Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Kim Johnson Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kim Johnson (Liverpool, Riverside) (Lab) [V]]

I pay tribute to Liverpool’s long-established Jewish community, and to two former residents: Maurice Eschwege and his daughter Vera Goltschmitt. As a young child, Maurice moved from Germany to Liverpool, where he grew up. He married Isabella Annoni, an Italian Catholic, and they had three children: Vera, Alexander and Muriel. Maurice ran a jewellers and pawnbrokers business on Lime Street. He was a pillar of the community and served as a justice of the peace. He was twice elected as a Labour councillor for the St Anne’s ward of the city in the 1920s.

When his wife Isabella died, Maurice moved to Paris to live with his daughter Vera and her husband. After the war broke out, Maurice was transported to a German camp—he never returned. Vera, her husband and their youngest son Alain were all transported to Auschwitz, where they were murdered alongside millions of others—Jews, Slavic peoples, Roma and Sinti communities, black, disabled and LGBT people and political opponents, who all perished at the hands of the Nazis. Today, we remember them, and in their stories we seek to learn the lessons of the past.

We recognise that the forces that drove this evil were pervasive and widespread: Governments and politicians throughout Europe—even in the UK—made antisemitism acceptable through their statements and actions, especially when denying safety to refugees. Today, as our Government lock asylum seekers in inhumane conditions in military bases and close the door on unaccompanied child refugees, it is clear that we still have much to learn.

Today, we must recognise that genocide does not begin with the death camp, but is what happens when we allow discrimination, racism and hatred to go unchecked—when we allow politicians and the media to divide us and govern through hatred. We a collective promise to reinforce our commitment to fighting the rise of racism and those political forces who would take us back to some of the darkest times of European history; and to take a stand against the normalisation and institutionalisation of discrimination and hatred in our own country and across the world.

As we take this opportunity to remember the millions who lost their lives in the holocaust, we remember prior genocides in the Congo, Kenya and South Africa, and we remember subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. But we have to redouble our fight against ongoing atrocities against the Rohingya, the Uyghur and the Kashmiris. Today, in the memory of all those whose lives were unjustly taken, we pledge our solidarity with oppressed peoples across the world and promise to carry forward the flame of resistance against hatred, racism and bigotry. In remembering the true horrors of fascism and the victims of all acts of genocide across the globe, we stand together, united—a light in the darkness—to say, “Never again.”