Holocaust Memorial Day

Neil Gray Excerpts

Thursday 18th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Neil Gray (Airdrie and Shotts) (SNP)]

It is an honour to have the opportunity to speak in this important debate. I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting this time and the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy) for securing the debate. It is also an honour and a privilege to follow all the brilliant speeches we have heard today, especially that of the hon. Member for Leeds North West (Alex Sobel).

I join others in paying tribute to Karen Pollock, the chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, and its Lessons from Auschwitz project, which since 1999 has enabled over 30,000 students and teachers to see at first hand the horror and brutality and

“to clearly highlight what can happen if prejudice and racism become acceptable.”

The theme of this year’s memorial day is the power of words, to remind us that

“The Holocaust did not start in the gas chambers but with hate filled words.”

Those words did not suddenly spring into being at the inaugural Nuremberg rally or from the venomous pages of “Mein Kampf”. It must be acknowledged that words and discrimination directed against Jewish people have been around for centuries, if not millennia, across the entire European continent and beyond, affecting all sections of society, all religions and all forms of state. Indeed, George Orwell noted in his essay on anti-Semitism:

“There has been a perceptible antisemitic strain in English literature from Chaucer onwards, and without even getting up from this table to consult a book I can think of passages which if written now would be stigmatised as antisemitism, in the works of Shakespeare, Smollett, Thackeray, Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and various others.”

While there can be no doubt that it is the Nazi leaders and those who carried out their orders who bear sole responsibility for the holocaust, their actions and beliefs were made easier to implement and for to others to subscribe to as a result of the norms and values that had been constructed over a long period, and eventually found fertile ground in 1920s Germany, in the toxic world of the Nazi party and those who carried out the work on their behalf. In the words of the hon. Member for Ilford North (Wes Streeting), who delivered an excellent speech during the debate in 2016,

“we should never avert our eyes from the most uncomfortable truth of all—that its perpetrators were not unique. They were ordinary men and women carrying out acts of extraordinary evil”—[Official Report, 21 January 2016; Vol. 604, c. 1635.]

The actions that the Nazis carried out may be beyond comprehension, but we can never be complacent or try to pretend that such actions took place in a vacuum and had no precedent. As the Jewish Italian writer and chemist Primo Levi, himself a survivor of Auschwitz, put it:

“We cannot understand”

fascism,

“but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard...because what happened can happen again... For this reason, it is everyone’s duty to reflect on what happened.”

When Barack Obama visited Yad Vashem in 2008, a few months before the presidential election, his note in the guestbook read:

“At a time of great peril and promise, war and strife, we are blessed to have such a powerful reminder of man's potential for great evil, but also our capacity to rise up from tragedy and remake our world. Let our children come here, and know this history, so that they can add their voices to proclaim ‘never again.’ And may we remember those who perished, not only as victims, but also as individuals who hoped and loved and dreamed like us, and who have become symbols of the human spirit.”

Former President Obama chose his words carefully, as must we all in politics around the world, so as not to allow this extremism to permeate again.

We must acknowledge the sad reality that a few decades hence there will be no one left who is able to offer a first-hand account of their experience of the holocaust. That is why the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust is so important—for example, in organising the event in Speaker’s House on Tuesday, or the football match between MPs and family members of survivors that took place last week. In that match, MPs, including me, played against—and lost to—Darren and Robert Richman, grandsons of Zigi Shipper, who when he was just 14 was taken from the Łódź ghetto to Auschwitz. Many who travelled with Zigi were murdered within an hour of arriving. He survived Auschwitz and was liberated by the British Army after a death march to Neustadt.

Also playing was Justin Spiro, the grandson of Harry Spiro. Like Zigi, Harry was just a boy when he was forced to work in a glass factory in the Piotrków ghetto. In 1942, the Nazis announced that all those working in the factory should attend work and everyone else should stay in their homes. Harry’s family and 22,000 other people in the ghetto were taken to Treblinka extermination camp, where they were murdered. Harry was eventually liberated by the Soviets and came to Britain as part of the group of youngsters who were later known as “The Boys”. I wish I could say more about some of the other survivors’ stories that were shared with us at the football match.

I quoted George Orwell’s comment on the history of anti-Semitism in fiction, but literature and art in general can play a more positive role in the world by portraying and expressing the personal experience, emotion and impact of real-world events in a way that is not always fully revealed by statistics alone, regardless of how extreme those events may be. I will finish with a quotation from novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who escaped to America with his Russian Jewish wife in May 1940, just prior to the Wehrmacht’s arrival in Paris, where they had been living at the time, and whose own brother would later perish in a Nazi concentration camp. In one of his novels, written just over a decade later, the central character reflects on his former lover, whose death in the holocaust he has just been reminded of when he is asked by another character if he had heard about her “terrible end”. The central character reflects that he had not thought about her until that moment

“because one could not live with the thought that this graceful, fragile, tender young woman with those eyes, that smile, those gardens and snows in the background, had been brought in a cattle car and killed by an injection of phenol into the heart, into the gentle heart one had heard beating under one’s lips in the dusk of the past.”