Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Brown of Silvertown Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brown of Silvertown (Lab)]

My noble Lords, it is an absolute privilege to follow on from the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and so many of the exceptional speeches we have heard today. I pay tribute to the maiden speeches of my noble friends Lord Katz, Lady Levitt and Lord Evans. They were powerful speeches all, and I hope noble Lords will agree that they will be influential and strong voices in this place.

As we have heard today, the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day was “For a better future”. Today I want to pay tribute to an organisation and the people within it who are seeking to create a better future for us all by educating our ever-changing world about the horrors of the past so that we do not replicate them in our futures.

Generation 2 Generation is a charity that enables descendants to tell their family Holocaust stories to a range of audiences across the UK. It currently has 41 speakers and is recruiting more. This academic year to date, the speakers have been booked to deliver their family stories to more than 390 audiences, reaching over 45,000 people. I am sure noble Lords will agree that that is impressive. Its key aim is to ensure that the Holocaust is not forgotten or denied, and to challenge racism and discrimination in all its forms.

Last Sunday, I was privileged to speak to some fabulous volunteers who wanted the stories of their families to be told and not to be forgotten, to be an education to a world where propagation, propaganda and misinformation is rife. So, let me tell your Lordships about Sabina Miller.

Sabina was born in 1922. She was Jewish, one of five, and she grew up in a warm, comfortable, loving and happy home in Warsaw. When the Nazis invaded in 1939, their home was taken from them and the family was forced to relocate to the ghetto. Some 400,000 people were crammed into just over one square mile. Hygiene was impossible, food was so, so scarce, and disease was rampant. Like many, Sabina contracted typhus. She was overwhelmed with the disease and was unconscious for 18 days. She remembers her mum standing at the end of her bed saying, “You’ve got to live. You will live. You must survive”. But when she awoke, both her mother and her father had died.

The situation in the ghetto was desperate, so Sabina covered her star of David and effected an extraordinary escape. She found illegal work alongside other Jewish girls on a farm—20 years old, digging potatoes, cleaning out stables and forced to sing anti-Semitic songs while they worked. While she was there, she received a postcard from her beloved sister Esther. It said, “I’m on a train. I don’t know where I’m being taken. If anyone finds this card, please send it”. Esther must have thrown that card from a train, and someone, in a simple act of kindness, delivered it. Those were the last words that Sabina’s sister would ever address to her. Shortly after, Sabina heard that the Sokołów and Węgrów ghettos where the remainder of her family had been taken, had been, to quote the Nazis, liquidated. Her siblings, her parents, her cousins, her aunts, her uncles, her grandparents—all gone. She said later, “The fact that people have families and I haven’t is something which hurts dreadfully”.

That was just the beginning of Sabina’s amazing story of survival. She spent the winter of 1942 living in an ice-cold, small ditch, warily begging for food. She changed her identity many times, was imprisoned, was interrogated on four separate occasions by the Gestapo and was eventually sent to a forced labour camp in Germany, where she remained until the war’s end. I cannot do justice to quite how unbelievable Sabina’s story is, and how unlikely it was that she would survive.

But survive she did, as did Lela Black, born in Salonika and sent to Auschwitz with her husband, her daughter and the rest of her extended Greek family. She was the only survivor. Some 50,000 Jews lived in Salonika before the war; approximately 96% of them were murdered in Nazi death camps.

I also want to mention Tony Chuwen, a Polish Jew who survived two concentration camps, hid in the German army and escaped to Finland, finally skiing for three days over the frozen sea to Sweden. Tony, while he was serving in the German army, at huge personal risk shared his meagre rations with the woman cleaning the barracks, a Jewish woman held in a prison camp. Years later, he attended a Holocaust event and heard that two women had survived their time in a Nazi camp by sharing scraps of food that one of them had been given by a German soldier.

Sandra, Gloria and Jacqueline are the descendants of these strong, extraordinary people. They volunteer for Generation to Generation. All three women told me how their relatives completely rejected any notion of bravery or resilience. Instead, these survivors asked, “Why me?” And they answered, “I was lucky”. Their stories are dotted with unexpected acts of kindness from Jews and non-Jews alike. And perhaps that was part of their luck.

We know, in this place, that anti-Semitism, racial hatred and genocidal violence are still with us. I hope—and I know that the volunteers from Generation to Generation also hope—that by sharing these stories from survivors, one day people will no longer be dehumanised, treated as other, humiliated, terrified or murdered because of their race, creed, nationality or religion. Let us remember the horror and the evils of the Holocaust, and let us not rest until justice is done for the victims in our world where genocide again threatens our humanity.