My Lords, it is with respect and solemn reflection that I move the Motion standing in my name on the Order Paper. This year marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many of us have attended Holocaust Memorial Day events across the country, including the national ceremony in London. His Majesty the King attended the commemoration at Auschwitz-Birkenau alongside Chief Rabbi Mirvis, Holocaust survivor Mala Tribich and leaders of 50 countries.
Last week, I had the honour of listening to Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg. What struck me was that, although Manfred is now 94, he related what happened to him as a young boy as though it were yesterday. He told us about the heartbreaking moment when, aged 13, he and his mother were sent off to work while imprisoned at the Preču concentration camp. On their return, his little brother Herman was missing. They never saw him again. For over 70 years, Manfred held a small hope that, somehow, Herman had survived and one day they might be reunited. Sadly, that was not to be. Manfred’s story about his little brother brought home to me that, while we rightly remember that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, we often miss that 1.5 million were Jewish children.
Manfred’s story touched me deeply, as he spoke of his mother and the loss of her youngest son. I am the youngest son in my family and I recently lost my dear mother. I take this opportunity to give my heartfelt thanks to noble Lords for all their kindness shown to me in the last few weeks. It does not really matter how old you are; the loss of a mother affects you deeply. My mother was an inspiration: one important thing she taught me, which is so relevant to today’s debate, is that we must never forget the lessons of history. The history of the Holocaust provides lessons for the whole world. It shows us what can happen when hatred takes over a society, when barriers are created and fellow humans are treated as something different—something to be despised.
Nazi ideology can be hard to comprehend. It was ruthless and fearsome. Children like Manfred’s younger brother Herman were especially vulnerable to Nazi persecution. Nazi Germany and its collaborators murdered not only 1.5 million Jewish children but tens of thousands of Romani Gypsy children, 5,000 to 7,000 German children with physical and mental disabilities living in institutions, as well as many Polish children and children residing in the German-occupied Soviet Union.
Along with elderly people, children had the lowest rate of survival in concentration camps and killing centres. People over 50 years of age, pregnant women and young children were immediately sent to gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau and other killing centres. Until mid-1943, all children born in Auschwitz, regardless of origins, were murdered, usually by phenol injection or drowning. Later, non-Jewish newborns were allowed to live. They were entered in the camp records as new arrivals and tattooed with a prisoner number.
My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this important debate to your Lordships’ House today. It has been my solemn duty to bring this debate to the House in previous years, and I congratulate him on his speech. I too am looking forward to hearing the maiden speeches of the noble Lords, Lord Evans of Sealand and Lord Katz, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt. I know the whole House will join me in welcoming them.
On Holocaust Memorial Day every year, we remember the unspeakable crimes of the Nazi regime against the Jewish people. We remember also the many political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Polish, Roma, Sinti, lesbian and gay victims of the Holocaust.
It is on Holocaust Memorial Day that we remember the unique evil of the Holocaust: the killing of Jews because they were Jews, as part of the Nazis’ plan to wipe out the entire Jewish people. The history of the Holocaust is a bitter truth, and we must never shy away from repeating that truth. Auschwitz, Dachau, Bergen-Belsen, Majdanek and Treblinka are just some of the haunting names of the places where Jews were imprisoned, beaten, worked to death, tortured and exterminated—murdered because they were Jews.
Not all the names of the Nazi camps are so familiar to us. Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen were just two of over 1,000 concentration camps operated by the Nazi regime for the mass persecution and murder of Jews and its other victims. Eighty years ago today, on 13 February 1945, Soviet forces liberated Gross-Rosen concentration camp. By 1945, there were no Jews left at Gross-Rosen because, on 2 December 1941, the head of the camp, Anton Thumann, gave the order that
“no Jew is to remain alive by Christmas”.
On 12 October 1942, the last 37 living Jewish prisoners were sent to Auschwitz.
