Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Pickles Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Sir Eric Pickles (Brentwood and Ongar) (Con)]

It is a great honour to follow the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) who made a very thoughtful speech. I have to say that I agreed entirely with what he said.

Last April, I visited Treblinka, the former Nazi death camp, which the people of Poland have preserved as testimony to man’s inhumanity to man. No country suffered more than Poland and the world is grateful for the way in which it has acted as the custodian of these absolutely terrible places.

Treblinka was unambiguously a death camp. Most victims survived only a few hours, and those who were too frail to make it to the gas chambers were escorted to a hospital, which was a façade—it was an open pit at which they were shot and then thrown in. Some of the victims were still alive when they were thrown in.

The Nazis, in their shame, destroyed their apparatus of genocide in the face of the advancing Soviet troops. The best estimate is that somewhere between 700,000 and 900,000 Jews and around 2,000 Roma were killed in Treblinka’s gas chambers. More Jews were killed at Treblinka than at any other Nazi extermination camp apart from Auschwitz. It is a grim place. There is a dignified monument and carefully laid stones remembering the different communities.

I laid a wreath at the site and following the visit, as most politicians do, I tweeted my observations. Within minutes I received a tweet that said:

“No one died at Treblinka, it was a transit camp. There were no gas chambers, no crematoria, no mass graves”.

I have no idea whether the person who sent me that tweet believed it or not, and it is too easy to dismiss this as yet another example of our post-truth world’s fake news, which is all too prevalent on social media, but I think there is something more sinister going on. Members will recall the long-established 10 stages of a holocaust or genocide starting with classification and working through persecution and extermination. Of course, the 10th and final stage is holocaust denial: it did not happen; the numbers are exaggerated; there were not that many Jews in the first place; they brought it on themselves; the Jews are using it to justify their actions. To forget or belittle continues the holocaust.

This month sees the release of the film “Denial”, which depicts one of the most infamous libel trials of the past 20 years involving the American historian, Deborah Lipstadt, and David Irving. If one looks at the trailer, and at the comments made beneath it, one can see that there are thousands of abusive comments claiming that the holocaust was a fake. Only a few days ago David Irving claimed that he is inspiring a new generation of “holocaust sceptics”—a fancy way of dressing up holocaust denial.

It is in that context that we should see the building of the new holocaust memorial and learning centre just a short walk from this Chamber in Victoria Gardens. I am proud to be a member of the foundation alongside the right hon. Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond). It will establish the memorial in a massively important place. An international design competition was launched in September 2016, and 92 teams have expressed an interest. Ten were shortlisted and when the competition ends on Monday we will see them on the web and will take the exhibition around the country.

It will be a lasting monument of which we can be immensely proud, but, as we are running short of time and others want to speak, and, given that last year we lost Elie Wiesel, I would like to end with a quote from him that explains why we are doing this. He said in his Nobel prize acceptance speech:

“What all victims need above all is to know that they are not alone; that we are not forgetting them, that when their voices are stifled we shall lend them ours, that while their freedom depends on ours, the quality of our freedom depends on theirs”.