Holocaust Memorial Day

Robert Jenrick Excerpts

Thursday 21st January 2016 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick (Newark) (Con)]

So much has already been said during this extremely powerful and thoughtful debate, but let me add two stories from my own life and my constituency.

I recently took my parents-in-law, who were visiting us for the holidays, to a museum in my constituency of which some Members may be aware. Remarkably, the National Holocaust Centre, a few miles north of Newark, is the only museum dedicated to the holocaust in this country, although I hope that that will change in the near future.

My parents-in-law are the children of holocaust survivors. My wife’s grandfather and grandmother were Jews who lived in a village near the city of Pinsk. The Nazis came to their village. At the time, Pinsk was 90% Jewish; today it is 0.05% Jewish. The Nazis rounded up the able-bodied young men and took them to labour camps. The young men were told that if they tried to escape, their families back in the village would be killed. As we can imagine, however, word came to the camp pretty quickly that everyone in the village had been shot. Most had actually been burnt to death, and their bodies had been dumped in an open grave outside the village.

Furnished with that reality, my grandfather-in-law narrowly succeeded in escaping from the camp, and spent the remainder of the war fighting as a partisan in the forests of what is now Belarus. At the end of the war he returned to the smouldering ruins of his former village, amid the wreckage of his former life, and discovered that every single member of his family had been killed. Remarkably, the following day he met my wife’s grandmother, who was herself a holocaust survivor with a similar story, and every single one of whose family had also been killed, most of them at Auschwitz. They fell in love, and the rest, of course, is history. My mother-in-law, my wife and my three daughters are the result. So it is a great privilege for me to represent that museum.

Let me tell the House briefly about the two founders of the museum. Their story is not as well known as perhaps it should be, and it is worth retelling today. Twenty years ago, two brothers from Nottinghamshire, who are not Jewish and have no family connection with the holocaust, visited Israel to study and were captivated—if that is the right word—by Yad Vashem, which was being constructed at the time. On returning to their parents’ farmhouse in a remote area north of Newark, they persuaded their parents, who were extremely socially aware individuals themselves, to convert their farm into a holocaust education centre and over the next 20 years they have done exactly that. They have realised a remarkable vision and James and Stephen Smith—those two constituents of mine—are now among the most extraordinary individuals leading in holocaust education and genocide prevention around the world. They have founded the Aegis Foundation that works to prevent genocides and runs the genocide museum in Kigali in Rwanda, which is partly funded by the Department for International Development. They also run Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, which is now attempting to create 3D visualisations of remaining holocaust survivors so future generations can hear, to some extent first-hand, the stories when survivors have long departed.

The brothers had two profound driving ideas behind their mission. The first was that when the survivors are gone, we need to be able to tell the story—that although there are many museums all over the country, and even in my own rural constituency, at least one museum should be our conscience. It should be here for future generations, and I hope it will be. Secondly, they believed this museum should remind us of our common humanity by showing that whatever motivated the attacks on the Jews was a virus—a virus that exists in all of us and which exists in the world today. We see that alive and well, as we have heard already—in ISIS, in Boko Haram, and in anti-Semitism in Paris and in this country.

As an individual who grew up in the Church of England and walked though my village in Shropshire to Sunday school classes, it is a deep sadness and a shame to me to take my children to Hebrew classes and have to knock on the door and pass through security and sophisticated alarms so they can join four and five-year-olds learning a bit about their Jewish heritage. That is what we are fighting for today—to remember, to keep the flame alive, and to try at least to ensure that it does not happen again.