Holocaust Memorial Day

Rupa Huq Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Dr Rupa Huq (Ealing Central and Acton) (Lab)]

One day last November, I had the unforgettable experience of visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau with students from Ealing Independent College and the Holocaust Educational Trust. I say “one day”, but it was a long and, in some ways, difficult day. We flew out of Luton at 6 am and were back at 11 pm. For all of us—200 of us from schools across the London region—the memory of that day will remain with us forever. The icy conditions—it was minus 4°—and the emotional demands of the day set a harsh context for bearing witness to the horror of the atrocities committed in the death camps. Startlingly, if a one-minute silence had been observed for every person who perished at that camp, we would have been there for more than two years.

Seventy-plus years on from the liberation of Auschwitz, this subject still has enormous contemporary relevance. It has been pointed out that with the passage of time there are fewer and fewer camp survivors, Kindertransport children and people who liberated the camps, so we owe a huge debt to people and organisations such as the HET and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, headed up by Olivia Marks-Woldman, whom I was at school with in Ealing. The commemorations next week up and down the country are crucial to educating successive generations. We can only understand our present and future if we understand our past.

This is a debate about the 6 million Jewish victims of the holocaust, but it extends to the millions of others the Nazis exterminated, including Romani Gypsies, communists, socialists, trade unionists and gay people. It also includes those slaughtered in other genocides. Holocaust education campaigning evolves. We have already heard mention of the “Antiques Roadshow” at the weekend featuring memorabilia and other astonishing artefacts from Auschwitz and of those on display at Yad Vashem in Israel. That brought it into the nation’s living rooms on prime time television.

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day schools pack contains recipe cards—things such as Rwandan vegetable stew. That is another way of digesting information about cultures attacked in genocide. I think there are other recipes from Cambodia and Bosnia. Culture is transmitted subtly, and when there are no grandparents, culinary tradition and memory die.

All communities must learn lessons and be vigilant against racism, anti-Semitism, islamophobia and all forms of hatred in the contemporary world. There are worries that following the verdict in the EU referendum, and even following the events across the Atlantic that will come to fruition tomorrow, prejudice and racism are in danger of becoming acceptable, and that holders of those abhorrent views may feel disinhibited from expressing them.

Holocaust Memorial Day has renewed significance this year. We live in a time of post-truth politics and fake news. Members have mentioned the film “Denial”, which I had an opportunity to see earlier this week. It deals with the trial in which the Nazi David Irving opposed the American academic Deborah Lipstadt. I warmly recommend the film, which is a fact-packed treatment of the downfall of the UK’s most notorious rewriter of history. It is frightening to hear that he is making something of a resurgence. I think that such views are as ridiculous as those of people who think that the earth is flat, and we need to call them out.

At the end of last year, I attended my first-ever Rabbi’s Tisch, which is a Friday night meal. It was a great event, which was held at Ealing Liberal Synagogue. The presence of a Community Security Trust guard on the door served as a reminder that, while all communities deserve to worship in safety, that is not always possible.

It is deplorable that pigs’ heads are left on the doorsteps of mosques in the UK, and that we hear of the desecration of Jewish graveyards in Europe. Just over the border of my constituency, the Hammersmith Polish centre was attacked in the wake of the Brexit result. It seems that there has been a resurgence of hate-filled political rhetoric—ditto the scapegoating and vilification of migrants and refugees.

Last year the Kindertransport refugee Ernest Simon addressed us at Ealing town hall. He told us about the train trip from Austria into the unknown that he had made as a child in 1939. The first question posed to him in the Q and A session was “Should we take in Syrian refugees?” His answer was an emphatic “Of course”: we had a moral duty to do so. All debates such as this resonate with contemporary events.

There is a large Polish community in my constituency, and this week, along with members of the all-party parliamentary group on Poland, I met here a cross-party delegation of visiting Members of the Polish Parliament. They, too, voiced concern about the rising tide of hate crime, and we reassured them that strong ties bind our two nations. They also asked me whether I had been to Poland. I did not have a straightforward answer to that question. Yes, I had flown to Krakow, but what we saw there was something that all of us will remember forever: something utterly unforgettable and outside the accepted norms of what takes place in everyday Poland, the like of which we must make sure that we never witness again anywhere.

The diversity of my constituency is one of the reasons why it is the best in the whole world, along with the strength of our many communities. I have constituents of all faiths and of none, and the constituency contains numerous churches, a mosque in Acton and another in Ealing, and a liberal as well as a reform synagogue. I am proud to say that next Friday we will have our annual remembrance event to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. It has become an annual date in the calendar—as has this debate, a parliamentary fixture that is much looked forward to.

At that event in Ealing and throughout the country, we should mark this shameful episode in history, and also subsequent genocides. We must assess our own responsibilities in the wake of such crimes. We must never forget the holocaust, and we must ensure that such events never occur again.