Holocaust Memorial Day

Phillip Lee Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Dr Phillip Lee (Bracknell) (Con)]

Seventy-four years ago yesterday, a group of men—and they were, sadly, all men—met at Wannsee, a nice lake and idyllic location in Berlin, and decided systematically to murder 11 million-plus Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals and the like. As a result of discovering that fact when I was young, I developed a rather morbid fascination with the holocaust. I could not quite understand why a sophisticated country that had given birth to famous chemists, philosophers, historians and composers could find itself hosting a conference at which such dreadful deeds were planned.

The sheer industrial scale of what happened is seen in the places of Chelmno, Sobibor, Treblinka and Auschwitz. Another particularly dreadful episode happened at Babi Yar in Ukraine, where over 33,000 men, women and children were shot over the course of two days, just 29 years before I was born. I had this fascination, and I could not understand the word “holocaust”, meaning “holo” or whole and “caustos” or burned. I could not understand how intelligent, sophisticated, educated people could design purpose-built gas chambers and commit such a crime.

When I was practising as a doctor in Aylesbury, I had two patients who had survived Auschwitz. I clearly remember the lady with the tattoo on her arm, and I particularly remember the man who came in suffering from serious depression. Ten hours after I admitted him, he committed suicide, rather shockingly, on the ward. I think that that personal experience was what drove me to visit Yad Vashem for the first time in 1998; subsequently, like many other Members, I visited Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust. It drove me to try to understand, as best I could.

I agree with those who have said today that it is important to remember other genocides. I am thinking of, for instance, the genocide of 1915 in Armenia, of what was done by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979, when almost 25% of the population died, and of the more recent genocide in Rwanda, when the killing rate actually topped that of the Nazis: some 600,000 people were killed within six to eight weeks of the start.

Of course it is important to reflect and remember, but I think the most important thing that we should do is try to understand. I have long thought that killing the people who were convicted at Nuremberg was a mistake. I think that we should have kept those people alive, and tried to understand what on earth drove them to behave in such a way. And what of justice? Of course it is important to bring people to justice, but fewer than 10% of people were ever charged with any crime in connection with the holocaust. The numbers are not much better when it comes to the Khmer Rouge, and certainly not when it comes to the Armenian genocide of 1915.

We need to understand how people could do those things by day, and then be normal by night. There are famous photographs of Hungarian Jews arriving in June and July 1944, when 12,000 a day were being gassed, and there is the Höcker album showing SS men and women partying in the evenings and afternoons in the intervals between gassing thousands of people. How can that have been?

It is very easy to stand here and make speeches. It is very easy to say that we should not be bystanders, but should act. It is very easy to say that we should not do this and we should not do that. Forgive me, but we have stood idly by in the case of Rwanda, idly by in the case of Darfur, idly by in the case of Syria, and in the case of the Yazidis in particular. We are not doing much better than our predecessors. Indeed, I suspect that we do not have the determination and courage of some of our predecessors, who actually went to war to defeat evil. I think it is about time that this country rediscovered that determination, that courage, and that strong belief in the values of freedom and the equality of people, irrespective of their faith, gender or sexuality. It is about time that Britain, France and, yes, Germany—and America—rediscovered that courage, because otherwise such genocides will continue to happen in the future, and I very much hope that they will not.