still miss Sheila every single day.
The hon. Member for Cities of London and Westminster mentioned Danny Finkelstein’s book, which I am proud to be reading at the moment having been given a copy of it. It reflects in many ways the story of my own family. I hope the House will indulge me as I use my last three minutes to tell a little about my family’s history, which, in many ways, sums up the history of the Jewish people in this country—the British Jews, as the hon. Member said earlier.
My father, Mario Reynaldo Uziell, came to this country in 1934 to escape the increasing persecution of Jews across Europe. At the time, his family lived in the Hague, but they moved very quickly to Paris. They lived in several major cities throughout Europe, and my father himself was born in Vienna. When, at the age of 12, he arrived at Brentwood School—a boarding school in Essex—he could not speak a word of English, but he mastered it very quickly. So much so that, by 1942, when he had been in the country for only eight years and still had Portuguese citizenship, he volunteered for the British Army.
However, because his first language was French, the Special Operations Executive nabbed him and said, “You’re a French speaker; we need you to help the resistance in France.” That was dangerous for a Jewish man, but he volunteered to do it none the less. I do not know what part he played in the resistance. I know about his training, but he never spoke about his experience in occupied France—probably for very good reason, and certainly because he had signed the Official Secrets Act.
I still have the document that my father signed in 1948 pledging his allegiance to King George VI so that he could become a naturalised British citizen. There is an example of somebody who started his life as a continental Jew speaking French, whose family originated in Bulgaria, the Ottoman empire and Thessaloniki—then known as Salonika, where my grandfather was born—but who proudly became an Englishman. He never had an accent—he learned English early enough to avoid speaking with any accent, unlike both of my grandparents, one of whom had a French accent and the other a German accent. On my mother’s side of the family, we have a very proud connection to the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, whose Aunt Rose was also my Aunt Rose—Rose Goldberg. She lived until the end of her life—she died only about 15 years ago—in Brondesbury Park, which is very near where I grew up in Willesden.
Finally, before my time is up, I want to pay tribute to some of the holocaust survivors who found their homes here in Britain, especially three of my constituents, one of whom is no longer alive. One of them is Trude Silman, who is 95 this year. Trude escaped from Bratislava to come to the city of Leeds, and she because the first woman to qualify with a biochemistry degree from the University of Leeds. She is still as clear and articulate as she ever was—a very active mind. The second is Arek Hersh, who was in the Polish ghetto in Łódź and was taken to the concentration camps, and was finally released from Auschwitz when he was 16 years old. The third is Iby Knill, who wrote two excellent books but sadly passed away just two years ago. Along with the many holocaust survivors, they contribute to our collective knowledge of Judaism here in the United Kingdom. They were proud British Jews.
Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)
After the Father of the House, the time limit will go down to five minutes, which we will have to enforce strictly, or else not everybody will have the chance to speak.
Affordable and Safe Housing for All
Fabian Hamilton Excerpts(3 years, 7 months ago)
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Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab) [V]
Housing has become an increasingly expensive commodity, consuming an ever larger proportion of a family’s disposable income. Many people in this country no longer have the prospect of being able to buy their own home, and private sector rental costs have grown out of all proportion to incomes, especially in our large cities, and most of all in the capital, London.
Five years ago, I co-authored a report with my friend Simon Jose entitled “Building Homes for Britain”. In that report, we proposed that local authorities could work regionally to build huge numbers of new homes based on the German passive house model. These houses are built in factories not too far away from the sites in which they will finally be based. Their most important element is the energy they save, which can help to reduce consumption by up to 90%.
Simon and I proposed using a national housing investment bank to help fund these new housing developments. The bank would be set up by statute, and the taxpayers’ money needed to fund the building projects would be match-funded by some of the UK’s largest pension funds—organisations that we spoke to and that were very sympathetic to the idea. Let us imagine for a moment a future where mass house building, managed responsibly and ably by vastly experienced local authorities, not only delivers the affordable homes that this country so desperately requires, but saves its tenants a huge sum of money every month in reduced energy bills and much lower rental costs. Suddenly, some of the UK’s most hard-pressed families, particularly those who have been hit hardest financially by the pandemic, would have considerably more disposable income available, and the construction work itself would ensure increased economic activity and employment.
Our report showed that for every £1 of taxpayers’ money invested in housing construction, the economic output equals £2.84 in local activity, and that would have a multiplier effect across the whole of the UK economy. More apprenticeships and construction jobs would be needed, thus helping to create work in relatively well-paid sectors and encourage more young people into training and education within the construction industries.
