Meeting of the Parliament 28 January 2020
I thank the Government for introducing the debate in its time, rather than during members’ business.
Every year, we mark Holocaust memorial day and every year, by definition, the holocaust slips further into history. This year marks 75 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp. I defy anyone to have watched the news last night and seen the hundreds of survivors—children then and bent-backed in old age now—gathering beyond the “Arbeit macht frei” gates, possibly for the last time, and not be moved. Their numbers have thinned and their voices grow fewer, but for all the passing of time, it seems to me that there has seldom been a year in my lifetime when the lessons of the Holocaust have felt this fresh, prescient and urgent.
The rise of hate crime, politics of identity, culture wars and out-and-out antisemitism that we see across the world is a reminder that progress is not irreversible and that things do not just get better. Injustice and prejudice must be fought, gains are hard won and ground will never be held if complacency and indifference are allowed to take hold.
Recent anti-Jewish attacks in major European cities and the mainstreaming of antisemitic hate speech at home have left our Jewish population wary and even frightened. A couple of years ago, I spoke at an event for the Board of Deputies of British Jews in London and I asked about the groups of men that were in clusters of four at every corner and entrance to the venue. I was told that they were volunteer security—men who were taken from the ranks of a community who feel the urgent need to protect their places of worship around the clock from attack and debasement, and their congregations from intimidation and threat. Such things are happening now, in our country, to a community still scarred by the events of 75 years ago, when 6 million of the Jewish people were systematically annihilated.
Following the liberation of the death camps at the end of the second world war, a horrified public came together to say, “Never again”. Yet “again” happened, whether in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia or Darfur. In every case, the world failed. We turned our faces away, and when we were finally forced to look and accept, we pledged again that that was to be the last time that systematic annihilation on the basis of ethnicity would be allowed to unfold—until the next.
Unlike many in the chamber, I have never been to Auschwitz, but I have been to places of mass murder: Bergen-Belsen, the Racak massacre site in Kosovo, and the United Nations enclave in Srebrenica in Bosnia, where the blue helmets stood aside for Serb forces to sweep in and once again perpetrate genocide on Europe’s soil. There is something arresting about each of those places; it is the stillness, where so much indifferent violence and perfunctory murder took place.
I wonder at the coincidence of Holocaust memorial day being so close to Burns night, when the most appropriate observation of human capacity for evil is so perfectly captured by Burns himself:
“Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!”
Yet, to mourn is not enough. We must resolve to do better.
We have asked too much of those who escaped death at Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Ravensbruck, Treblinka and a dozen other camps and who, through luck, guile, fate or timing avoided the gas chambers, firing squads, punishment beatings or rampant disease that claimed the lives of so many. Yet, after they walked out of hell, we asked them to relive it.
The Holocaust Educational Trust’s work of taking children to the camps and having camp survivors tell their stories again and again in classrooms across the country has been invaluable in teaching generations that are untouched by such horror how hate can degenerate into evil and that Kristalnacht, the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto or cattle trucks rumbling into factories of death are not events in isolation, not the alpha and omega. Rather they are the destination reached by a journey that starts with intolerance, moves to discrimination, traverses hate, ideology, dehumanisation, persecution and then reaches annihilation. All that is required for that journey to be made is for decent people to avert their eyes, stand back, leave it to someone else and be too afraid to challenge, in case those instruments of hate are turned on them. That is how it was in 1930s Europe, and that is how the world has turned ever since.
We have to take responsibility for the protection of our fellow citizens and for the preservation of the culture of openness, opportunity, diversity and freedom that so many fought so hard to secure. Soon, the number of survivors will thin to nothing and those first-hand accounts will cease, but their names will not be lost nor their stories become untold as long as we commit to that task. The Talmud says:
“If you lift the load with me, I will be able to lift it; and if you will not, I won’t lift it.”
Tackling those forces of evil—prejudice, hate and persecution—along with the handmaidens of indifference, blindness and cowardice that allow them to flourish, is a load that we have left to the survivors of Auschwitz for too long, to the Holocaust Educational Trust for too long: to other people, for too long. If we want history to be remembered and the names of those who died and those who were saved to be written, recorded, seen and to count, then it is time for us all to step forward and help lift the load with them. I support the motion.
15:15