Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) (Amendment) Bill

Lord Pickles Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Pickles (Con)]

My Lords, it is an enormous pleasure to support my noble friend introducing this Bill and to listen to the noble Lord, Lord Palmer. I draw the House’s attention to my declaration of interest, which relates to various Holocaust remembrance organisations that I belong to.

It would be churlish of me at this time, given the announcement made this week, not to thank the Government and the Minister here today for the additional support for the Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre, which is due to be built outside the Houses of Parliament. We are particularly pleased to receive the endorsement of the Prime Minister, and the former Prime Ministers David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Tony Blair and John Major, in addition to the Leaders of the Houses of Lords and Commons, the all-party group, the Mayor of London, the London Assembly, the Chief Rabbi, the Dean of Westminster, the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the Jewish Leadership Council, the Association of Jewish Refugees, the Wiener Library, the National Holocaust Centre in Newark, the Imperial War Museum, the University of Huddersfield Holocaust Exhibition and Learning Centre, the Anne Frank Trust, the ’45 Aid Society, the Learning from the Righteous, the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in Hendon, the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education and the nine synagogues in Westminster City Council. That additional help is well received. We are particularly proud that the Design Council chose to feature the design of the memorial and learning centre at its headquarters recently.

I know there are some who say that it is the right idea, but the wrong place. Some may even believe that, but they are wrong: the place is the point. Outside this building is the natural place for it to be. It is close to where all important decisions on Britain’s involvement in the Holocaust were made—the good ones, the bad ones and those of complete indifference. It is my hope that when the memorial and learning centre is built, visitors will leave there and look towards this building and recognise that it is a bastion against tyrants. I hope, too, that when we look out at that memorial we will remember that, as legislators, we always have a choice: we can either protect civil liberties or oppress our citizens.

I turn to the Bill. What we know about the Nazis is that they were many things: they were murderers; they were psychopaths; they were bigots; they were racists and they were anti-Semites. But, fundamentally, the Nazis were thieves. They looted and plundered throughout Europe. They stole from citizens; they stole from states, and, because there is no honour among thieves, they stole from one another. Elie Wiesel pointed this out far more elegantly than me, saying that this was a process:

“They stole your living, they stole your belongings, they stole your individuality. And they tried to wipe you out. To wipe out the fact that you ever existed”.


Do not think for a moment that this was confined to a bunch of Nazis. Their loot from Jewish people was an important part of the economy in the years of the Second World War. That was how people got their fur coat, their bit of jewellery, a nice mirror and the like. What was not looted by your neighbours was often taken by the state and sold outside your house or at special sales. The very clothes of the poor victims of Babi Yar, who were stripped and laid in pits, were sold close to the execution site. Do not let anyone say that nobody knew about this.

If we were to announce that, henceforth, property rights would be determined by the Nazis’ Nuremberg laws, people would rightly be outraged, but that is what we have effectively done in large parts of the world by putting so many obstacles in the way of restitution of stolen property. Around the world, thousands of artefacts, properties and belongings remain in the wrong hands—in the hands of national collections, local authorities, museums and private individuals. People and communities are often very proud of their collections and may even be well meaning, but stolen property in the most benign and cultured hands is still theft. It is shocking that, even today, thousands of injustices remain uncorrected.

My noble friend talked about the Washington principles. I shall not repeat those, but one important aspect of them fits very well with this Bill and is about information. It is about families being able to search websites and to locate the property. This country has a proud record in this regard. It is true that there were not many such artefacts, but we managed to get them on a public list and were helpful in enabling people to find them within three months of the Washington declaration. This process continues. The Spoliation Advisory Panel has worked extraordinarily well, with 75% of all those claims coming from information supplied by British museums.

In June, I take over as the chair of the International Tracing Service, with its extensive records from the Holocaust and its aftermath housed in Bad Arolsen in Germany. One of the aims of the UK chairmanship will be to make it simpler for families to view and search records, but without this Bill all the searching can be done but that restitution cannot take place. The Bill is an important part of this process.

Those who think that we are gently winding down discovery of new loot should think again. I was in Bern, Switzerland, in 2017 and visited an exhibition which showcased the art from the home of Cornelius Gurlitt. His father, an art dealer, had sold what Hitler dismissed as “degenerate” art. At the time of its discovery in a Munich flat in 2012, leading figures in the German and Austrian art worlds asked: “What is the problem? Everybody knew about Gurlitt’s collection”. Yes, everybody did know, except for the families that it was stolen from. My noble friend spoke so well about the work of Anne Webber and the Commission for Looted Art in Europe, which has been on the side of these families seeking justice for a long time. Anne and her team have united families with their treasured items, from books to paintings which once had pride of place above the fireplaces of Jewish homes across Europe.

I will quote two short paragraphs from a selection of quotes on the meaning and importance of restitution written to the Commission for Looted Art in Europe by families for whom the commission has helped to recover Nazi-looted property. The first is:

“These books of our murdered grandmother which until now filled the shelves of that German library have seemingly turned from passive objects to be read into witnesses whose voice will be heard and treasured”.


Secondly:

“Of all the pictures in the collection we are particularly pleased that this one has been rediscovered. It was one of the favourites of our grandparents and our aunt remembers it hanging on the dining room wall of her childhood home. As a young child she always liked it so much and she is so happy that she has had the chance to see it hanging in the family home again”.