Isaak Egon Ochshorn, a Jew who was in Gross-Rosen from June 1941 to October 1942, before being transferred to Auschwitz, gave evidence after the liberation of the camps that showed the appalling treatment of Jews at Gross-Rosen. He said:
more apt a tribute than when seeing the King spending hours at Auschwitz-Birkenau, paying tribute with the sincerest words possible. I am sure that the entire Jewish community, here and around the world, is moved and grateful.
For some of us, every day is Holocaust Remembrance Day. My earliest memories are of my mother weeping over my bedside because of her inability to get her mother out of Poland and into this country. She blamed herself for her mother’s death.
On my father’s side, he lost his mother and two siblings. His tiny ancestral village on the border of Poland and Ukraine lay during the war in the path of the Russians coming one way and the Germans coming the other. When the Germans arrived, they summoned all the Jewish women to the village square with their valuables. Next door to my family lived a Polish painter, Eugeniusz Waniek, who subsequently went to Kraków and became very well known.
On her way to the square, my aunt Helena rushed next door to him and thrust a set of silver cutlery wrapped in a linen cloth into his hands. “Keep this”, she said, “until we get back”, which, of course, she and her children never did. He did a brave thing, which would have cost him his life had it been discovered: he hid the silver in the cloth in a box in his garden. At the end of the war, he took it with him to Kraków. There was no internet then and he never knew what had become of my family.
I happened to speak about my origins to Norman Davies, the distinguished historian of Poland. In 2008, he wrote in a Kraków newspaper about my trip to the family village. Waniek, the painter, by then 102, was read this by his carer. He declared that he had something for me and, to cut a long story short, I returned to his flat in Kraków, where, in the presence of the media and after a glass of schnapps and some reminiscences, he presented me with the cutlery in the same linen cloth. They are the only artefacts I have that were touched by my lost family. What a tribute it is to the bravery endemic in such small acts in those terrible times. He died three months later.
My Lords, it is an honour to participate in this debate. I anticipate hearing many more thoughtful and powerful contributions like those we have already heard, and look forward to hearing the words of the noble Lord, Lord Katz, who will follow me. I congratulate him on making his maiden speech today, along with the noble Lord, Lord Evans, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt.
I declare my interest as a former chair of the Council of Christians and Jews. With that in mind, I was very glad to see on the speakers’ list today my friend the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, who shared with me as a trustee there. I look forward to what he has to say.
On Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember the lives of the 6 million Jewish men, women and children, along with other groups, who were murdered by the Nazis. This year has been particularly significant, as it marks the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. As the Minister pointed out, as each year goes by, the number of living people who have their own personal accounts of surviving the Holocaust diminishes. It is the responsibility of us all to ensure that their lives do not simply become statistics in a history book but that they are remembered as people, each with their own stories and experiences.
In that regard, I commend to your Lordships the Forever Project, an interactive experience that I visited at the Beth Shalom National Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire. This project gives people the opportunity to hear from and to have a question and answer session with a hologram of a Holocaust survivor. Through the use of AI and voice recognition, it is an innovative way to preserve their memories and to enable future generations to learn about their experiences. Those memories serve as a reminder and a warning of where anti-Semitism can lead when left unchallenged, and we must be alive to prevent such atrocities recurring. This is why commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day each year is so important.
My Lords, it is an honour to speak in the debate, opened by my noble friend Lord Khan, and to hear from so many noble Lords on this subject, not least, in a few minutes’ time, my noble friend Lord Dubs, whose wise words continue to inspire.
I thank noble Lords from across the House for the warm welcome that I have been given in the few days I have been here. I thank the doorkeepers, attendants and all the staff of the House, who have been so supportive and have done their level best—often in vain—to stop me getting lost. I thank my supporters, my noble friends Lord Kennedy of Southwark and Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, and my noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon, for all the support and encouragement that they have given me.
As the memory of the Holocaust, that most singular act of evil, fades into the distance, and the number of survivors who can bear witness to the cruelty of Nazi persecution diminishes, we must redouble our efforts to etch the Shoah, and subsequent genocides, into our collective memory.
I add my voice to those of many other noble Lords today in thanking the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust for all the work that they do to ensure that this happens. However, they face a Sisyphean task. Research from the Claims Conference published last month found that 52% of those surveyed in the UK did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust. Nearly a third could not name any of the camps or ghettos established in World War II. Those figures underscore the scale of the challenge, in the face of social media misinformation which seeks to downplay, distort and even deny the reality of the Holocaust, one of the most documented events in world history. Our truth is indeed under attack. This is our responsibility too. Debate is coarsened and conspiracies fed when senior politicians compare their opponents with Nazi collaborators or doubt their loyalty to this country.
It is a privilege and an honour for me to follow the speech of my noble friend, and I congratulate him on what he has done and what he has said today in his speech. As we know, he has been national chair of the Jewish Labour Movement since 2019. He has a long history in the Labour movement. He was political officer of the Transport Salaried Staffs Association, working with our late friend Lord Rosser when he was general secretary. He served on Labour’s National Policy Forum and retains a keen interest in transport matters and rail in particular. He has also served as a local councillor, representing Kilburn for Camden Council from 2010 to 2014. He was a Labour candidate for Hendon in 2017, and for Cities of London and Westminster in 2001, in which role I preceded him—and also lost—many years before. He was recently awarded an MBE for political and public services. I always enjoy meeting colleagues who have been local councillors, with whom I have something in common, and I understand the contribution that local councillors make to life in their communities—we sometimes devalue that here.
Mike also talked about his family history. It is appropriate, on a day when we are debating this topic, that we should remember the family history of people like him and how it led to this country becoming the country it is. He talked strongly about anti-Semitism, a scourge on any country, and on this one when we experienced it. I found the anti-Semitism painful and personally upsetting, and I still do.
Recently, the Prime Minister invited to tea at No. 10 Downing Street—the first time I have been there for some years; well, I am hoping—Holocaust and Kindertransport survivors and above all, their children and grandchildren. There are not many of us left, as has been said, who came to this country on the Kindertransport, and even fewer, sadly, who survived the horrors of the camps. I remember an occasion here, an event that I think the Holocaust Educational Trust organised, in one of the committee rooms. There were Holocaust survivors there, and they asked me what I was. I said, “I just came on a Kindertransport”, and they said, “That’s wonderful”. I said, “Look, compared to what you went through, I just got on a train, and two days later I arrived at Liverpool Street station. What you went through was unbelievably appalling, and we respect what you’ve been through and your sense of purpose and tenacity”. Sadly, there are not many people left in either category, either Holocaust survivors or Kindertransport people, which is why it was interesting to have tea in 10 Downing Street with the Prime Minister. I notice that King Charles has also been to Auschwitz and spoken out strongly in opposition to anti-Semitism.
My Lords, I very much welcome this debate initiated by the Government during their presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and I congratulate the Minister on his speech. It is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, as it always is to work with him. We are blessed today by three maiden speeches from the noble Lords, Lord Evans of Sealand and Lord Katz, and the noble Baroness, Lady Levitt, who are all on the Bench opposite.
Only the noble Lord, Lord Katz, has spoken before me; the chairman of the Jewish Labour Movement has shown what a great contribution he will make to this House. If I may squint at my phone, I found an interview he did with Jewish News in which we explained how his family originated in Białystok—then in Russia, now Poland. He recounted his preparation for his introduction to this House:
“I was asked by this very nice man ‘We just wanted to check whether any of your family has been ennobled?’ I thought to myself that in the past some of my family may well have been on the run from Russian nobility!”
I thought that that encapsulated a bit of his history.