In total, our report forms the basis of a blueprint for housing regeneration. It is not about construction for profit, but about construction of homes based on need. If we truly want a more stable, more prosperous society, which will give every citizen the opportunity to live in a decent, affordable home, it seems to me that the Government, even this current Conservative Government, should adopt our ideas and get on with building the homes that Britain really needs.
Holocaust Memorial Day
Fabian Hamilton Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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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.
Holocaust Memorial Day
Fabian Hamilton Excerpts(4 years, 10 months ago)
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Bob Blackman
I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. It was clear that this was going on for a long time before the second world war broke out.
Hermann and his brother had to walk to and from school, because German culture at that time prevented Jewish people from travelling on trams. Jewish people were not allowed to mix with other people on trams—this was the dehumanisation of Jewish people. Of course, on their way to and from school, Hermann and his brother were often verbally and physically attacked by students from the non-Jewish school. The people they called friends suddenly turned on them because they were Jewish.
Then, at 9 pm on 9 November 1938, across Germany the synagogues were burnt, and businesses and homes and shops were smashed. Windows were smashed and homes and buildings were burnt to the ground. This is known as Kristallnacht, the night of broken glass.
Hermann and his brother had not seen these crimes at first hand, but when they went to school the following morning, many of their teachers had been arrested and they were sent home. Hermann’s mother went to the bank where his father worked to warn him. However, two members of the Gestapo forced their way in and arrested his father at work. His father was then held for two days before being allowed home.
After Kristallnacht, Hermann’s parents realised, as did many others in Germany, that they could no longer stay there safely. They tried to arrange for the family to leave but could not obtain visas for the whole family. However, they managed to arrange for Hermann and his brother to be sent to England on the Kindertransport, meaning that they were making a huge sacrifice—they knew they would probably never see their sons ever again.
Fabian Hamilton
I pay tribute to the hon. Gentleman for his work on fighting antisemitism, defending against it and ensuring that this curse can never happen again. Has he visited the amazing and incredible holocaust museum, Beth Shalom, in Ollerton in Nottinghamshire? It is absolutely incredible. It recreates the classrooms he has just talked about as well as the carriages of the Kindertransport. If he has not done so, I urge him to visit it.
Bob Blackman
I have not visited, but I will make it a priority to do so when it is convenient, because I believe that it is something we should go and witness for ourselves.
Hermann and his brother had a long journey to get to the United Kingdom. They were then taken to a refugee hostel in Margate, where they remained for about a year, during which time Hermann had his bar mitzvah. They regularly wrote to their parents and two days before the war broke out, their parents wrote to them to say that they had just received their permits—they were going to be allowed to leave. However, once war had broken out, they were not allowed to leave. They were sent to a camp in the Pyrenees, from which they were still able to write to the brothers, but eventually they were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were both murdered.
In this country, Hermann and his brother were separated and sent off to different schools. Hermann was sent to work in Staffordshire while his brother worked in London, but eventually they were reunited. Hermann went on to marry and to live in London. He lived in my constituency, and he regularly spoke in schools about his experiences not only in Germany, but in this country, because we should remember that Jewish people coming as refugees to this country did not always have a happy experience. We should own up to that, and we should also say that we are not unique in offering service now to Jewish people. Sadly, Hermann died on 1 January 2020. I met him on many occasions and had the opportunity to hear of his experiences both in this country and before he arrived.
I want to single out two other people. The first is Angela Ioannou, who is an ambassador for the Holocaust Educational Trust. She recently attended the Lord Merlyn-Rees annual lecture in Parliament, and has given an account of her views on how we can make sure that holocaust education continues to be rolled out. The other is Dr Alfred Weinberger, who was born 26 April 1900—he shares my birthday, if not my exact birth year. He was deported to the ghetto in 1943, and then on to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he was killed.
The reality is that the testimony of survivors and their experiences bring to life the horrors of the holocaust. We must set out our stall to make sure that such things never happen again. Members have mentioned other forms of systematic murder, but I have seen the plight of the Rohingya at first hand. The duty we owe is to ensure that those people who have perpetrated murder are brought to justice and suffer for the war crimes they have committed, and that we help and assist people who are refugees.
I end by saying that the theme of this year is “stand together”, and I that think the whole House stands together united today in remembering the horrors of the holocaust and saying, with one voice, never again.