We need to remember that, whether it is a painting or a book or a porcelain jar, every object represents the life and lives of those who were lost. Their restitution restores a personal connection, a link with those lives so utterly transformed or destroyed by the Nazis.

I conclude with a quote from Primo Levi. I was a guest on “Desert Island Discs” a few years ago. Besides the luxury and the various discs, you get to choose a book. My choice was Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man. I have two editions, but it is the second one which I treasure most. It was a gift to me, signed by Holocaust survivors. Some of them have passed on, but I got to know many of them and to understand their bravery and determination. This book, and this quote, mean a lot to me. It starts:

“But consider what value, what meaning is enclosed even in the smallest of our daily habits, in the hundred possessions which even the poorest beggar owns: a handkerchief, an old letter, the photo of a cherished person. These things are part of us, almost like limbs of our body … the personification and evocation of our memories. Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of his house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himself … It is not possible to sink lower than this; no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so …They will even take away our name: and if we want to keep it, we will have to find ourselves the strength to do so, to manage somehow so that behind the name something of us, of us as we were, still remains”.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I am privileged to speak in this debate and grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury, for making it possible for us to have it. I have listened carefully to all the contributions and have sensed the reasoning and the passion that, combined, make such a strong case to move this Bill forward.

I approached this exercise thinking that, as a garrulous Welshman, this was going to be the shortest speech I would ever make. After all, a Bill became an Act in 2009. It has proven itself over 10 years and has shown that the sunset clause was a mistake. I attribute no ill will to those who included it. This was a new Bill going in a new direction, and now we are looking at it and seeing if we cannot make it go in that direction for a long time more, so we should not attribute bad thinking to those who inserted the sunset clause and we should be delighted to see it removed. Indeed, since it was during a Labour Administration that this Bill came on to the statue book and Andrew Dismore was a sitting Member of Parliament at that time, and in view of recent controversies and anxieties, I say with all the energy and depth of passion I can that if getting this Bill on to the statute book contributes in even the smallest way towards healing wounds and reminding us all of our responsibilities to each other, I want it to happen for that reason alone—however minute that contribution might be.

So here we are with a very short Bill that has worked, alongside which these ways of evaluating claims have been inserted. Yes, it is a small number of cases—there may well be more—but it makes sense that what has worked and is seen to be morally right should be given the go-ahead, the green light, to continue into the hereafter.

My house was burgled once; somebody came in and stole stuff. He took money, and we could not give tuppence about that, but he also took my wife’s engagement ring, which had been a gift from her grandmother, and her grandmother’s brooch, within which there were two little cameo pictures of her and her husband when they were young—irreplaceable. Alongside the stories of the great works of art and treasures, which command their own logic and evidence, we must not forget that what particularly violates those from whom objects are taken is the loss of the personal items, the things that matter for everyday living, family memories and things like that. It is the great and the small. It is the mere act of violation that we need to do whatever we can to offer restitution to.

I said that this should have been the shortest speech, and perhaps that is where I should finish, but there is one thing that I feel I must say. I buy into the thinking of the noble Lords, Lord Polak and Lord Pickles, about the monument. But in the name of frankness, I have to say that it is the right idea in the wrong place. I could not sit through the debate and not say that. I will offer some words of explanation.

Pretty much exactly 50 years ago, I left these shores to travel and spend the first of my 10 years in Haiti. My experience there changed my life and my understanding of life in its entirety. I became aware of the evils of the slave trade. I am so pleased that the noble Baroness, Lady Deech, mentioned that. Millions of people taken from the western shores of Africa to end up in what was called the New World lost their lives, were forced into slavery and had no possessions that could be stolen, except their liberty and energy. It was this building that fathered the debates that led to the end of slavery in the British Empire. If the University of Cambridge is looking at the sources of its wealth, let anyone do an inventory of the wealth of this nation that depended on the deprivation of liberty of those slaves.

The plight of people shipped against their will— 150 years’ worth—tearing them from their families and leaving them to die in foreign territory has remained on my mind. Is the argument that the right place for the atrocities of the 1930s and 1940s is alongside the building within which those debates took place? I see a questioning look from the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, but I thought I heard him say that it should be alongside Parliament.

[Lord Pickles]

The noble Lord is most generous and I was enjoying and have a lot of sympathy with what he was saying. That is why I said that people within this building—the legislatures—have a choice. They can either oppress or protect. During the 19th century, they chose to oppress. That is why it is important because we must always be vigilant. It was, after all, a compliant legislature that introduced the Nuremberg laws. That is why I deliberately said that there was a choice.

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port]

I am grateful for that. Choices were made within this Parliament about the plight of slaves. Therefore, a monument could possibly be built to talk about the deprivations, destitution and suffering of slaves, but there is not room for two such monuments in the same place. That is all I am saying. I really do not want to be heard as having one iota of opposition to the idea, but I felt it incumbent on me, since I feel it in my deepest heart, to say that I suspect that I would side with those who feel that this is not the right place.

As far as the Bill is concerned, we must pass it and do so with good will, and hope that it has some of the outcomes and effects that have been hinted at from the speeches we have heard from the Floor of this House today.