Holocaust Memorial Day

Wera Hobhouse Excerpts

Thursday 27th January 2022 Commons Chamber

[Robert Jenrick]

I thank my hon. Friend, and return to my thanks to and support of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which sends hundreds of thousands of our young people to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau. I hope this Government will continue to support the trust, as previous Governments did, enabling those visits to continue.

Social media is fuelled with antisemitic hatred, with conspiracy theorists growing their followers daily. According to research published last year by the Antisemitism Policy Trust, there were up to half a million explicitly antisemitic tweets per year made viewable to UK users. During the pandemic, we have seen the use and abuse of holocaust language and imagery, with anti-lockdown protesters carrying signs reading “Vaccine Holocaust” and wearing the Star of David. In May last year, we saw a convoy of vehicles drive through north London with speakers blasting out antisemitic slurs and threats against Jews. In December, the passengers on a bus in Oxford Street, who had been celebrating Hanukkah, were subjected to vile and frightening abuse, with racists banging shoes against the bus.

[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

I think it was in the dying days of the Obama Administration that Obama told students at a university that

“ignorance is not a virtue.”

Do we not need to put that across again and again? Ignorance is not a virtue. It is education and knowledge that lead us to understand and not to commit such atrocities against others.

[Robert Jenrick]

The hon. Lady makes her point eloquently, and of course I agree entirely.

Some of us here have been on the receiving end of antisemitism—I know the right hon. Member for Barking has on many occasions. I recently received a letter telling me to teach my “Jewish Zionist wife” to “put out fires”, as they intended to burn our house down and cremate our children.

As Communities Secretary, I encouraged universities to adopt and use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, a cause taken up strongly by the current Education Secretary, but despite those entreaties some universities have not done so. Only last year the University of Bristol, one of our most respected universities, acted painfully slowly to discipline Professor David Miller, a purveyor of antisemitic conspiracy theories that went well beyond the bounds of free speech. Such incidents are one of the reasons I champion the brilliant Union of Jewish Students.

I will end my speech today as the right hon. Member for Barking would have done, by quoting a diary extract of her grandfather’s. Old, ill and interned, deemed an enemy alien at the time, in an entry before Christmas, he wrote,

“Is the present time a blip? Is Hitler only an episode? Are these ideas going to disappear and the better side of humanity re-emerge?”

We owe it to her grandfather Wilhelm, and all the survivors of genocides, to do all we can to learn from their experiences.

Today, we remember not simply the liberation of the camps, but the triumph of freedom and the human spirit. We marvel at the strength, the resilience and the faith of those survivors and of Jewish people here in the UK and around the world. We must continue to tell their stories. We must use this day to continue the fight against hatred in all its forms. Then, perhaps, one day we will have a future without genocide.

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[Wera Hobhouse (Bath) (LD)]

It is an honour and privilege to follow so many moving speeches. I have been to many holocaust memorials across Germany and eastern Europe throughout my life: Bergen-Belsen, close to my home town of Hanover; Dachau; Auschwitz-Birkenau; the row of two or three houses that is all that is left of the Warsaw ghetto; and, most hauntingly, the Ponary massacre memorial outside Vilnius.

Whenever I am directly confronted with the stories of unspeakable atrocities committed by the German state during the 1930s and 1940s on the Jewish people, I feel a crushing sense of horror and shame. I was born in 1960; it was not my generation that was directly responsible for the terror. However, I feel acutely a collective responsibility for what happened in my country of origin, and that we should never forget and should work towards a world in which such awful suffering never happens again. If we want to be serious, we cannot just let the holocaust disappear into the history books—another time, another people, another place—but keep it alive and learn from it.

My grandmother was half Jewish. Her first husband was Jewish. My uncle was in Dachau in 1936, but got out with the help of Scandinavian friends. All my mother’s half brothers and sisters had to leave Germany and, except one, never returned. My grandmother’s anguish about her children and their families hung over my mother, who was the youngest, every day of her childhood. While my mother, who was only a quarter Jewish, survived Nazi Germany, her life was marred daily by exclusion, discrimination and fear. I would not be here if the war had not ended the way it did, because my mother would never have been allowed to meet my father, who was not Jewish.

My grandmother’s second husband, my grandfather, was not Jewish. He was a judge and was appointed to the Court of Appeal in Leipzig in 1927. In 1933, only months after he came to power, Hitler installed the Volksgericht, or people’s court, which was a political court to deal with anybody who was seen as an enemy of the state and which signalled the end of the rule of law. My grandfather resigned.

My grandfather’s youngest brother was schizophrenic and was murdered by the Nazis through one of the programmes of euthanasia. Although that is not directly related to the holocaust, it is worth remembering that there were German victims too, like my great-uncle, for whom there is no grave either.

My grandfather died before I was born, but I know through my mother that he never forgave himself for not becoming politically active to stop the rise of Hitler.