This year, we mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp, Auschwitz-Birkenau, in January 1945. I was grateful to be invited to the ceremony led by the Foreign Secretary David Lammy at the FCDO, where we heard both from a Holocaust survivor and from a young woman, among many others. She, like myself, is not Jewish, but she spends a lot of her spare time on Holocaust education because she can see how vital it is to all of us.
I recognise the special pain for the Jewish community, but as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said:
“The Holocaust threatened the fabric of civilisation … prejudice and the language of hatred must be challenged by us all. Holocaust Memorial Day is for everyone”.
My Lords, I draw the attention of the House to my registered interests, particularly those relating to Holocaust remembrance. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Katz, on a wonderful speech. He reminded me very much of how I felt when I first arrived here. I can remember being given an office on the third floor, above Royal Court, and then spending the next two weeks trying to find it again. He gave an informed maiden speech. It is clear that his contribution will make a very big difference to this House. I welcome him here; he comes with a magnificent reputation, and I personally look forward to hearing him speak again.
A couple of weeks ago, I stood close to the railway arch at Auschwitz-Birkenau, close to where, over 80 years ago, my friend Ivor Perl last talked to his mother. On the separation ramp, he jumped lines to join her and his little sister, saying, “I want to be with you, mum”. She replied calmly, “No, Ivor, go and be in the other line with your brother”. He obeyed. They would never see each other again. By the time he was allotted a hut, both mother and daughter were dead and cremated, their ashes cooling. Ivor remembered that it was a beautiful warm spring day.
Noble Lords may recall that Ivor inspired the strap-line of the UK’s presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, “In Plain Sight”, meaning that the Holocaust did not happen in dark corners but in bright sunshine, with the whole world watching.
The UK holds the presidency on the cusp of significant change. Within a few short years, Holocaust survivors will move from contemporary memory into history books. How we deal with the loss of witnesses has been vigorously debated for the last few decades. When I took up the role of special envoy 10 years ago, the feeling among some was that empathy was the key, and that everything would fall into place naturally. I had my doubts. Unsupported empathy is fragile and fickle. If there is any doubt about that, consider the indifference the world has shown to the Israeli hostages. Consider the reaction by humanitarian agencies to the three emaciated men who were released—one of whom was hoping to be reunited with a family long dead. Not a single word of comfort came from any of the self-described humanitarian agencies.
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Due to woeful conditions in the camp, few lived long. Children born to Jewish mothers were routinely murdered. Thousands of Jewish children survived this brutal carnage, many because they were hidden. With identities disguised, and often physically concealed from the outside world, these youngsters faced constant fear, dilemmas and danger. Theirs was a life in shadows, where a careless remark, a denunciation or the murmurings of inquisitive neighbours could lead to discovery and death.
Of course, none of these stories could be preserved without the men and women with the courage to tell them—women such as the remarkable Lily Ebert MBE, who died at home in London in October last year, aged 100. Her life after Auschwitz showed that, even in the face of unspeakable evil, the human spirit can triumph.
Ann Kirk BEM died earlier this year, at the age of 96. She arrived alone in London aged 10 on the Kindertransport. She dedicated her life to raising awareness about the horrors of Nazism. Anne was married to Bob Kirk BEM, who also came to the UK on the Kindertransport and died late last year, aged 99. They were a wonderful couple who dedicated their lives to sharing their story—a story of how they left their home and parents as children and made new lives in the United Kingdom.
Anne met Bob at a social hub for Jewish refugees called Achdut, which means togetherness. The couple married in 1950 and had two children. It was not until 1992 that they told their sons about their background, after being invited to speak at an event commemorating Kristallnacht at Northwood synagogue. It was during the couple’s speech that their children discovered the truth of their upbringing. I often think how hard it must be for survivors to give their testimony, to return to those moments, to remember those darkest of days and to recount how loved ones—husbands, wives, sons, daughters—were taken away.
I want also to take a moment to debunk the idea that we did not know what was happening. From 1942 onwards, reports of the mass murder of Jews in continental Europe began to reach Britain. As the tide of the war turned against Germany and its allies, the British Jewish community started to plan for post-war relief work. Jewish aid workers began, after the liberation, to report that some children had survived the Nazi concentration camps.
