Holocaust Memorial Day

Lord Weir of Ballyholme Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Weir of Ballyholme (DUP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great honour to contribute to this vital debate—a debate in which the House is rightly able to speak with one voice. It is particularly an honour to follow the long list of excellent contributions that we have heard. I welcome and look forward to hearing the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Evans, who will be the next speaker. I particularly congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Katz, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, on their excellent maiden speeches. I am glad that I was able to follow the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, rather than precede him—I would have risked matrimonial disharmony if I had come between husband and wife. I look forward to hearing the further contributions of the noble Lord, Lord Katz, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, who have made such an excellent start.

The Nazis inflicted great atrocities across a wide range of communities, many of which have already been mentioned today. It is right that we acknowledge and remember all of those. Evil is evil, but it is particularly true that the Holocaust, the infliction of an attempt to wipe out the entire Jewish community off the face of the earth, stands alone as the greatest act of evil in the history of mankind. The murder of 6 million Jews—it is Jews, not just people—is something that we must commemorate at all costs.

When we mention the 6 million people, it is sometimes difficult for us all to get our heads around what that means in practice. Stalin once said that the death of a single person is a tragedy; the death of 1 million people is a statistic. We cannot afford the deaths of the 6 million Jewish people in the Holocaust simply to become a statistic. We should always remember that behind each one of those 6 million is an individual life and story: a father, mother, son, daughter, brother, sister, husband, wife or friend.

If there were no other reason than simply to commemorate the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and their families, that would be reason enough to hold the annual Holocaust Memorial Day. However, sadly, there are other reasons that also compel us, rightly, to keep this uppermost in our mind.

First, it is clear that humanity has not learned the lessons of the atrocities of the Holocaust. Since 1945, a range of genocides—a word that is sometimes overused and perhaps wrongly used—have clearly been inflicted throughout the world, from Cambodia to Rwanda, and from Darfur to Bosnia. Therefore, ensuring that we learn the lessons of history is critical to ensure that it does not repeat itself.

Secondly, and even within this country itself, it is clear that anti-Semitism did not simply begin with the Holocaust—and, even more sadly, that it did not end with the Holocaust. The last 18 months in particular have seen a heightening of anti-Semitic behaviour across the United Kingdom. We have seen it in our streets, in our schools and across our community as a whole, with the terrible statistic that 2024 had the second-highest number of anti-Semitic attacks in recorded history.

I was struck by a speech that the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson, gave in this House some time ago. He contrasted his greater concern for his young daughter, who lived in London, whenever she would go into the city on a Friday or Saturday night to socialise, with that for his son, who served with the Israel Defense Forces. That, for many Jewish people, is an all too commonplace experience in our society. The poison and cancer of anti-Semitism is still with us, which is why we need to ensure that we constantly confront it and do everything in our power to eradicate it.

Thirdly, we need to understand and know the Holocaust to ensure that we learn the lessons from it and are vigilant to make sure that it does not happen again. There is a dangerous and historically mistaken belief that the Holocaust was a one-off terror perpetrated by a few evil fanatics at the top of the Nazi regime. Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. The Holocaust was the most extreme example, but it was built upon centuries of anti-Semitism across Europe. While we think of it as a terror, what is perhaps most chilling about the Holocaust were the efforts made by the Nazi regime to make everything appear as ordinary and normal as possible. That was done for the purposes of trying to make sure that the Jewish victims of the Holocaust went to their death as compliantly as possible. To the extent to which the fictions were created of, for example, the showers in the concentration camps, they were not purely built on terror but on trying to create a sense of ordinariness and a belief that nothing unusual was happening.

Fourthly, it was not just the actions of a handful of people; the Holocaust was brought about by both the active participation, and often the acquiescence, of tens of thousands, if not millions, of people who helped facilitate it. They were people who, in other walks of life, we would simply regard as being ordinary and unremarkable. That is why it is wrong for us to see this as some one-off event; that drags us into a place of complacency, in which we believe that the conditions of the Holocaust could never happen again.

While acknowledging the evils perpetrated by so many during the Holocaust, it is also appropriate that we acknowledge the bravery and dedication of many other people in Europe during that decade or so. Many people acted with bravery and risked their own lives in sheltering and protecting members of the Jewish community and others, often directly at the expense of their lives. This took place in the UK as well. I am very proud that, in my constituency—the village of Millisle—there was a centre which served as a refuge for Jewish people directly before and after the war. It helped to look after some of the children from the Kindertransport and it became a home shortly after the war to some of those who had survived Auschwitz. That bond with the past has been built upon in Millisle. Millisle Primary, the local primary school, has recently opened a Holocaust memorial garden. That is a living way in which the current generation can acknowledge what has happened in the past.

Finally, I suspect most noble Lords have had the great honour and privilege—like I have—of meeting Holocaust survivors and listening to the very moving and telling first-hand testimony of those survivors. With the passage of time, the number of survivors is becoming less and less. Perhaps, in another five or 10 years there will not be the opportunity for anyone to receive first-hand testimony. This is why it is important that the mantle passes to the rest of us to carry on that critical message. The work of organisations such as the Holocaust Educational Trust and the ambassadors of Lessons from Auschwitz is no better exemplified than by the actions of our sovereign, who gave a truly remarkable example to the rest of us this year by becoming the first member of the British Royal Family to visit Auschwitz. That is the leadership example we need to pursue.

Peter Robinson, a former leader of mine, once described politics quite accurately as a never-ending relay race. For concentration camp survivors, their race as individuals on this earth is nearly run. It is up to all of us—the post-war generation—to now grab hold of the baton and to carry on the message of the critical nature of commemoration of the Holocaust and to ensure that—not simply in words, but in deeds—we fulfil the promise of “never again”.