Holocaust Memorial Day

Martin Whitfield Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Martin Whitfield (East Lothian) (Lab)]

It is a true privilege to speak in this debate. I send my compliments to the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) for securing it and to the Backbench Business Committee for facilitating it. It was a true privilege to listen to my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel). In listening to his speech, we were privileged to experience the power of words. That power is hugely important.

I had a marvellously prepared speech, but I am going to cast it to one side. As a primary school teacher, it was a privilege to talk to children and to be there when they discovered new things and new facts. It has been a huge privilege this week to send out to the schools in East Lothian the Holocaust Memorial Day packs provided by the trust.

I wish to share my experience of coming to understand about the holocaust. I had the luck and, again, the privilege of listening to a survivor when I was at school. I remember us all sitting around in the hall when this lovely lady came in. She seemed terribly old and terribly far away, but her opening words were, “I was at school.” Suddenly, she had us all—there may have been 70 of us in the hall—in the palm of her hand. She shared with us an experience that she wished we would never have, and she shared with us an experience that has stayed with me ever since. The word “privilege” gets used a lot, but it was a great privilege to listen to a survivor.

I wish to extend my compliments to the ambassadors as they take over from those who are living now and who have experienced what happened. They will take the experience forward and spread it out.

Social media is a great, great tool in the hands of the right people, but, unfortunately, it is used sometimes for truly horrendous things. I would like to take this opportunity, in thinking of the power of words, to say that we who have the power of words must point out what happened to those people who are still to learn about the holocaust and to those people who are learning empathy through listening and understanding about what happened. We must also hold out against those people who want to misrepresent what happened, those people who have forgotten the important lessons of history and those individuals who just deny what history so clearly tells us. We must not forget. The importance of this day and the importance of this debate rests with us and in doing that.