There are volumes and volumes of history books analysing the rise of the Nazis, citing the political instability after the first world war, the loss of national pride in being a great nation, and the Russian revolution leading to the fear of communism which drove many Germans into the arms of the fascists. It was the extremes of left and right that destroyed the moderate political centre. With that came illiberal and intolerant attitudes towards anyone who could be painted as the enemy. From there it was only a small step towards viewing people from a different race or culture as not being worthy of our human compassion and protection. The Nazis deliberately stoked irrational fear to win elections. Once Germans had elected, in a democratic vote, a barbaric leader, they could not free themselves from the monster they had helped to create. Only a world war did that.

“Wehret den Anfängen”—resist the beginnings—is what I learned from my German history lessons. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has published “The ten stages of genocide” so that people and communities can recognise the warning signs. Discrimination, dehuman-isation and polarisation are among those warning signs, and sadly they are part of our political reality today, under our own eyes.

The fight against intolerance, exclusion and inhumanity is ongoing. I owe it to the memory of the millions of Jews who perished in the holocaust at the hands of the country where I was born to convert the shame that I will always feel into political activism. I will stand up and speak out about the need for us to keep our eyes wide open to where barbarism begins.

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[Catherine West]

Indeed, I will. My hon. Friend has a long record of promoting the values of the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and has done an enormous amount to emphasise their work not just nationally but locally in the Hampstead area, where so many survivors made their home when they first came here following the second world war and where they have made a strong contribution. Indeed, many Jewish members of our communities are active in organisations such as CARIS—Christian Action and Response in Society—in Haringey, which provides food, clothing, education and legal advice to newly arrived communities. We also have the remarkable Haringey Welcome, which promotes dignity and respect for migrants and refugees in our borough.

Madam Deputy Speaker, I know you agree with this being a day when we try to reflect on the words we use in Parliament. Some of my Jewish constituents have written to me when we have had debates about immigration in the House and asked that we always try to have those debates in a respectful way. They have asked that, when we talk about groups such as the Gypsy and Traveller community, we try to understand other perspectives and not just use language that may denigrate groups that are already experiencing a lot of discrimination.

[Wera Hobhouse]

We all need to recognise the feeling of marginalisation and exclusion: it is not one of extinction, but they are also destroying lives. Does the hon. Member agree that we need to recognise that?

[Catherine West]

Indeed. One of the other local groups in my constituency, the Sir Martin Gilbert Learning Centre, which brings history to life, is another way of not forgetting and of informing a future approach that holds the light—that light that we all want to put in our windows tonight so that we never forget, but also so that we can go forward in a positive way, always trying to prevent violence from happening again and to remember the lesson about how discrimination begins. That reflects the important point that the hon. Member for Bath made about rooting out the beginnings of discrimination and negativity and trying to address them.

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, for presiding over today’s excellent debate; it is one of the best I have been in since I was elected in 2015. I look forward very much to what the Minister and the shadow spokespersons have to say and also to lighting a candle this evening so that we may never forget.

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[Eddie Hughes]

My hon. Friend is completely right. It is not just a question of reading about these things in textbooks; it is a question of the opportunity to have the story brought to life, and I strongly believe that the centre will do exactly that.

[Wera Hobhouse]

In my speech I briefly mentioned my uncle, who got out of Dachau and was then interned on the Isle of Man for the whole of the war and could never really integrate. It is so important for people who come here as refugees to be properly integrated and to become part of our communities.

[Eddie Hughes]

Again, I completely agree. This handing down and sharing of stories and information, person to person, from one generation to another is vital.

While we will recall 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered during the holocaust, there will also be many deeds of singular courage and resistance, such as those of our own Frank Foley, who was based in the British Embassy in Berlin and bent the rules to help thousands of Jewish families escape Nazi Germany before the outbreak of the second world war. One of them was the father-in-law of my right hon. Friend the late James Brokenshire, and James considered it a privilege to lead on the Government’s plans for the national holocaust memorial in his time as Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary. Sadly, in the not-too-distant future the holocaust will pass from living memory to history. The new holocaust memorial and learning centre will keep alive the memory of those who were murdered during the holocaust and subsequent genocides.

Despite our failure to learn the lessons of the past, we must not give up hope that one day we can imagine a world free of genocide, a world that fully grasps what happens when hatred, intolerance, prejudice and antisemitism are left unchallenged. That very hope was echoed during last year’s Holocaust Memorial Day debate, when our hon. Friend the late Sir David Amess said:

“I simply do not understand and have never understood antisemitism. The most important lesson from the holocaust is that although we cannot police the world, it is simply not acceptable to stand by and do and say nothing when genocide happens.”—[Official Report, 28 January 2021; Vol. 688, c. 624.]

At 7 pm this evening, there will be a short online ceremony to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. I hope hon. Members across the House will take this opportunity for a period of quiet reflection. At 8 pm, as people light a candle in their window, we will think of the millions of victims whose time on this earth was senselessly and brutally cut short; but I will also be holding out hope for a brighter future and a day when the enduring values of care, compassion and kindness triumph over the dark forces of hate, intolerance and prejudice.