Holocaust Memorial Day

Mike Freer Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mike Freer (Finchley and Golders Green) (Con)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) for securing the debate and, importantly, for ensuring that it was held in the main Chamber. It is important that a topic as significant as the holocaust be debated here, and not in an anteroom to the Commons.

Today, when attention spans are seemingly getting ever shorter, and our media seem to report items fleetingly, it is important that we stop and remember events such as the holocaust and subsequent genocides. I pay tribute to the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, of which I am a trustee, and to the Holocaust Educational Trust for all the work it does in ensuring that at least once a year we pause, reflect, remember and hopefully learn the lessons of history.

I represent one of the most religiously and ethnically diverse constituencies in the country. Most people do not think of Finchley and Golders Green as particularly diverse—it is often thought of as nice, quiet suburbia—but 25% of my electorate is Jewish, 8% Hindu, and 7% Muslim. The borough of Barnet, of which my constituency is part, has the largest percentage of Christians of any London borough, and one of the highest percentages in the country.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial day—“communities together: build a bridge”—resonates, because my constituency and Barnet are blessed with good community relations, but those good relations between faiths and various ethnic groups do not come easily. They take work, not just once a year, but day in, day out. That work is aimed at ensuring that we understand each other’s point of view, as well as our points of difference. Too often, ignorance allows division to fester and breeds contempt, and contempt means that people may all too easily become willing to turn a blind eye when others are singled out and denigrated.

Holocaust memorial day is always an emotional experience for me. As my constituency has a large Jewish population, I have met many residents who survived the holocaust, either having escaped on the Kindertransport or having otherwise fled Nazi persecution. I know of residents who have survived the death camps or lost family in them. I was especially pleased to see that one of my constituents, Freda Wineman, met the Prime Minister this week when he signed the Holocaust Educational Trust’s book of remembrance. The personal testimony of survivors is crucial to ensuring that we do not forget.

I mentioned that Holocaust memorial day is emotional, but that is perhaps not for the reason people might expect. I visited Yad Vashem on a trip to Israel, and found that visit emotionally draining, so when I was invited to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, I fully expected the experience to be equally emotional. I give credit and thanks to the Government and the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government for providing £2.1 million in funding for the maintenance and restoration of Birkenau, to ensure that it does not crumble into history.

When I visited Birkenau, the emotion I felt was not sadness but anger and rage. That took me by surprise. Murder and mayhem are all around us, and often the deaths that we hear of and see are the result of arguments or passion. Newspapers, television and cinema have numbed us to the violence, the killing and the bloodshed, but the reason I was angry is that it struck me that Auschwitz-Birkenau was cold, clinical and utterly efficient. Members may think this an odd comment: in some ways we lampoon the Germans for their efficiency, but on that day I thanked God for German efficiency, because they kept impeccable records. People may try to deny that the holocaust happened, but German efficiency was so good that we can point to the records of how many carriages came in, hour by hour, how many people were on the transports, and even the number of carrots used in the stews that barely fed the inmates.

[Fabian Hamilton]

Will the hon. Gentleman add to that list of efficient record-keeping the staggering fact that each person who was killed had a death certificate issued, as did my relative?

[Mike Freer]

The hon. Gentleman makes a powerful point. When people were being killed on an industrial scale, the fact that the murderers took pains to issue death certificates is perverse and astounding, but it means that we have the evidence to point out to holocaust deniers and to say, “This cannot have been made up. Here is the evidence.”

Even during the last days of the war, when one might think that the Germans would be maintaining their resources on the fronts, they did not. They diverted resources from the fronts to maintain the killing machine, to ensure that the final solution was not impaired. That also fuelled my rage.

One of the things that particularly angered me was that Auschwitz-Birkenau murdered 1.3 million people— 1.3 million—yet we are told that no one noticed. So when the train drivers pulled back out of Auschwitz-Birkenau with empty carriages, no one noticed that they went in full and came out empty. When the local traders delivered food and supplies to the guards, did they not notice the people standing around in the freezing cold in the striped uniforms? We are told that no one noticed. That made me angry. No one noticed the thousands who went in but did not come out.

Next to the camp is the Polish town that bears the name Oswiecim, or Auschwitz. Before the war that had a population of about 12,000, of whom 58% were Jewish. The Jewish and non-Jewish population lived side by side harmoniously—Jewish bakers, synagogues, a whole range of shops which showed that there was a vibrant Jewish community living harmoniously alongside the non-Jewish population. The local council, much like my own council in Barnet, had Jewish and non-Jewish councillors working together for the good of the town, yet shortly after the war started, there were no Jews left in Oswiecim, not one, and we are asked to believe that no one noticed.

Words struggle to describe the horror of mass extermination, but words also cannot describe my anger at how people can simply turn a blind eye to the disappeared. Given that I have such a large Jewish population in my constituency, I asked myself whether I would have noticed if I got up one morning, walked down my road in Finchley and saw every other house suddenly empty—not just one or two, but every other house; one in two houses. Would I not have noticed? If the same happened in the local areas of Golders Green and Hampstead Garden Suburb, and every other house was empty, would someone not have noticed? Wouldn’t you have noticed? I believe people did notice, but they chose not to.

I believe fervently that we can bring communities together so that they see the person, not the religion or the colour. If we can achieve that and the theme of building bridges and bringing communities together, so that people see beyond the label, the seeds of division are harder to sow.

Many of us know from our constituency surgeries that when we sit down with people from a variety of faiths and backgrounds we find that they all have the same problems; they are concerned about jobs, education, crime and the future. Their backgrounds are irrelevant. They simply want to get on with their lives and live peacefully. For me, building bridges and bringing communities together is crucial. I spend a lot of my time on interfaith work, because I believe that if we can get beyond labels and get people to see that more unites us than divides us, we will reduce the risk of further genocides of the sort we have seen. Once again, I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate.