Holocaust Memorial Day

Jim Shannon Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dame Margaret Hodge (Barking) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Holocaust Memorial Day.

I thank the right hon. Member for Stratford-on-Avon (Nadhim Zahawi)—who is not in the Chamber—the hon. Member for East Renfrewshire (Kirsten Oswald) and the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) for co-sponsoring the debate. Let me also pay tribute to two organisations, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust, both of which devote much energy and time to organising the events that help us to commemorate the holocaust. Without their excellent work, we would not keep alive the memory of those who lost their lives in the Nazi death camps, or indeed those who were killed in other genocides from Rwanda to Cambodia and from Bosnia to Darfur. Without them, our efforts to learn the lessons of history would weaken and fade away.

This is the last time I shall have the privilege of participating in this important debate, but it could not be a more difficult and depressing time to do so. I have just returned from a short visit to Israel. We went to support the people who lived on Kfar Azar, a kibbutz that we had visited in February last year. Many of those living on the kibbutz were people committed to peaceful co-existence with their neighbours in Gaza, but tragically many were killed on 7 October, many who survived are distraught because their loved ones were captured as hostages, and many, especially the women, were treated with the utmost abominable, sadistic cruelty, sexually assaulted in utterly inhumane ways, and then murdered. Israel and its people are experiencing a national trauma and a real, existential fear for their survival, with memories of the holocaust at the heart of their minds; and the same is true in Gaza, with innocent civilians experiencing a similar national trauma, an identical existential fear and a comparable terror of genocide as they live with bombardment, death, injury, displacement, and a lack of humanitarian aid.

So we meet at a deeply depressing time to reflect on the holocaust, with many asking themselves, “When will the world ever, ever, really learn from our past?” But the truth is that we must keep trying. This year’s focus for Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom. That theme allows us to reflect on how, by better understanding the past and better understanding how easily freedom can be eroded, we can act today to make the world a better place for those fleeing persecution today.

I want to raise these matters in the context of my own family’s experience. Like others, I lost close relatives in the holocaust: my grandmother, whose last written words to her son, my uncle, were “Don’t forget me completely”, and my uncle, whose wife wrote in a letter pleading for his release, “He’s only a number to you. He’s everything to me.” But I had other relatives who escaped days before the start of the war, and were dispersed across the diaspora as they sought safety. They too were victims of the assault on Jews, they too suffered hugely, and they too should be the focus of our concerns as we commit ourselves to its never happening again.

My grandfather came to England on 29 March 1939. He was 66 and had just recovered from a prostate operation and an embolism in his leg. We have a powerful account of his experiences and emotions in the diary that he kept. He described his last visit to his parents’ graves in Vienna, in tears because he would never visit those graves again. He recalled how his parents, my great-grandparents, visited the graves of their own parents, my great-great-grandparents, in Poland, in tears because they were driven out of their homes by pogroms—a never-ending cycle of violence.

My grandfather described his feelings a few days after arriving in England:

“Because of the lack of language skills very lonely, depressed, cannot memorise, miserable pronunciation. Living like a recluse.”

Even six months later, he said that those who stayed in Vienna

“may have saved themselves from all the horrors and all the difficulties of emigrating.”

He talked about antisemitism in Britain and how it reached up into the Government, when the only Jew in the Cabinet was sacked by Neville Chamberlain. On his arrival in Britain, my Jewish refugee grandfather was classified as an “enemy alien.” That was later changed to “friendly,” but he was still an alien.

At 8.30 am on 27 June 1940, in the middle of a war that led to the death of 6 million Jews, my grandfather was in his bath and there was a knock on the door. He was arrested, removed from his home and interned. He tried to ring his doctor to certify his illnesses but then, as today, no doctor picked up the phone. He was taken to Huyton, in Liverpool, and given a number: “Group number 28/2, number 1428.” He was housed in overcrowded conditions with a rubber sheet, straw and blankets. In the early days, he was not allowed to write or receive letters. The sanitary conditions were dreadful, and the German Jews found themselves housed with German Nazis. His freedom was indeed fragile. Our treatment of Jewish refugees was unconscionable.

Fast forward to my own experience. I came to the UK from Egypt, stateless, in 1949. After the creation of Israel, Egypt became an increasingly hostile environment for Jews. My father had a stone thrown through the window of his office and, with the memory of the holocaust still raw in his mind, he decided to get the family out of Egypt. We were rejected by three English-speaking countries, and the UK finally, to my father’s eternal gratitude, gave our family of six entry visas to this country. My father’s freedom was indeed fragile.

Five years later, we were still stateless and my father applied for British nationality. At that time, my mother was dying in hospital and my older sister and brother were away at school and university, so I was at home with my younger sister. She was six and I was nine. A Home Office inspector came to tea. I remember that occasion vividly as, instead of our usual boiled eggs and toast, we had to eat cucumber sandwiches and fruit cake, which I absolutely hated, having grown up on succulent fresh fruit in the middle east. Worst of all, we were interrogated —two young girls on their own—for a full hour on who our friends were, what books we read and what games we played. My freedom was indeed fragile, dealing with a hostile, not friendly, environment that remains forever locked in my memory.

What do all these stories tell us? My family know, and indeed the families of millions of refugees know, that freedom is never guaranteed. We should understand that how we treat those who escape persecution and genocide is central to our reputation as a country that boasts a humanitarian approach to genocide and the holocaust.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the right hon. Lady for securing this debate and for the tone of her speech. Most of us are proud friends of Israel. I think of what the nation of Israel was put through because so many people would not speak out, and we saw the result in the horrific atrocity that is remembered today. Does she agree that we remember not out of a sense of morbidity, but out of the absolute necessity to ensure that the lessons taught by the slaughter of the Jewish people are learned by people of all faiths, so that it is never permitted to happen again?

[Dame Margaret Hodge]

I completely share that sentiment expressed by the hon. Gentleman.

As I was saying, we are not as good as we proclaim to be. My grandfather did not feel welcome and I did not feel wanted as a nine-year-old girl. The asylum seekers who try to come here today face a similar hostile environment. They are told by leading Government politicians that they pose an “existential threat” to the west’s way of life, that they are part of a “hurricane” of mass migration, that MPs feel “besieged by asylum seekers” and that asylum seekers are “invading” Britain. We should reflect on what we say and what we do today before we exercise any moral entitlement to condemn the atrocities of the past.

The language we use today matters; the laws and practices of today designed to exclude many of those seeking freedom from persecution, which make a mockery of our commitment to the victims of genocide, matter; the fees we charge for visas today matter; and our refusal today to allow those seeking asylum to work matters. The hostility my grandfather faced in 1938 and the trepidation I felt when subjected to questioning in 1954 echo through the generations. All of this contributes to our credibility in the debate on the holocaust and subsequent genocides.

So before we applaud ourselves for keeping alive the memory of the holocaust, we should think about how fragile freedom was then for those who sought to escape death and how fragile it remains today. We must take responsibility and stand up to genocide wherever it rears its ugly head, and we must protect those who seek refuge in Britain. If we stand by while genocides unfold, or fail to protect those who need it the most, the horrors the likes of which my grandfather, father and even myself experienced will have all been for nothing. Freedom is one of our basic values, so surely we owe it to our children and our children’s children to be able to stand up and really mean it when we say, “Never again.”.