Holocaust Memorial Day

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is an absolute privilege to participate in this debate. I wholeheartedly congratulate the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt) not only on securing the debate, but on his deeply moving contribution.

Members on both sides of the Chamber have made some incredibly powerful contributions reflecting on the events of decades ago and pondering their relevance today—and I certainly believe that they are relevant today. We said then that never again would the world stand by while a state killed its own citizens in such a planned and systematic way. Today, and even then, it was unimaginable—completely and utterly incomprehensible —that a state could inflict such suffering and despair by exterminating its own people and those of other countries simply on the basis of a perceived difference.

Yet, as we reflect on the holocaust, how can we not also consider, as has been said, Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and Darfur, where we have seen communities systematically dehumanised and killed because of a perceived difference, whether it be one of race, religion, ethnicity or belief?

[Bob Stewart]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Lyn Brown]

Can I not?

[Bob Stewart]

Of course.

[Lyn Brown]

With the help of the Commons Library, I have looked at some of this place’s wartime debates about the holocaust. They make it absolutely clear that there was a high level of awareness of the situation. In a debate on refugees on 19 May 1943, a Home Office Minister said that since the outbreak of the war, 8 million people in Poland had suffered barbarous punishment or death, and many others spoke knowingly of the Nazis’ intention to exterminate the Jewish people.

There is also a palpable sense in these pages of powerlessness with regard to tackling the problems, which were known about, and saving lives. Perhaps that sense of powerlessness has been echoed in this Chamber throughout the decades since. Indeed, I remember the debate on Syria.

In 1939 the merchant ship St Louis set sail from Hamburg with 937 German-Jewish refugees on board, seeking asylum from Nazi persecution. Despite setting off with visas to allow them into Cuba, they were denied access. They set sail for the US and Canada, where access was also denied to them. The St Louis returned to Europe, and at that point the UK agreed to take 288 of the passengers. Others went to Belgium, France and the Netherlands, but following the German invasion of those territories, they were again at risk, and historians estimate that 227 of the asylum seekers on that boat subsequently perished in the holocaust.

What makes the holocaust stand out is not only the sheer number of victims, but the concrete evidence of how the killing was organised and implemented on such a scale. Of great significance is the fact that every Jew was defined not by their religion or their own definition, but by the perpetrators’ definition. Jews were singled out and registered on a central database—its purpose was to expedite their murder—before being publicly marked, stripped of their citizenship, forced to hand over their possessions, dehumanised and, ultimately, deported to their death. I am astonished that the Nazis intended to expand the final solution beyond their borders: they drew up lists of Jews in the USA, Great Britain, Israel and so on. There has never before been such an event in history.

Our political forebears in this place did something, but we have to admit that it was not enough. Debates at that time referred to quotas or the numbers that should come here or go elsewhere in our empire. I am sure the Government of the day thought they were acting for the best, but it simply was not enough. Edmund Burke is attributed with saying that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men—and, indeed, women—to do nothing. We said, “Never again,” and we set up the United Nations to promote world peace, but we have still seen enormous inhumanities unfold in front of our eyes. Even today, we see credible evidence of the organised murder on a horrendous scale of the people of Syria by the state.

In preparing for this speech, I was reminded of one by my right hon. Friend the Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Mr Brown) in 2008. In it, he reflected on a visit to a museum in Rwanda that commemorates the millions who lost their lives as the world looked the other way. There is a picture of a young boy called David, a 10-year-old who was tortured to death. His last words were, “Don’t worry—the United Nations will come for us”. But, as my right hon. Friend said, we never did. That child believed the best of us, only to discover that the pieties repeated so often, over and over, in reality meant nothing at all. The words “Never again” became a slogan, rather than what they should be—the crucible in which all our values sit and are tested.

My mother, like many of her generation, watched the liberation of the camps on newsreel footage. She was so profoundly moved by what she saw that she ensured that I was educated about it, and she gave me a copy of Anne Frank’s diary when I was about 10 years old. I devoured that book—trying to imagine myself in Anne Frank’s shoes—and I gained a tiny insight into the injustice and inhumanity to which she and her family were subjected. It was a lesson that I hope I have not forgotten. Years later, my mother and I visited Prague. We went to the ghetto, and saw the walls with the names of the 80,000 Jewish victims and the piteous paintings by the children.

I hope that hon. Members will allow me to say that I am neither a moral nor a political coward, but I know myself: I know how that visit, and the ones to Anne Frank’s house and to Dachau, affected me. I have therefore baulked at making the trip referred to by many hon. Members today, but in the light of this debate, I will face up to the challenge and visit Auschwitz-Birkenau before the end of this Parliament with, I hope, the support of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

This year, we mark the centenary of the outbreak of the first world war—the great war, as it was labelled at the time—and we should use the tone of this debate, which I commend, to fend off the revisionism that such occasions sometimes engender. It is widely believed that the treaty of Versailles created the conditions in which fascism emerged into the 1930s, and from which the horrors of the holocaust unfolded. Let us bear that in mind when we assess the events of 100 years ago and let us apply the lessons to our foreign policy when we encounter inhumanity in today’s world.

We know so much about the holocaust. We should be immensely grateful to the Holocaust Educational Trust for providing the resource that we all need. I join others in commending its work and that of Karen Pollock in particular. I am sure that the trust will rise to the challenge of keeping alive and accessible the stories and lessons of the holocaust as the number of survivors sadly dwindles over time. I commend the Government’s continuing commitment to ensuring that the holocaust is never forgotten, including through their funding for the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust under the admirable leadership of Olivia Marks-Woldman. Both trusts play their part in humanising the holocaust. In my view, that is the only way in which we can begin to comprehend such a vast and enduring tragedy.

In the Chamber today, we have heard how Members have comprehended the horror through seeing the piles of shoes or treading the steps into death chambers. For me, it is those paintings by the children in the Prague ghetto. We know so much, and yet we seem to learn so little. As we pause in the week before we mark Holocaust memorial day on 27 January, with its theme of journeys, we should take time to reflect on our global shortcomings and on our tendency to recognise the absolute horror of the holocaust, and yet to allow subsequent genocides to happen with such depressing frequency.