Holocaust Memorial Day 2012

Lord Evans of Rainow Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2012 Westminster Hall

[Graham Evans (Weaver Vale) (Con)]

It is a privilege to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Dorries, and I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon Central (Gavin Barwell) on securing this debate. He is an excellent advocate for his constituents, and deserves credit for securing this debate to mark Holocaust memorial day.

I pay tribute to the fantastic Holocaust Educational Trust, and particularly want to mention Karen Pollock’s well-deserved new year honour—the MBE. The trust does such important work in ensuring that we never forget the horrifying events of nearly 70 years ago. Thanks to the trust, I was able to visit Auschwitz with schoolchildren from my constituency. It was a truly unforgettable and extremely moving visit, and is seared into my memory. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Eric Ollerenshaw), I thought I knew a thing or two about the holocaust as an amateur historian, but it is necessary to go there and see the industrial scale of the place.

I want to mention just two or three things that stuck in my memory from the visit—many speakers have already shared a lot of the points I was going to make. The Germans were always clinical and their records impeccable, and in Auschwitz I, they had recorded the very early inmates in black and white photographs. Auschwitz was started after the invasion of Poland in 1939, with Polish prisoners of war being kept there. They literally had “prisoner No. 1”, “prisoner No. 2”, and so on. The photographs were in the corridors, and what struck me was the type of people the Nazis imprisoned there. They would have a photograph of the prisoner, with his date of birth, the date of incarceration and the date of death. They then had the prisoners’ occupations, which included teacher, student, engineer, doctor, lawyer and business man. You name it, it was there. They were very ordinary people, with the types of occupations that many of our constituents have.

Another thing that struck me was the length of time the prisoners spent in Auschwitz I. They would get arrested and incarcerated in, say, April, and by October or November they would be dead. They were worked to death on about 750 calories a day. They would be woken at five o’clock in the morning with some ersatz coffee, work a 15-hour day and then have watery soup and a piece of bread in the evening. That was their food for the day, so it is not surprising that they died from exhaustion, overwork and beatings. I will always remember the faces of those people, very young people in some cases. They would last six months—and then were finished; and the Nazis recorded the whole thing.

What struck me at Auschwitz II—Birkenau—was the industrial scale the Germans were able to put together, in particular the ramp. When someone stands on the ramp, it seems innocuous, but they then see the photographs that a Nazi officer took to record a particular train load of, I think, Hungarian Jews, coming in. It was clearly a hot, sunny, midsummer’s day in 1945. Men, women and children—families—were brought off the train, on which they must have spent days, and the old and infirm, and those with young children, were taken to the left, and those whom the Nazis thought could work were moved to the right. That was photographed. It was when I was standing there, looking at that black and white photograph, that it hit me that we were witnessing how the events had happened. The photographs were found by chance.

The other thing that really moved me was when we went over to the gas chambers. The Nazis tried, but failed, to cover their tracks. They attempted to destroy the gas chambers, but they are still clear for all to see. What struck me was that leaves were falling on the steps that men, women and children had had to go down. The steps were still there for all to see, and millions of innocent men, women and children had gone down them, never to return.

What is so effective about the Holocaust Educational Trust’s visits is that schoolchildren go along and then return to their schools and share their experiences with their classmates in assemblies. I have experienced that in my constituency, as have many Members. As time goes on, it is essential that we work harder than ever to ensure that people remember the holocaust; we cannot allow it to become a remote and distant memory for future generations. Those who fail to learn the lessons of history risk repeating them. Evil men know that. Adolf Hitler knew it. When he was trying to convince the SS—not that it needed much convincing—he always referred to the Armenian genocide, which took place between 1915 and 1923, during the Turkish Ottoman Empire. It involved 2 million Armenians—1 million were murdered and the other 1 million were displaced. The circumstances were very similar to the genocide of the Jews. What Hitler was saying was, “Who remembers that genocide?” It had happened only 20 years previously and the world had moved on and forgotten about it. The point Hitler was making was that they could murder 8 million people on the continent of Europe and that in years to come, it would be forgotten and nobody would remember the European Jews.

We all know that education is essential to fighting hatred. However, simply teaching children that racism is bad will only get us so far. Teaching young people about real events from recent history, such as the holocaust, is so much more effective and underlines the importance of the work of Holocaust Educational Trust. When one looks at the record of other nations that are not as assiduous on holocaust education, one sees that anti-Semitism is far more prevalent.

It is also important to remember that this unique event in history, in which millions of people were murdered by the state on an industrial scale because of their racial origin, occurred in what was one of the most modern and, arguably, civilized nations in the world. Germany under the Weimar Republic just over a decade earlier was generally considered to be one of the most liberal and enlightened countries. Laurence Rees’s series, “Nazis: A Warning from History”, is very good on that, and I recommend that Members watch it. It is important that holocaust education continues and that we remain vigilant against future genocides.

Sadly, anti-Semitism still lingers to this day, which serves as a further reminder of the importance of holocaust education. During the first half of 2009, there were 628 reported anti-Semitic incidents—a record high. Fashion designer John Galliano utterly disgraced himself last year with a drunken rant expressing disgusting anti-Semitic views and boasting about his love for Hitler. I am most worried, however, about the continued reports of anti-Semitism on our university campuses. The hon. Member for Ilford South (Mike Gapes), who is not in his place at present, has mentioned that the London School of Economics is investigating allegations that an anti-Semitic attack occurred after a Jewish student raised objections to a Nazi-themed drinking game on a university ski trip. A recent Union of Jewish Students survey highlighted that 20% of Jewish students have experienced, and a further 32% witnessed, anti-Semitism in the past academic year. Those depressing findings show how much more needs to be done, and should motivate universities and Government to take responsibility.

I applaud my colleagues who have taken part in this debate. It is always encouraging when Members from all parties can come together, and there are few more important subjects than this one. I also pay tribute to our forebears who fought in the second world war. One of my relatives was killed serving in the Royal Air Force, dropping Special Operations Executive agents into occupied France, a subject that my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) referred to earlier. I am also a proud British individual from Cheshire, and my hon. Friend served in the Cheshire Regiment, which goes to show that it continues to serve us well in foreign fields.

Finally, I want to mention Nicholas Winton. He was a special individual who helped 10,000 Jewish children escape from Czechoslovakia in 1939, just before the second world war started. There is a bronze plaque to the Kindertransport in the House of Commons, and whenever I do the “Graham Evans tour of the House”, I never fail to take my visitors to see the plaque and tell them the story of Nicholas Winton, the humble young man who did so much to save 10,000 Jewish children who came to this country. On 1 September 1939, he had a trainload of 250 children ready to travel through Germany, into France and over to the United Kingdom, but, as those historians present will know, 1 September was when Germany invaded Poland and that train did not leave Prague station. Those 250 children disappeared, never to be seen again, and records show that, unfortunately, their parents died in the holocaust. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham for the moving account that he gave earlier. The children saved by Nicholas Winton gave him a gold ring, inscribed on which was an old Jewish proverb: “Save one life, save the world.”