Holocaust Memorial Day

Vikki Slade Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2025 Commons Chamber

[Vikki Slade (Mid Dorset and North Poole) (LD)]

It is a privilege to speak in this debate, and it is humbling to follow the hon. Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky); I thank him for his incredible testimony about his family.

I pay tribute to Mr Speaker and his office for the moving parliamentary ceremony yesterday, especially the testimony of Yisrael and Alf, who both survived the Nazi Holocaust. To mark this event in the same week as the fragile ceasefire in the middle east and the release of Emily Damari and two other hostages makes it even more poignant.

When my son Isaac was nine, his school, Springdale First, held a world war two tea. Children were invited to bring a grandparent to share their memories of living through the war, but he came home distressed because my parents—his grandparents—were not born until several years after its end. Being an ingenious child, he knocked on the door of our neighbour Margaret and asked her to be his adoptive grandmother for the day, so that she could share her memories with his classmates and enjoy the wartime entertainment, which included his singing of “We’ll Meet Again”. I tell this story because, as the living memory of the Holocaust reduces, it is more important than ever that each of us keeps it alive through our own annual acts of remembrance and in calling out antisemitism and all acts of discrimination and hate against groups because of their faith, nationality or identity.

Twelve years ago, I visited Israel and Palestine as part of a Liberal Democrat delegation, during which we made a trip to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum. The experience stays with me for many reasons, but the thing that struck me hardest was what came well before the death camps like Auschwitz: a decade of dehumanising a whole community; of families being rewarded with crates of beer for betraying their neighbours; of the boycotting of Jewish businesses, the burning of Jewish authored books and, most strikingly, the sale of ashtrays depicting so-called Jewish faces on them, so that people could stub out cigarettes on their faces, helping to foster the feeling that Jews were not really people at all.

Last Sunday, I attended a Holocaust memorial event in Wimborne Minster in my constituency. The service, which can be seen on the minster’s YouTube page, was based around the book “Violins of Hope” and accompanied by the haunting playing of pieces of music reminiscent of that time by classical violinist Emma-Marie Kabanova, herself a refugee from Ukraine.

As well as the accounts of those whose music continued to be played in the camps, maintaining hope and retaining their humanity, some of the testimony we heard shared more about what came before the war—how Jewish people were forced to leave their homes and their businesses, how they fled in boats from European shores to reach Palestine but were refused landing or, worse, died at sea. I closed my eyes to listen to the simplicity of the violin played in the minster, as the words of those who lived through that horror were shared with us all. The contrast between the evil perpetrated in the name of power and ideology and the selflessness of those condemned to death for something they could not control was incredibly moving.

By the end of the Holocaust, as we know, 6 million Jewish men, women and children had been murdered in ghettos, mass shootings, concentration camps and death camps. In addition, and often forgotten, were the other groups targeted by the Nazis for extermination, among them Romani Gypsies, those with disabilities, gay and bisexual men and black people.

This year carries a special significance, as we mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Next Sunday I will be attending the Poole Lighthouse Holocaust memorial event, as I do every year, at which candles are lit for the victims of not only the Nazi Holocaust but later genocides, all of which unbelievably occurred within my lifetime, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. That is what Holocaust Memorial Day is for: looking backwards to look forwards.

The theme of Holocaust Memorial Day this year is “For a better future”, so I return to my son, Isaac. At the age of 12, he joined his fellow Broadstone scouts on a European adventure focused on world war two. They travelled across several countries, alternating light-hearted activity days with visits to the Colditz castle prisoner of war camp, to Auschwitz and, on their return, to the Menin Gate to see the war graves and witness the last post at sunset. We thought carefully about whether he was too young for such a trip and whether he could really understand what he was seeing, but I have seen the positive impact of that trip on him. The relationship that we all build with history and truth goes some way to structuring our perspectives in adulthood and preventing our susceptibility to dangerous narratives.

The work of the Holocaust Educational Trust in training and supporting hundreds of teachers each year to help us all learn from the past and work towards a more united future, and of the Antisemitism Policy Trust in training decision makers like us, should be commended and supported. As my party’s spokesperson for housing, communities and local government, it should not be surprising that I will say there is a role for our communities to play too. At a time of rising antisemitism and Islamophobia, many UK communities are feeling vulnerable, with hostility and suspicion of others rising. The Home Office’s own statistics revealed that the number of religious hate crimes recorded in the year to March 2024 had rocketed, which it has directly attributed to a spike in anti-Jewish hate.

We have also seen inconsistent responses from the police to language and behaviours that may well be antisemitic or viewed as hate crimes. I call on the Government to ensure that the police have the resources and, most importantly, the training they need to respond effectively and swiftly to antisemitic hate crimes, and to provide funding for security organisations such as the Community Security Trust.

We must speak up against Holocaust and genocide denial and distortion. We must challenge prejudice. We were told by Holocaust survivor Alf Garwood in Mr Speaker’s service yesterday:

“When my parents were coming to terms with their trauma after the war, I saw what their hate towards those who had destroyed our lives did to them. Hate only poisoned them.”

We must all continue to remember, and to work for peace and understanding at a time when the world feels fragile, and we in this place must lead that work together for a better future.