Holocaust Memorial Day

Stephen Lloyd Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Lloyd (Eastbourne) (LD)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) for securing this debate. It was also a pleasure to join him at the Backbench Business Committee as a co-sponsor of it.

I was struck by the description that my hon. Friend the Member for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) gave of perpetrators in Rwanda hacking victims’ Achilles heels to stop them moving. It is such events, seemingly tiny in the giant scale of these shocking atrocities, that make the point powerfully. My hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) will clearly never forget the experiences he described. Such descriptions paint a real picture of just how “normal” and “ordinary” these dreadful things are, some of which happened within the last 20 years. That is why debates such as this are so important. Otherwise, we can easily forget; in some cases, it was many years ago.

I have been involved in all of these debates since the last general election, and I am very supportive of the Holocaust Educational Trust. To me, one of the strongest reasons for having such debates is not just that they remind us of the dreadful and shocking things that happened then, but that history keeps repeating itself. The work of the trust and other such bodies is very necessary; otherwise, the awful atrocities that still occur would probably happen even more often. We in this august Chamber must each year remind ourselves, and everyone in the UK who follows these debates, of what happened.

Like some of my colleagues, I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau a few months after the last election. To me, it seemed that I knew it well, because I had seen it in so many Hollywood films. That sounds bizarre, but that is the reality. Of course, I did not know it at all. As I walked around, the things that really struck home, as a number of Members have mentioned, were the mechanics: the orderliness of the functionaries; the fact that they kept expert notes; the fact that they diverted freight trains full of victims, while at the same time fighting a war to the death with the Soviet Union. It was literally insane.

Last night, as I was preparing for the debate, I was reminded of the great writer Primo Levi, whose work I read when I was a young man. As I am sure all Members know, he was an Italian chemist, a Jew, who had been in Auschwitz and who wrote about his experiences, and his general philosophical approach, a few times after the second world war. I was reading a couple of quotations last night to remind me of the books that had had a seminal impact on me when I was only a teenager.

Because he was such a good writer, Primo Levi was able to describe the organisation that was involved in a way that is so simple and yet so horrific. He wrote:

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in numbers to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are…the functionaries ready to believe and act without asking questions.”

That is the point. It appears that there are a certain number of complete monsters who are the dictators, who lead and who do terrible things, but who can do absolutely nothing other than annihilate people around them. They can do nothing on a grand scale without all those functionaries.

The reason I consider that so important is that I cannot accept, will not accept and never have accepted that we are all so pure and that we would do it differently, given that functionaries could behave in such a shocking way—ordinary, normal people like us and the people listening to our debate. Earlier, a Member mentioned the train driver who said that he did not see anything. That is ludicrous. If a driver sets off with 20 full freight cars behind him and leaves with nothing, he will obviously notice that. However, there is something within humanity that just shuts such things off. I do not know what it is, but I do not believe that that could not occur here. I do not believe that there is something that was just so much worse for people over there. The reason I mention that, and the reason the debate is so important to me, is that I believe that the more we in the Chamber can demonstrate the truth of just how ordinary that shocking behaviour was, the harder it will be for society to park it over there and say that it could not happen here.

Rwanda has been mentioned. I was born and brought up in Mombasa, in Kenya, which is a super country no more than a couple of thousand miles from Rwanda. Some dreadful things happened between the Kikuyu and the Luo only about a year and a half ago. Members may remember hearing the news of the explosion between them. One thing led to another, one group suddenly turned on the other, and bang! About 1,000 people were shot down. Houses were burnt, women and children were killed. I knew those areas really well, and for all I know, many years ago I may have met or walked past either some of the victims or some of the perpetrators.

The overall ugliness of genocide makes us want to turn away, as indeed we do. Even when I was preparing for the debate last night, I thought, “This is so wearying”. It is such a wearying, exhausting issue, because it is so horrid. Primo Levi also said:

“It is neither easy nor agreeable to dredge this abyss of viciousness, and yet I think it must be done, because what could be perpetrated yesterday could be attempted again tomorrow, could overwhelm us and our children. One is tempted to turn away with a grimace and close one’s mind: this is a temptation one must resist.”

That is one of the reasons that I was so determined to join my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale in seeking the debate. It is exactly the same reason that so many hon. Members have been flagging up today.

Dwight Eisenhower, the allied supreme commander, was, in many ways, an interesting soldier and politician—he was almost an anti-politician. He was known for being very unemotional and dry. When he heard about the camps he did not believe it at first, but after being told, he came to realise that they did exist. He told his aides and his chief of staff that he wanted to visit a camp, and not just to see it for his own eyes. He said:

“The things I saw beggar description…The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were…overpowering…I made the visit deliberately in order to be in a position to give first-hand evidence of these things”.

That is why today’s debate is so important and why I, like a number of hon. Members, will be attending a memorial commemoration in my constituency on Sunday—I look forward to it. It is taking place in a local synagogue. Only a small number of Eastbourne people are Jewish, but the synagogue and the group are strong. They, the Holocaust Educational Trust and the many other bodies around the UK and the world that keep commemorating this event and keep reminding us must never stop, and we must always support it. We must never turn away because, as my hon. Friends the Members for Beckenham and for Rugby (Mark Pawsey) said, if we do so, we simply will never have any chance of preventing those dreadful occurrences from repeating themselves again, again and again. Finally, I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale and the HET. I always consider it a privilege to speak on this dreadful issue.