Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Marco Longhi Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Marco Longhi (Dudley North) (Con)]

When other countries were rounding up their Jewish communities and herding them on to the trains to the gas chambers, Britain provided a haven for thousands of refugee children. In November 1938, the then Government announced the Kindertransport scheme, and the Dudley refugee committee was in one of the very first waves of local committees formed the following month. One of its founders, a Mr Honigmann, was a refugee himself, having escaped antisemitic laws in Germany. It was in Dudley that he found safety, and he became a scientific adviser to the newly opened Dudley zoo. Teachers from local schools in Dudley joined him in his efforts, and an excellent education was provided for the Jewish refugee children.

One young man, Georg Kreisel, before reaching the safety of British shores, had been arrested at a school in Vienna, and witnessed horrific beatings and slayings. Out of the 3,000 men and boys who had been detained, Georg was among just three who were released. The rest were sent to concentration camps. He observed:

“Behind me the gates of a hell closed, and horror-stricken, I sought my way home.”

Georg excelled academically, and towards the end of world war two, he made an important contribution to the success of D-day by calculating the effect of waves on the floating harbours being designed for the Normandy landings.

My predecessor in Dudley North, Lord Austin, the son of a holocaust refugee, did a great deal of work to root out antisemitism, and I pay tribute to him for his efforts. To echo the sentiments he told this House, it is the contribution we make in the belief in the values that British people have fought and died for—values of democracy, equality and freedom, fairness and tolerance—that make us British.

We must all take responsibility not just for our actions, but for our language as well. There is no place for identity-based prejudice and hostility, wherever this manifests itself. All of us have a duty to be vigilant, alert to the insidious traps set by those who seek to divide us. I welcome the Government’s introduction of the online harms Bill, but I would ask Ministers to look again at the categorisation and assess whether more could be done to tackle smaller platforms such as BitChute—my hon. Friend the Member for Bury South (Christian Wakeford) has just referred to it—which is a video platform for neo-Nazis. We must not allow any cesspit of hateful, antisemitic, racist abuse to grow and take hold. We all know what happened when it did.