In May 1945, Leonard Montefiore, a well-known philanthropist, travelled to Paris to meet with the heads of Jewish organisations. Before returning home, he wrote to Anthony de Rothschild, chairman of the Central British Fund—now World Jewish Relief—outlining a scheme to bring
“a few hundred children from Bergen-Belsen or Buchenwald”
to Britain. On his return to London, Montefiore drew up detailed arrangements planning not only how he was going to get the children to Britain but how he was going to give them the best possible care.
The British Government approved his proposal and granted permission for 1,000 child survivors to be brought to the UK. At this point, it was believed that no more than 5,000 Jewish children in central and eastern Europe had survived the Holocaust, and those would be cared for in allied and neutral countries such as Sweden and Switzerland, so the Home Office’s offer of 1,000 visas was a fitting response.
That said, the offer of help from the British Government was not without conditions. The children had to be aged 16 years or under and would be granted permission to stay in the UK for only two years. They were not to cost the taxpayer a penny and the Central British Fund was to be financially responsible for the entire cost of looking after them. The money to do this was to be raised privately. It was later stipulated that only children who had been in concentration camps would be admitted to the UK, although the age limit was raised to 18 in 1946.
In the end, just over 700 children came to Britain. They were known as the boys, even though there were girls too, and they arrived in five groups. The first group arrived in August 1945, is known as the Windermere boys and was made up of 300 children. The second group arrived in October 1945, is known as the Southampton boys and was made up of 152 children. The third group arrived in March 1946, is known as the Belgicka boys and was made up of 149 children. The fourth group arrived in June 1946, is known as the Paris boys and was made up of 101 children. The fifth group arrived in April 1948, is known as the Schonfeld boys and was made up of 21 children.
Their story is less well known than that of the Kindertransport, through which 10,000 Jewish children were saved in the aftermath of Kristallnacht in 1938. The boys set up the ’45 Aid Society in 1963. They wanted to say thank you and to give back to the society that had welcomed them. Over time, the running of the ’45 Aid Society has passed to the children of the boys—often referred to as the second generation—the custodians of the testimonies and life stories of the boys. They keep their testimonies alive and make them relevant for future generations, through educational activities, community events and fundraising.
I want to thank these custodians, but I really want to say a special word to the survivors. Every day that you have lived, and every child and grandchild that your families have brought into this world, have served as the ultimate rebuke to evil and the ultimate expression of love and hope. We need only to look at today’s headlines to see that we have not yet extinguished man’s darkest impulses, but none of the tragedies that we see today may rise to the full horror of the Holocaust.
The individuals who are the victims of such unspeakable cruelty make a claim on our conscience. They demand our attention: that we do not turn away; that we choose empathy over indifference; and that our empathy leads to action. That includes confronting the rising tide of anti-Semitism around the world. We have seen attacks on Jews in our streets and in the streets of major western cities. We have seen public places disfigured by swastikas.
Some foreign Governments continue to rinse their history, and some are not willing to recognise that the Nazis could not have done this alone; they needed willing partners. It is up to each of us, every one of us, to forcefully condemn any denial of the Holocaust. It is up to us to combat not only anti-Semitism but racism, bigotry and intolerance in all their forms, here and around the world. We cannot eliminate evil from every heart or hatred from every mind. What we can and must do is make sure that our children and their children learn their history so that they might not repeat it. We can teach our children to speak out against a casual slur. We can teach them that there is no “them”, there is only “us”.
I have had the honour of attending many Holocaust Memorial Day events over the last couple of weeks, each one different and yet all the more meaningful. My department funds the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, and this year granted an additional £80,000 to the existing annual grant of £900,000, to ensure that the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony was televised on the BBC. I have been told that 2 million people tuned in to the ceremony.
