Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Paula Barker Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Paula Barker (Liverpool, Wavertree) (Lab) [V]]

Before entering this place, I was fortunate enough to visit the death camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau on a number of occasions—fortunate in the sense that I was able to see at first hand a place that had once, in our recent history, inflicted so much suffering, destruction and, ultimately, death; a place where human beings routinely slaughtered fellow human beings on account of nothing more than their ethnicity, religious beliefs, disabilities, sexual orientation and political activity; a place that is in every sense a living, breathing monument to all who were killed during the holocaust, a fixed reminder of the horrors of genocide and a warning to any society that wishes to dangerously flirt with intolerance and prejudice.

I am proud to represent such a diverse constituency in Liverpool, Wavertree. I know that many of my Jewish constituents will have been lighting a candle yesterday, paying tribute, remembering and reflecting on the lived experiences of the 6 million Jews and those who survived, as well as the other persecuted peoples who perished in those camps at the hands of the Nazis. It is on candles that I want to briefly focus. How poignant and moving was the “Thought for the Day” from the Chief Rabbi yesterday, in which he said:

“Even a tiny flame can conquer darkness.”

The symbol of Holocaust Memorial Day is, of course, that candle. No matter how small the flame—no matter how inconsequential our behaviours may seem at times—we can be that light in the darkness. It is undoubtedly a powerful call to responsibility in which we all must play a small part as citizens.

I saw that at first hand and was able to capture it in the freezing eastern European snow, as we placed a small row of candles on the remnants and decaying walls of Crematorium IV at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp during my visits. It was not the freezing cold temperatures that gave me chills as I stood there. It was, in fact, upon learning the story of 7 October 1944. For months, young Jewish women were smuggling small amounts of gunpowder from the munitions factory within the Auschwitz complex to the men and women of the camp’s resistance movement. A young Jewish woman, Roza Robota, passed it to her co-conspirators in the Sonderkommando, the special squad of prisoners forced to work in the camp’s crematoria.

While the uprising was ultimately unsuccessful and a brutal crackdown ensued, Crematorium IV was destroyed and never used again. Roza was hanged in January 1945 alongside three other women comrades. Defiant until the last, their heroic stand is remembered as one of the most courageous acts of Jewish women prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau. Their resilience and unrelenting insubordination in the face of adversity and death is a beacon of hope to us all. In that place, in that moment, they were that flame—that candle—and it is our duty, many decades later, to continue telling their stories.