Holocaust Memorial Bill

Lord Carlile of Berriew Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 4th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Carlile of Berriew (CB)]

My Lords, it is an enormous privilege to follow the noble Lord, Lord Cameron. Particularly as somebody with my background, I admire the motivation and ambition which he expressed when he announced the commission. The difference between us is about location. It may be partly because when I went to Auschwitz—as I have once, and frankly I do not have the courage to go there again—I went into the very room where my father’s first wife, my sister’s mother, was murdered after three years as a slave worker in that camp. After that visit, I came back thinking, “How really can we honour the people who died like Tosia?” That was her name.

My belief is that we can honour those people not by choosing a symbolic location about which not everybody agrees, but only by choosing a place which in itself declares honour for those people, where children and adults can go and learn about what happened to those people, where tyranny is laid out for what it is— tyrannical—where there is the academic potential for people to teach and learn in large numbers about what happened during the Holocaust, and where they are going to be secure.

The noble Lord, Lord Cameron, and I agree about almost everything, but the location in my view is far too small. It is far too mechanical, and I use the word literally. The architecture is mechanical; that is why it is so repetitious, as the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, declared. In my view, it also creates a security issue, not only for the centre itself but for this Parliament. There have been terrorist murders in and around this Parliament. We know that; some of us were here when some of them took place. We cannot say for sure that the curtilage of Parliament will not have to be extended at some point for security reasons. There are arguments for extending the curtilage of Parliament from one bridge to the other. If that were advised and were to happen, it would cause great difficulty for people visiting and leaving a centre in Victoria Tower Gardens.

Then there is the point raised by my noble friend about the number and nature of security guards who would have to be there. The figures we have been given suggest that between 2,000 and 3,000 people every day would visit that memorial centre, wherever it was situated. I do not want to be the person who says later, “I told you so”, but this is the real world and some of those 2,000 or 3,000 people could be terrorists. Terrorists are often not stupid people—they know how to cause terror.

Everybody who goes near that centre or enters the garden would see police officers holding machine guns, as we have outside Peers’ Entrance. There would have to be detailed searches. It would take hours to get in and out of the premises. It would be open only by appointment to people who had booked on the internet the previous day; it would not be open to the general public simply to walk around the grounds and see memorials to the Holocaust which had been erected there.

I say to the noble Lord and anyone who thinks that this is the right site: please go to Warsaw. It took people a very long time to build the POLIN centre there, but it is the most magnificent, broad and diverse centre you can have for an understanding of the Holocaust and the wickedness of tyranny. What I say is not only for myself but for my parents, who are dead now. My mother, too, was an extremely brave Holocaust survivor. She saved the little girl who later became my half-sister; she and my sister’s father fell in love and, for good or ill, they had just me. I speak from a family like this.

I want to add one more thing, if I can be forgiven the brief time that it will take. The noble Baroness, Lady Golding, is sitting next to me. In the other place, she and I played a significant part in the War Crimes Act. It was very hard opposed at one stage, and we believe that we contributed to something very important in memory of those who died in the Holocaust. There have not been many cases, but its existence is important, and there has been at least one very major case. Equally, what I want for my deceased relatives and my still-living sister is an establishment which is not just symbolic but able to teach everything one can learn about what happened at that terrible time.