As we approach the 25th anniversary of the Stockholm declaration, it is important to take stock of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s achievements. IHRA is perhaps best known for its non-legally binding definition of anti-Semitism. There are many other tools relating to accessing archives and safeguarding sites, and a toolkit to fight Holocaust distortion. These are just a few of the tools developed by IHRA in partnership with the experts, and I pay tribute to the work of the noble Lord, Lord Pickles, in particular, in this area.
IHRA is important because it holds each and every one of us to account. We all have issues with our history. The problems we face today are more complex and more subtle. It has been a long process even for democratic countries to confront their own problematic history. Year on year, we see countries rinse their history and rehabilitate people. Well-known anti-Semites morph into nationalists or become heroes in the fight against communism. It was only in 1995 that the French Government accepted responsibility for the deportations and deaths of over 70,000 Jews and Austria finally dispelled the myth of being Hitler’s first victim and made amends to Austrian Nazi victims.
In the United Kingdom and the United States, we need to come to terms with the fact that we did not open our borders and accept Jews fleeing the Nazis. Earlier, I mentioned the Kindertransport. In the case of the UK, we accepted children but not their parents. Most of the children never saw their parents again.
The work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Association of Jewish Refugees and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust to ensure that we never forget is more important than ever, especially as the number of Holocaust survivors is dwindling. Each and every one of us who has had the privilege of hearing first-hand testimony has a duty to keep their memory alive.
That is why we remain determined to create the UK national Holocaust memorial and learning centre in Victoria Tower Gardens—a place where we can learn about the Holocaust, a place which will ensure that we never forget where hatred can lead. Subject to the passage of the Bill, and to recovery of planning consent, we hope to begin construction before the end of this year.
These words of Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel are very important:
“Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed, and seven times sealed. Never shall I forget that smoke. Never shall I forget the little faces of the children, whose bodies I saw turned into wreaths of smoke beneath a silent blue sky”.
It has been 80 years since the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Americans liberated Buchenwald and the British liberated Bergen-Belsen. We owe it to those who were murdered, those who survived and those who liberated the camps to never forget and to ensure that every generation knows where hatred and indifference can lead.
Before I end, I would like to pay tribute to my noble friend Lady Anderson. We all know how dedicated she is to tackling anti-Semitism and all forms of hatred. She has never given in, despite appalling levels of abuse directed at her. She is someone I greatly admire.
As a man of faith and as the Faith Minister, I think it is only fitting that I end with the following words penned by the late Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks—may his memory be a blessing:
“We know that whilst we do not have the ability to change the past, we can change the future. We know that whilst we cannot bring the dead back to life, we can ensure their memories live on and that their deaths were not in vain”.
I look forward to everyone’s contributions, in particular, the maiden speeches of my noble friends Lord Katz, Lord Evans and Lady Levitt. I beg to move.
“The sport of Commandant [Thumann], favoured in winter, was to have many Jews daily thrown alive into a pit and to have them covered with snow until they were suffocated”.
We must never forget.
In this the 80th year following so many liberations, we must also remember that liberation was not the end of the story for the victims and survivors of the Holocaust. Many Jews died early because of the harm the Nazis did to them during the Holocaust. The wounds of families that were broken by the Holocaust were felt for many years and are still felt today.
Holocaust Memorial Day was intended to be a reminder of the suffering of the Jewish people in the past, but we sadly know that Jewish people are still not free from persecution. As we heard from the Minister, since 2023 we have seen a shocking rise in anti-Jewish racism on our streets, online, and in our schools. In 2024, the Community Security Trust recorded 3,528 anti-Semitic incidents in the United Kingdom, the second-highest total ever reported to the CST in a single year, second only to the 4,296 recorded in 2023.
