Holocaust Memorial Day

Hannah Bardell Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Andrew Percy]

Absolutely. I was not in the Chamber for Question Time—I apologise for that—but certainly that is exactly the kind of thing I mean. It links to the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire) about the need for better education in this whole space. Yes, 100%—I would be more than happy to work with the hon. Lady. I would, of course, say to my right hon. Friend—I was coming to this later in my speech, but I shall say it now—that the Holocaust Educational Trust does a fantastic job. No Holocaust Memorial Day debate is complete without a shout-out to Karen Pollock and all of her fantastic team for everything that they do.

I do hope that the Government will continue to enable the HET funding to be used in a way that allows the trust to take students, teachers, local journalists and even the local MP on its visits. While I had visited concentration camps in Germany before, I had never visited the Nazi concentration camp of Auschwitz until I went on a HET visit. Doing so is an incredibly powerful thing, and I would encourage colleagues to try to undertake a visit. Every colleague who has been on one knows the power of it. The sad reality, of course, is that we cannot take every school student on such visits.

[Hannah Bardell (Livingston) (SNP)]

Does the hon. Gentleman agree that it is important to fund as many young people as possible to visit the western front and the battlefields of world wars one and two, as well as Auschwitz and Birkenau? I visited the battlefields as a young teenager in my second year at high school, and it left an indelible mark on me—I went to the grave of my grandmother’s uncle, who died there. When I left university, I visited Auschwitz and Birkenau. I know the importance of being able to see the magnitude and understand the impact so that our young leaders of the future will make sure that mistakes made back then are never made again.

[Andrew Percy]

Again, I could not disagree with a word that the hon. Lady says. Visits are important, but it is not always possible to take every student, as I have said. One of the lessons I enjoyed teaching, which I found to be one of the most powerful about the battlefields—we could not take every child—was to make my students put their own name or a family name into the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website. They would very often find somebody, and we would then do a piece of creative writing on what that person’s experience must have been like. Visits to the battlefields and, of course, to Auschwitz are very important.

One of the real challenges of teaching the holocaust is that, because of the scale of the horror and the outrage, it is often very difficult for young people to understand the machinery and the scale of what actually happened. However, a visit reinforces something that it is much more difficult to get across in the classroom. We have to continue holocaust education, and we have to continue to fund the Holocaust Educational Trust properly.