Holocaust Memorial Day

Mark Pawsey Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

I am pleased to have an opportunity to play a small part in raising awareness of the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust, which do a fantastic job of raising awareness and ensuring that lessons are learned about Nazi persecution and subsequent genocides.

Many Members have spoken in moving terms about their personal experiences. My interest in understanding more about genocide arose through visits to Rwanda. Members may be aware that there is a Conservative social action project, known as “Project Umubano”, in which I participated in 2008, 2009 and last year. Up to 2008, my career had involved running a business in my home town and my overseas visits had been limited to family holidays. I left school at a time when we did not do gap years. I had never been to Africa or to a third world country. When I applied to join the project, I knew very little about Rwanda’s history. I had vague memories of pictures on TV at some time during the ’90s, and I watched pictures of a conflict that, to me at that time, was in a distant country with little relevance to my life.

Before my visit in 2008, I started to read up about what had happened in Rwanda throughout 1994. The more I read, the more places I visited while I was there and the more accounts I heard of how the conflict had affected people, the more shocked I became and the more I struggled to understand how the world had stood by and allowed a genocide to happen.

I was particularly interested to hear the accounts of survivors, via the work of an organisation called “SURF”, which is the Survivors Fund. When, a couple of years later, SURF brought a number of survivors to Bilton school in my constituency, I was keen to go along to add my contribution about what I had seen and to hear more accounts from people who had lived through the atrocities, many of whom had seen their neighbours hacked to death. I was interested in ensuring that the message about genocide got across to the next generation.

That was what encouraged me to take up the invitation, about which many Members have spoken, to visit Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust, which I did last year. When the invitation arrived on my desk, I was prompted to accept, because I felt by then that I knew more about what had happened in Africa in 1994 than I knew about what had happened on my own continent during the second world war, which had affected so many of my fellow countrymen. Like other Members, I joined a party of students from Rugby high school at Birmingham airport for a flight to Poland. We then made the harrowing visit to the concentration camps.

I was particularly interested in the reactions of the young people I travelled with. In common with my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans), I found that these usually chatty, vociferous and noisy youngsters became silent over the day, as they took in the magnitude of what they saw around them. We saw the massive number of people who were crammed into tiny buildings, and came to understand something of the arbitrarily imposed punishments. We walked around the sites of the gas chambers—the buildings having been blown up as the Russian army advanced.

My recollection of my feelings on that day is that I was surprised and almost felt guilty that my visit had less impact on me personally than I thought perhaps it might. I wonder whether that was because of the visits I had made to Rwanda and my awareness of the Rwandan genocide, which was much more recent—only some 15 years earlier. I recall visiting the Murambi Genocide Memorial Centre, where I saw the mummified bodies of victims whose Achilles heels had been slashed with machetes so they could not run away. As I finished my visit to Auschwitz, I felt that I could not be shocked any more.

That leads me to an issue that Members have raised this afternoon. As we start to lose the generation of people who were survivors of Auschwitz, the challenge for organisations such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is how do we keep those memories alive. It is vital for us, as Members of Parliament, to encourage those organisations to ensure that as many people as possible are made aware of what happened, and that the atrocities I have seen in Rwanda and Auschwitz do not happen again.

I conclude by complimenting my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale on his diligence in arranging this debate, and thank the Backbench Business Committee for allowing this important issue to be debated in the House.

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

May I remind Members that they have about eight or nine minutes each.