Holocaust Memorial Day

Jeff Smith 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.