Holocaust Memorial Day

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2020 Commons Chamber

[Ms Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Bassetlaw (Brendan Clarke-Smith) on his excellent maiden speech. Given that I was thoroughly entertained throughout and gripped by what he was saying, I am sure he will have a long, prosperous and useful career in this Chamber.

I want to thank and pay tribute to Olivia Marks-Woldman, the inspirational Karen Pollock and all the wonderful people at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust for their tireless work. Among the many things that they do is ensure that, every January, we have pertinent themes and rich resources from which to draw when we stand up to contribute to this poignant, far-reaching and important debate. I really try to contribute something different every year, because I think that that is important. I am very grateful to them. Often, because of the shortness of these debates, we do not get enough time to praise them as we should, so I find myself in the bizarre situation of thanking the Government for making time available today for us to have a proper and fulsome debate.

Today, the theme is “standing together”. We spend months in my office talking about what we are going to talk about in this debate, because it is an annual event and we always buy an extra book or two. One of the things we talked about was the different forms that resistance to the Nazis took. In previous debates in the House, I have spoken about the incredible bravery of Jewish people in the most extraordinary and terrible circumstances, and the extraordinary strength that they displayed when they must truly have felt that there was no hope left. That strength was epitomised in the Warsaw ghetto uprising. The Bielski partisans also showed that strength, as did the Sobibor uprising. The strength and courage in evidence there were simply staggering.

Today, because of this theme, I want to share stories of some of the people who stood with the Jewish community despite the grave personal danger to themselves. As we have heard, after the German occupation of Poland in 1939, the Nazis pursued a policy of segregation. The Jews of Warsaw were relocated to a ghetto, and at the outset 138,000 Jews were forcibly transported there, and 113,000 non-Jewish Poles were also forced from their homes. Society was split in two. People were forbidden to bring their possessions into the ghetto, and they were thrust into immediate destitution. Conditions inside the ghetto quickly deteriorated. Eight or 10 people were living in just one room, and the German Administration severely limited food supplies. Jews found trying to escape were murdered. Within the first two years, 92,000 had died of starvation, of disease and of cold; that was 20% of the people imprisoned in the ghetto.

It cannot be denied that some were looking on in satisfaction, gloating that their Jewish neighbours were being forced from their homes and forced apart from them, but thousands of people stood against this awful racism. They shared their food and their shelter, but that had a cost too. As we have heard, a new law in Poland decreed a death sentence for all those who

“knowingly give shelter to such Jews or help them in any way”.

Helpfully, examples were given, just in case anybody was in any doubt. Those examples included taking a Jewish family in for the night or offering a lift in a vehicle. Any of these led to execution.

[Daniel Kawczynski]

The hon. Lady rightly acknowledges that Poles were killed for helping their Jewish friends and neighbours, but it was worse than that. In the case of my family, it wasn’t just that you were shot by the Germans; first, you had to watch as your children were shot. They made you watch as they killed your wife and children, then they shot you. Your crime was helping your Jewish friends and neighbours.

[Ms Brown]

The hon. Gentleman is, of course, right.

I know I will not be the only person in this Chamber to own a copy of Martin Gilbert’s tremendous yet totally horrific book, “The Righteous”, which documents many stories of brave people who defied that law and similar laws, not just in Poland but across occupied Europe. I do not have personal stories that I can recount, but I would like to use the debate to put on record stories of heroic people, and today I want to talk about two Polish families who stood together with the Jewish people in the Warsaw ghetto.

First, I want to talk about Jan and Antonina Zabinski. Jan was the director of the Warsaw zoo, which was emptied of animals because of the air raids. When deportations to Treblinka began in 1942, Jan and Antonina decided that they had to help. They secretly provided shelter to 20 Jewish people in their two-storey home, and Jan sheltered hundreds more using the only other shelter he had available—the empty animal cages. Jan was employed by Warsaw city council, and he used that privilege to gain access to the ghetto. He used the pretext of looking after small trees and the public gardens inside the ghetto to aid his Jewish friends, and he tried to help them in any way he could.

One of those that Jan helped was Rachel Auerbach. Rachel secretly compiled records of everything that happened in the ghetto. This was an invaluable record of daily life under Nazi persecution, and she entrusted Jan with her precious manuscripts. He buried them inside the zoo grounds in glass jars. When the war was over, Rachel was able to retrieve her book and publish it, and it provides us all with a precious, dreadful insight into her first-hand testimony of the holocaust, as well as her memories of pre-war Jewish cultural life. Unsurprisingly, Jan was a member of the underground resistance, and he was eventually discovered. He was arrested and deported to Germany, but even after that, when Antonina was alone and even more aware of the terrible risks, she continued to provide shelter. The courage of Jan and Antonina was recognised at Yad Vashem as members of the righteous among nations.

Another of those recognised at Yad Vashem—one of the very first—was Dr Felix Kanabus. Felix was a young Polish surgeon, a socialist. He was disgusted, as were so many, by the sight of his fellow Poles aiding the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews, because he had many Jewish friends and he had spoken out publicly against antisemitism. So, when the crackdown began, many of his friends reached out to him for help, and he used his skill as a surgeon to help where he could.

Felix helped several Jews to avoid persecution by performing operations to reverse their circumcisions. In other cases, he provided medical certificates stating that a circumcision had been performed as a medical necessity—anything he could do to throw the Nazis off and stop their attention from falling on those that he could help. Felix protected a colleague and their family when they were summoned to the ghetto, by disguising them as servants, and he and his wife Irena worked with their networks to find safe apartments for many others. Like Jan and Antonina, Felix and Irena risked their lives, and those of their families, to resist the holocaust.

These are truly moving stories; but they are absolutely nothing compared with the scale of the violence—the 6 million Jewish victims and the millions of others who were subjected to systematic disfranchisement, dispossession, detention and murder. These stories of Jan and Antonina, Felix and Irena tell us something about what it means to stand together; because each and every one of us has a role in standing up to hatred, discrimination, persecution and genocide, whatever form it takes. One person’s actions will never be enough, but it is infinitely important to act, rather than do nothing.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a German theologian that I absolutely love; I love the idea of religionless Christianity. He was an anti- Nazi dissident, and he said:

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of the victim beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor and a pacifist, but when he saw what was happening all around him in Germany society, he understood what he had to do. He saved many Jewish lives. This German pastor—this man of God—became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and as a result he was arrested and taken to Buchenwald where, just one month before the Germans surrendered, he was hanged. I can recommend “Letters and Papers from Prison”, which talks about his ministry in Buchenwald and is a remarkable testimony.

Sadly, the reason it is so important to remember these histories is that the poison of racism has not gone away. It is really frightening to see how it rears its ugly head again and again, right around the world; whether it is the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims, who have been put into re-education camps in Xinjiang; the treatment of Indian Muslims in Assam and throughout India—many of whom are being stripped of their citizenship and being attacked; or the attacks on refugees by the President of the United States, who employs the rhetoric of the terrible so-called “great replacement theory”.

In the spirit of today’s debate, let us reflect on what standing together actually means. I believe it is more than just a passive virtue; I think it is an active obligation, and I believe that every single one of us can learn more, and do more, to stand together against hatred wherever and whenever it emerges.