Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Austin of Dudley Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Ian Austin (Dudley North) (Lab)]

I congratulate the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) on securing this debate. It is a privilege to follow the speech that we have just heard.

In 1939, a 10-year-old Jewish boy from an industrial town in what was then Czechoslovakia was put on a train by his mum and two teenage sisters and eventually made his way to Britain as a refugee. It was to be the last time that he would see them. They were rounded up, sent first to a ghetto, then to Theresienstadt, and eventually to Treblinka, where they were murdered on 5 October 1942. That boy is my dad and that explains why for me this issue is so important.

Like other Members who have spoken today, I have visited Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust, which does such important work. I want to say a few words about the survivors with whom they work, including people such as Ziggy Shipper, who at the age of 84 visits schools every week to teach children where hatred and prejudice can lead, and Eva Clarke, who was born in Mauthausen concentration camp, but survived and came to the UK after the war. I met an amazing woman through the Association of Jewish Refugees, Mindu Hornick, who lives in Birmingham now. She was imprisoned in a concentration camp and then sent to work as slave labour in an armaments factory. I said to her, “Mindu, these shells that you made, how many of them worked?” She looked at me, smiled and said, “None.” Is that not incredible? Here was a woman, in fear of her life in a concentration camp, thinking about how she could prevent other people from being killed.

Ben Helfgott weighed less than 6 stone when he was rescued from Theresienstadt, but he went on to represent Britain as an Olympic weightlifter. The only other member of his family to survive was Mala Tribich, who was forced to work as a slave labourer. She was sent to Ravensbrück and ended up in Bergen-Belsen. Tomorrow, she will be speaking to hundreds of people at Dudley’s annual holocaust commemoration, which I organise. Those are all incredible people. They spend their time teaching students and young people about the evils of racism, and it is humbling to see the sense of duty and commitment that drives them and other survivors to use their experience of that terrible period to create a better world for the rest of us.

I have seen young people visiting Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust, and I have seen their lives being changed by witnessing the appalling evidence of the industrial-scale slaughter that took place at Birkenau. I have seen them return to Dudley to campaign against racism and build a stronger and more united community. No one can fail to be affected by what they see in those places: the mountains of human hair and glasses; the pots and pans and personal possessions that show that people thought they were going to live elsewhere, not to be murdered.

Last summer, my dad and I travelled to the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. In Ostrava, we found the flat where he grew up. He stood on the pavement, pointed at the first floor window and told me that that had been his bedroom. He described how he had been woken up in the middle of the night on 18 March 1939. He had looked out to see what the noise in the street was. It was German soldiers marching into the town square. We found the site of the Jewish school and the synagogue he had attended. Ostrava had had several synagogues, Jewish schools, sports clubs, shops and businesses to serve the 10,000 Jews who lived there. Incredibly, the single room that serves as the city’s synagogue today has seats for just 30 people. For me, that evidence of entire families and whole communities having been wiped out is even more moving than the evidence of industrial-scale slaughter on display at the concentration camps.

In Poland, we travelled to a small town called Nowy Targ, where we found the family shop of my dad’s uncle, Emmanuel Singer. A few streets away, we walked through the Jewish cemetery, which contains the mass grave of 500 Jews who were butchered in a single day. We saw the wall behind what is now a youth club where one of my dad’s cousins had been shot after being dragged from his fiancée’s family’s attic. We heard how Emmanuel Singer had fled to Krakow with forged Aryan papers and hidden there before being betrayed, arrested and tortured for his money. He was then dragged to his death along a country road, chained behind a horse and cart. Three thousand Jews lived in Nowy Targ before the war. I asked the local historian who was showing us around, “How many survived and came back? How many live here now?” She looked at me as though I was mad, and replied, “None, of course.”

Seeing that for myself and hearing the detailed, human stories really brought home to me the horrific scale of the tragedy. It is impossible to compare anything to this, history’s greatest crime, but it is certainly possible to learn lessons. There is a quote from the Spanish philosopher, George Santayana, at the memorial at Auschwitz. It says:

“The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again.”

The fact that there are no tracks leading from Britain to Auschwitz tells us something very special about our country. When other countries were rounding up their Jews and herding them on to the trains to the concentration camps, Britain provided a safe haven for tens of thousands of refugee children such as my dad. It is a fantastic thing about our country that the son of a Jewish refugee can become a Member of Parliament and serve as a Government Minister.

Let us think of Britain in the 1930s. The rest of Europe was succumbing to fascism, but here in Britain, Mosley was rejected. In 1941, France was invaded, Europe was overrun and America was not yet in the war. Just one country was fighting not just for Britain’s freedom but for the world’s liberty. Britain did not just win the war; we won the right for people around the world to live in freedom. For me, that period defines our country. It is what makes Britain the greatest country in the world, with a special claim to the values of democracy, freedom, fairness and tolerance. Because of who we are as a people and what we are as a country, the British people came together and stood up to the Nazis and fought fascism. We are a country that does not walk away or turn a blind eye. On each occasion when people have been gassed and chemical weapons have been used against people, we have known whose side we were on and we have always in the past stood up for the oppressed.