Holocaust Memorial Day

Stephen Kerr Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Kerr (Stirling) (Con)]

I have been deeply moved by all the speeches in this debate, but I particularly thank the hon. Members for Dudley North (Ian Austin) and for Bassetlaw (John Mann), and my hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart), for their outstanding contributions. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Chichester (Gillian Keegan), who brought back to me vivid memories of a visit to Yad Vashem.

I will dwell for a moment, if I may, on the spirit of remembrance. Richard Dimbleby filed a report after he had been in the concentration camp at Belsen. For several days, the BBC refused to broadcast it because of the horror of its content; only after he threatened to resign did it broadcast it. I would like to include some of it in my remarks, lest we forget.

Richard Dimbleby began his report with what he called

“the simple, horrible facts of Belsen”,

and he went on:

“But horrible as they are, they can convey little or nothing in themselves. I wish with all my heart that everyone fighting in this war, and above all those whose duty it is to direct the war from Britain and America, could have come with me through the barbed-wire fence that leads to the inner compound of the camp...I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice raised above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left, and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was ‘English, English, medicine, medicine,’ and she was trying to cry but she hadn’t enough strength. And beyond her down the passage and in the hut there were the convulsive movements of dying people too weak to raise themselves from the floor.

In the shade of some trees lay a great collection of bodies. I walked about them trying to count, there were perhaps 150 of them flung down on each other, all naked, all so thin that their yellow skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones. Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were there looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they never lived at all.”

Dimbleby said:

“This day in Belsen was the most horrible of my life.”



The Nazis classified people according to their perverse ideology of hatred, separating those they deemed sub-human and then cruelly murdering them. Continuing hostility, hatred, threat and violence against Jewish people has no place in this country or any other. Those who aid and abet the perpetrators of this persecution should be ashamed, and exposed for their cowardice. Those who deny or downplay the evil of Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald and Dachau are purveyors of a wicked lie.

What have we learned from this desolation? If we had learned anything, would we have seen the genocides of Darfur, Bosnia or Rwanda? Would we have done more to confront Myanmar over the treatment of the Rohingyas? The sobering truth is that genocide is still happening in our time.

We must each take responsibility for how we relate to our fellow human beings. We must remember our common brotherhood and sisterhood. We see the seeds of the thinking that led to the Nazis in all the places of the world where people are persecuted because of their faith or belief, their ethnicity, their sexuality or their convictions. We are all our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. It is one of the first lessons of scripture, and it is what defines our humanity, our need to exercise compassion for one another, and our responsibility to one another.

In my Christian faith, we are invited to practise love, one to another, and to treat other people the way we would want to be treated. Those behaviours begin with what we are thinking and feeling, and we are accountable for our attitudes and behaviours. When we spread deliberate lies, when we abuse other people, when we hate other people because they are different or see the world differently from us, and when we give expression to that hate, we are descending to an infernal pit of self-loathing and self-destruction.

Loving our neighbours as we love ourselves, respecting every human being without prejudice, and upholding the universal human right of individual agency—these are the values that elevate our common humanity. We must always remember what happens when we do not listen to what Abraham Lincoln described as

“the better angels of our nature.”

We must individually live out our commitment and prayer of never again.