Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between Mike Wood and Luciana Berger

Thursday 24th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Luciana Berger (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), who spoke with great passion, and shared with the House his personal experience of the modern manifestations of antisemitism.

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) on the way in which he opened the debate, the tone that he set for it, and the fact that so many Members on both sides of the House are gathered here today. That is also a great testament to the valuable work of the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

I think it important to reflect on what Holocaust Memorial Day actually is. Why do we commemorate it on 27 January? The answer is that it marks the date on which the Red Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau in 1945. That was the site where nearly a million people were murdered, but, as we know, it was just one of the many terrible death camps across Europe.

I reflect on my own family experience. On my mother’s side alone, we know that more than 100 members of her family, aged between four and 83, were sent by the Nazis to their deaths in the gas chambers of not just Auschwitz but Treblinka, Sobibór, Mauthausen and Bergen-Belsen, for no other reason than that they were Jewish.

It is beyond our comprehension that humans are capable of inflicting such horrors on other humans. It questions the very nature of humanity, and leads us to the contemplation of evil. Yet we have continued to witness horrors in our own times, in Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia, and the House recently debated the plight of the Rohingya in Burma, driven from their homes, their villages in flames.

Humanity never seems to fully learn the lessons of history. That is why Holocaust Memorial Day is so vital and continuing holocaust education is so critical—so that we can do everything possible to ensure that it really does not ever happen again. It is why we celebrate the lives of survivors who are now in their 80s and 90s, such as Susan Pollack MBE, with whom I had the privilege to share a platform a few months ago at the Labour party conference in Liverpool. Susan was in Belsen when the British liberated it, and still visits schools to talk about her experiences. It is why we mourn the passing of so many holocaust survivors, particularly in the past year, such as Mireille Knoll, who lived through the occupation of Paris but was murdered this year at the age of 85 in a hate crime, and Gena Turgel, who survived four concentration camps. She tended to the dying Anne Frank in Belsen, and married a British soldier just six weeks after liberation. The testimony of every single survivor aids our understanding, adds to our history, and helps to educate the next generation.

[Mike Wood (Dudley South) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Lady for giving way during such a moving and powerful speech. Like her, I was extremely moved by Ms Pollack’s testimony, although that was at a Conservative party conference. Does she agree that the declining number of holocaust survivors is another reason why it is so important for their recorded testimony to have a central role in the new learning centre?

[Luciana Berger]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for that important intervention. I have seen the testimonies that are housed at Yad Vashem. That project, which is funded in part by Steven Spielberg, has done so much to capture the stories and the background. For every single person who perished, there is a whole history and a family who have been affected up to the modern day. It is critical for those testimonies to be at the centre of every holocaust memorial, however it may be presented—in particular, the new national memorial that we are due to have—in order to have an impact on the next generation.

It is important to recognise that the holocaust did not start with gas chambers. It started with ideas, with books, with newspapers, with films, with torchlight processions, with speeches. It culminated in crematoria, but it began with words. It had its roots in the warped racial theories of the 1890s, and in conspiracy theories such as those in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The Nazis did not invent antisemitism, but they modernised it, made it the state religion, and turned an industrial state into a machine for killing every Jew in Europe.

We should ask how that happened. How was such a thing possible in a civilised European country? One answer lies in the compliance of the civilian population. In the past year we also lost the writer Primo Levi, who was in Auschwitz. He wrote:

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

That is the aspect of the holocaust from which we need to learn the most: not the SS, who enjoyed the torture and killings, but the thousands of people in the civilian police, the railways and the civil service who never challenged what they knew to be happening, who never questioned the plans that they were helping to implement, who looked the other way. They saw those trains heading east, but they never wondered why no one ever came back, even for a day. At what point could it have been stopped? Surely the lesson for us today is that unless we challenge the words, it is much harder to challenge the deeds. We cannot be bystanders. We cannot walk by on the other side.

In the 1930s it was Der Stürmer, which ran from 1923 onwards with its unceasing antisemitism. It told its readers week after week that Jews spread disease, and the caption on every front page read “The Jews are our misfortune!”. Today it is social media, with all its manifestations of modern antisemitism: Jews secretly run the banks, organised 9/11, profit from wars, manipulate the media, and have loyalties to foreign powers.

When people deny the holocaust or claim that Jews exploit it, we cannot be bystanders. When people online draw up lists of Jews in the media, we cannot be bystanders. When people use the term “Zio” or “Rothschild” instead of “Jew” to cover their racism, we cannot be bystanders. Whether it is the neo-Nazis or those who think that they belong to the left, we must say no, and call it out as loudly as we can. Every single time, it must be challenged swiftly and without favour, no matter where it rears its very ugly head.

I will end with another quote from Primo Levi:

“It happened, therefore it can happen again: this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere.”