Holocaust Memorial Day 2021

Steve Reed Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab/Co-op)]

The House has made it clear today in this very important debate why future generations must know the history of the holocaust. I congratulate the very large number of Members on both sides on their extraordinarily moving contributions; there were too many, unfortunately, to refer to individually. I also congratulate the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for the quite remarkable ceremony online last night.

Like many Members across the House, I have also joined a group of students from my constituency on a visit to Auschwitz, and I thank the Holocaust Educational Trust for organising that. We walked in the shadow of the words, “Arbeit macht frei”, tracing the footsteps of millions who walked to an unspeakably brutal death. We stood on the railway tracks where the cattle wagons unloaded their human cargo and where a Nazi doctor selected those who would live and those who would die. We walked through rooms packed with the remains of human lives—shoes, human hair, children’s tiny clothes and toys. The lessons of history could not be starker, more painful or more necessary for a new generation.

I thank, too, Labour Friends of Israel for taking me to Jerusalem, where, like many other Members, I toured Yad Vashem, Israel’s remarkable museum of the shoah, which catalogues the hatred and demonisation that led humanity into the abyss. The great tragedy is, as many Members have said, that we still have not learned the lessons of the holocaust; genocides happened again in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, and against the Yazidi, Rohingya and Uyghurs. We see time and again where hatred leads humanity, and it is why all of us have a duty to call out bigotry wherever we find it.

I wish to acknowledge the words of my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge), because I share her horror at having realised after 2015 that antisemites had entered the Labour party, intent on infecting our party with their poison. As the Equality and Human Rights Commission report has shown us, our party was too slow to act. My friend, Dame Louise Ellman, a most distinguished former Member of this House, was subjected to the most aggressive antisemitic abuse by some members of her own local party, who demonised her for the wrongs of a foreign Government. A measure of our party’s recovery will be when Louise and the others who were driven out feel able to rejoin the party they grew up in and to which they gave so much.

My small contribution during that time was to help establish the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which runs an operation to identify, expose and disable online antisemitism. The project targets antisemitic extremism on the far left and far right, but where it identified antisemites who had become Labour party members, we reported them immediately for expulsion. When we identified how antisemites were operating online, we proposed legislative change, engaging with both the Government and the Jewish community leadership. I look forward to the online harms Bill bringing forward necessary new safeguards into law.

Labour’s new leader made clear in his acceptance speech last April his determination to root out antisemitism and make our party a safe space for Jewish people to be members of and to vote for once more. We understand the hurt that antisemitism has caused to the Jewish community and we will continue to work closely with and listen to the community as we seek to heal that pain. With the support of the Leader of the Opposition, I have asked every Labour council to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, with all the examples. We have backed the Secretary of State’s request for universities to do the same, and we support the establishment of the holocaust memorial and learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens, right next to this place, the heart of British democracy.

I wish to finish with a story of hope. My friend and constituent Eric Sanders is 101 years old. As far as I know, he is the oldest living member of the Labour party. Eric was born to a Jewish family in Austria in 1919. Growing up, he experienced at first hand anti-Jewish hatred, and restrictions on where he could learn, work and go, and on whom he could love. He watched, personally, Adolf Hitler drive into Vienna after the Anschluss that incorporated Austria into the Nazi Third Reich. Eric came here to Britain, where he joined our armed forces to fight for freedom. After the war, he settled in south London, became a teacher, married a young woman and started a family. Today, Eric is a father, a grandfather and a great-grandfather. He tells me how very proud he was to be awarded the Decoration of Honour by the President of Austria—that country’s highest civil award—just a few years ago. That act of recognition after the wrongs he suffered has allowed Eric finally to make his peace with the country of his birth. Just days before his hundredth birthday, I took a group of Austrian university students to meet Eric at his home in Norbury in south London. It was so moving to see a new generation of Austrians talking with a Jewish member of an older generation about what had happened to him and so many others in their country.

Eric would be the first to say that his story is now mostly in the past, but his story will not end with him if it inspires a future generation to build a better world. Today, as we reflect on the horrors of the holocaust, let us recognise that that anguished cry of 6 million voices from the past is our calling to build a better future, and in that, let us come together and find our light in the darkness.