Holocaust Memorial Day

Huw Merriman Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Huw Merriman (Bexhill and Battle) (Con)]

It is an honour and a privilege to co-sponsor this debate to mark this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day and to follow the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), the Chairman of the Select Committee on Transport, on which I serve.

Last November, the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) and I stood with 200 young people from across the south-east of England on the train tracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1 million Jewish men, women and children were murdered by the Nazis. I had travelled to Poland as part of the “Lessons from Auschwitz” project, run by the excellent Holocaust Educational Trust.

The train tracks run right into the camp. Ahead are the watchtowers where the guards would have been positioned at all times. At the end of the tracks are the remains of the gas chambers. To the left and right, as far as the eye can see, are the barracks where those selected to work were held.

As we stood on the train tracks, our educator read to us an extract from a young boy who stood on those same train tracks some 74 years earlier. That extract has stayed with me and I want to share it now:

“‘Men to the left! Women to the right!’ Eight words were spoken quietly, indifferently, without emotion. Eight short, simple words. Yet that was the moment when I parted from my mother. I had not had time to think, but already I felt the pressure of my father’s hand; we were alone. For a part of a second I glimpsed my mother and my sister moving away to the right. Tzipora held my mother’s hand. I saw them disappear into the distance; my mother was stroking my sister’s fair hair, as though to protect her, while I walked on with my father and the other men. And I did not know that in that place, at that moment, I was parting from my mother and Tzipora forever. I went on walking, my father held on to my hand.”

These are the memories of Professor Elie Wiesel, Nobel laureate, who has already been mentioned by my right hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Sir Eric Pickles). Elie spent the rest of his life working to ensure that the holocaust was never forgotten. He passed away in July 2016 aged 87, just a few months before my visit.

Today we debate this horror, and we speak in honour of Elie and all those who either perished in the camps or, against all odds, survived. Many of those who lived on dedicated the rest of their lives to ensuring that their experiences would never be repeated. Their stories act as a reminder of the evil that mankind can deliver to itself when hatred, prejudice and violence are left unchecked.

Yesterday in Parliament, I spoke to six young people who have made the same trip to Auschwitz over the past few years with the Holocaust Educational Trust. They have all been young ambassadors for the trust and have devised imaginative ideas to ensure that the horrors of the holocaust act as a flame to guard against the darkness of hatred and division. Time does not permit me to mention all their stories, but I will mention the final young ambassador I met—a lady called Charlotte Heard.

Charlotte told me that she had been keen to develop her knowledge of the holocaust, as she had a great-grandmother who was in a concentration camp in the last year of the war. Little was spoken about the experience and Charlotte lost her great-grandmother in 2015, motivating Charlotte to complete her “”Lessons from Auschwitz” project in April last year. On her return from Auschwitz, Charlotte and a fellow attendee from her school set about creating a memorial that would inspire others. This is how she described her work to me:

“We wanted to involve the students within our school as a way of uniting them. We have a school that has 40+ different languages. We thought this was very poignant as many cultures and races were victims of persecution, but of course in particular the Jews. Therefore the hands represent the many different students within our school and although they may be different in appearance, language or traditions, their hands are something that unite them, and join them together. The words I have painted on one of the panels read; ‘I believe in the sun, even when it is not shining. I believe in love, even when I cannot feel it. I believe in God, even when he is silent.’ These words were written inside a cell in the Cologne concentration camp, and we chose this because it shows the struggle that the Jews had faced. However the prisoner had never lost faith in his God. Therefore, as ambassadors whose role is to ensure we make the existence of the Holocaust in our past live on, these are key words that could inspire all the students in our school.”

These young ambassadors are doing an outstanding job of reminding their peers of what happened during the second world war. The importance could never be greater. First-hand experiences truly deliver the power but, 75 years on, these voices are being lost. We therefore have to find imaginative ways to appeal to the consciences of others. We live in a society where negativity, cynicism and casual insults are never far from the surface.

We should never assume that the horrors of the Third Reich could never be repeated in Europe. The Germany of the 1930s had culture, history and people of differing creeds living side by side, yet the murmurings of hate quickly turned an entire country into a place where sending Jews, Romany Gypsies and other groups to their graves was accepted by millions of people who had previously lived and worked among them. The noise of hatred in 2017 may be low, but a civilised society must aim to switch it off before it can deafen us.

I conclude by thanking Karen Pollock and her team at the Holocaust Educational Trust for continuing to ensure that this country remembers the unspeakable evil that created the holocaust. I also thank the trust for delivering these new voices—the young and not so young—who will continue to ensure that we never forget what occurred and that we do all we can to stop the undercurrents that, if left unchecked, could make it occur again.