Kindertransport Commemoration

Lord Shinkwin Excerpts

Monday 26th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Shinkwin (Con)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, for securing this debate. I should declare a personal interest in what we are commemorating today. I am an indirect beneficiary of the Kindertransport. Had Hanus Weisl, the teenager who would become my orthopaedic surgeon, not made it on to the last train out of Prague before the Nazis closed the border in June 1939, the chances are I would not have made it here to your Lordships’ House. It was due, in large part, to his expert care between birth and 13 that I had the best possible medical start to life.

So today I speak with gratitude and with a sense of debt, as someone who, like him, would have been regarded by the Nazis as Untermensch or subhuman. For both Hanus Weisl and I would have been destined for extermination—he for being Jewish, I for being disabled, as part of the Nazis’ Aktion T4 programme. I think of him and his parents who also miraculously escaped. But I speak, as many other noble Lords have done, with a sense of sadness as well, because I think of those who did not escape—those family members who probably waved Hanus off that summer’s day, none of whom would survive the Holocaust.

Thanks to the remarkable Wiener Library, which was founded by Dr Alfred Wiener, the grandfather of my noble friend Lord Finkelstein, I can not only put names to those family members. I know what journeys they themselves made. It is probable that Anna Weisl, Hanus’s maternal grandmother, was on the platform that day. Within four years, her journey would take her from her home, which still stands today at Klatovy, to Auschwitz via Theresienstadt. She arrived at her final destination on 15 December—which is in just over a fortnight’s time. She probably perished in the gas chambers in July 1944. Hanus’s aunt, Babette Pollak, was possibly also on the platform to say goodbye to her talented teenage nephew. She and Hanus’s uncle, Pavel, and their daughter, Zdenka, shared the same address as his maternal grandmother, Anna. Tragically, they also shared the same ultimate destination.

Although, of course, the family members who gathered at Prague station that June day would have been gripped by a deep sense of foreboding, could any one of them have foreseen the full extent of the Nazis’ murderous, racist intent? No. But 80 years on, we have no such excuse. For if the Holocaust teaches us anything, it is surely that we now know how far and how fast humanity is capable of falling and how important it is always to remember and learn from that very painful lesson.

I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree that there could be no more fitting commemoration of both the Kindertransport and those who did not escape to safety than a renewed commitment, by all parties, to combat the racism that is anti-Semitism.