Holocaust Memorial Day

Viscount Eccles Excerpts

Thursday 13th February 2025 Lords Chamber

[Viscount Eccles (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate and a particular pleasure to speak in a debate where we have heard three varied, enjoyable, interesting and informative maiden speeches.

I was 14 at the end of the war. I was at boarding school in Winchester, and my memory tells me that we did not know about Auschwitz. However, we were told about Belsen, and noble Lords will all know, I am sure, why Belsen came into the knowledge of the general public in this country, as the first of the camps that we really knew about. We learned about the camps in stages, and we learned about what had been happening in stages: arbitrary imprisonment, forced labour, cruelty, neglect, disease, starvation and industrialised murder.

This was so far beyond our 14 year-old experience, knowledge and imagination. It was a shattering blow to our experience of the war. After all, we had been through a period when it seemed that we were going to lose the war—and then we looked at this and what we were supposed to understand. At evening prayers, who ever took them faced a very troubled congregation.

Then, we thought to ourselves, “How could people be found to run such a system—who would be the guards, bookkeepers, managers and commandants?” We found it very difficult to cope with that. Then there were the misfortunes, the betrayals and the widespread collaboration—all these aspects came out, stage by stage. Then we got to hear about the text of the final solution. Again, that was quite beyond our comprehension. All we could conclude was that it was unattainable and massively evil.

Time goes by and our nature is such that we have to learn to cope. At that time, we did not have the 6 million label. We came to cope by somehow thinking that it was individuals to whom these things had happened. We thought of it as a whole series of individual tragedies and the effect they had had upon their close families and relations. This is probably still the way I think about the Holocaust—as a massive list of individual stories.

Eighty years later, there are two other ways in which we might usefully accept the challenge of thinking about the Holocaust. How did Europe come to create the conditions where the Holocaust was mounted, from the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires through Bismarck and competitive rearmament to the First World War, Versailles and the Weimar Republic, the rise of Hitler, the Second World War and the final solution? I believe that, although we have looked in some detail at that story—that long journey—it merits being looked at in ever more detail to try to come to some resolution about how this could have happened. Whatever one thinks about the Holocaust, it was one outcome of that long journey.

There is a second journey about which we need to think very carefully, and that is what has happened since 1945. During my national service, some of my colleagues had come recently from Palestine, which was still briefly in its mandate condition before the creation of Israel. They told pretty wild, difficult and dangerous stories of the Stern Gang and the PLA. It behoves us to consider what part the Holocaust has played in geopolitical outcomes since 1945 and, indeed, up to today. What part does that appalling event play in the way in which we think about where we are now and where we are going? Again, I feel that the study of and research about this are extremely important.

To sum up, we do our best in our efforts to cope with what is happening to us and around us. In coping, we have more than enough to think about, to study, to research and to remember.