Holocaust Memorial Day

Matthew Offord Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Dr Matthew Offord (Hendon) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) on securing the debate.

I remember attending the first Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration in Hendon back in 2001. It was held in a marquee in Hendon Park, on a site that has become a memorial garden. I think that that is a fitting tribute to the millions of people who were killed in the Shoah, particularly as so many relatives and friends of those who were murdered have made their homes in my constituency. I was delighted to see in the new year honours list three names of constituents who had had direct experience of the Nazi atrocities, and I think it appropriate to place on the record their names and experiences.

Harry Olmer was awarded an OBE. He is a Mill Hill resident who was born in Sosnowiec, near the German border in south-west Poland. In the spring of 1940, his family were sent to another small village, as life in his home town was becoming very difficult. In 1942, Jewish residents were expelled from their homes, and after a selection, Harry found himself in Plasnow concentration camp, near Krakow, then a munitions factory. He was then moved to Buchenwald, and then to another munitions factory in Schlieben. As the war came to an end, he found himself in Theresienstadt concentration camp, whence he was finally liberated by the Red Army on 8 May 1945. Two months later, he came to the UK, and worked as a dental technician and studied at evening classes before being accepted at Glasgow University to study dentistry. He later served in the British Army as a dentist.

A Hendon resident, Bernd Koschland, was awarded an OBE for services to holocaust education. I have known Bernd for many years, and he is well known to many people who attend the holocaust memorial service in Hendon each year. He came to the United Kingdom with the Kindertransport in 1939, after his father was deported to Dachau on Kristallnacht. On his father’s release, Bernd’s parents made the difficult, but sensible, decision to send him to England on the Kindertransport. In March 1939, he made the journey to England, and was later joined by his sister. In addition to his holocaust education work, Bernd was the chairman of the Barnet Multi-Faith Forum for 14 years, and I had the pleasure of working alongside him.

I want to mention the name of one other person, my Edgware constituent Lieutenant Colonel Mordaunt Cohen, who is the most senior Jewish officer who served in the British Army during the second world war and who received an MBE for his services to second world war education. Mordaunt joined the British Army after hearing about the horrors of Nazi Germany from children who had arrived on the Kindertransport. He fought in Burma from 1942 to 1945, which was in itself a horrific experience. After the war, he became chairman of the Association of Jewish Ex-Servicemen and Women. He celebrated his 100th birthday last year, and it was a huge pleasure and privilege for me to visit him in his home on that occasion.

To all three constituents, I say “Mazel tov, and thank you for all that you have achieved throughout your lives, particularly here in the United Kingdom.”

Last year, I spoke about a constituent of mine called Renee Salt. Since then I have visited Renee on several occasions to talk about certain things and to eat much of her cake, which she bakes at home. During one of our discussions, we spoke about another Hendon constituent, who died in 2008 and whom I had known. That was the Rev. Leslie Hardman. His link with Renee was that she was a captive in Bergen-Belsen, and he was one of the first British Army chaplains who liberated the camp. In his book “The Survivors”, he described how his colonel told him to go to the camp because

“you’ll find a lot of your people.”

Leslie also wrote that one of his first acts was to officiate over the mass burial of 5,000 bodies, a scene that he described as “bodies interlocked, coagulated, disintegrated”.

I have a lot more to say, but time will not allow me to do so. Let me leave the House with a quotation from someone relatively unknown, Salmen Gradowski. On 6 September 1944, he wrote:

“May the world at least behold a drop, a fraction of this tragic world in which we lived.”

We can consider those words from the perspective of history, but knowing that they were found after liberation in a flask buried in the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau crematorium makes them more powerful. I think that they illustrate this year’s theme of Holocaust Memorial Day, the power of words.