Anti-Semitism in this country is growing, and it is shaming that the spike in anti-Semitism we have seen over the past year has directly followed the worst massacre of Jews since the fall of the Nazi regime. When I moved this debate last year, just months after the pogrom of 7 October, I recounted the story of 91 year-old Moshe Ridler, a Holocaust survivor murdered in Kibbutz Holit, just over 1 mile from the border with Gaza. His home was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and then by a hand grenade. To his 18 children and great-grandchildren, may his memory be a blessing.
The deaths of the 1,200 people who were murdered in the 7 October pogrom, as well as the ongoing suffering of the hostages and their loved ones, remind us that the work of organisations such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust has never been more important. I put on record my thanks to the CEO of the Holocaust Educational Trust, Karen Pollock CBE, who does so much important work to ensure that our children and grandchildren are taught about the horrors of the Holocaust. I also thank the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, its CEO, Olivia Marks-Woldman OBE, and her team, which delivers the annual Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony and thousands of local activities across the country.
Eighty years on and still the Jews across the world experience persecution, discrimination and, at worst, fear for their lives. That is the imperative of our commemoration: we must not merely ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten; we must remember, actively reflect on and learn about the unique suffering of the Jewish people in the Holocaust. We must teach it to our children and remind our neighbours of the insidious threat of anti-Semitism. We must never forget—and we must hold to the promise, “Never again”. Only by keeping our covenant to remember may we hope to end anti-Semitism for good.
I look forward to hearing the reflections of noble Lords across the House. My thoughts and prayers are, as always, with the victims and survivors of the Holocaust and their families.
So it is with some pain that I wonder what Britain’s politicians and leaders mean when they support Holocaust remembrance. What do they mean by remembering it and by “never again”? What I see is ignorance of the history of anti-Semitism and the mistaken framework that treats the Holocaust as consigned to the Nazi past, not the preceding 2,000 years and today. Perhaps with good intentions, the Holocaust has been globalised. That makes it seem as though Jews were just one of many casualties—and it is therefore exceptional to focus on them or on anti-Semitism—and that the notion of genocide can be spread far, wide and thin.
Jewish scholars will tell you that to assemble the Holocaust with other genocides reduces its meaning to that vague word: hatred. It dilutes and avoids the centrality of anti-Semitism. Restricting the Holocaust to the Jewish tragedy—as it should be—does not mean that the loss of Jewish lives is worth any more than any others. But the record in recent years shows a marked reluctance to acknowledge the specificity of Jewish suffering. The Holocaust is entirely different from the other genocides we remember—in history, continuation, manner of execution, worldwide extent, collaboration and result. The Government, by going along with the structure that the Jewish Shoah should not be commemorated on its own, but always in tandem with other Nazi-targeted groups and more recent genocides, have opened the door to generalising the Holocaust. This enables the Jews to be forgotten and not mentioned by “Good Morning Britain” or Angela Rayner when marking Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sadly, it leads on to comparisons between the Holocaust and the Gaza war, most shockingly by the Irish President.
For half a century, it has been assumed, without evidence, that learning about the Holocaust prevents lapses into anti-Semitism—but it does not. That is in part because the Holocaust has been detached from the rest of Jewish history and because it has been used as a lesson in morality and democracy. It is easy enough to portray the Nazis as evil and the Jews as innocent victims. The lessons go on to indicate that it was not this generation that committed those crimes and that we are not bystanders. That must not be allowed to become an absolution. It should not be allowed to place anti-Semitism firmly in the past—that is wrong. Even in this country, we should not forget the massacre of Jews in 1190 and the expulsion in 1290. In my own hometown, Christ Church Cathedral is built right in the middle, on top of houses occupied by the Jews. There is too much politicisation, de-judaisation and universalisation demonstrated at Holocaust remembrance ceremonies. This is counterproductive.
The late Lord Sacks, of blessed memory, explained how anti-Semitism mutated from hatred of the religion, then the race and now the only Jewish state. Sadly, it is only a state of one’s own and the means of self-defence that stop genocide, as can be seen from more recent genocides. If Israel had existed in 1938, rather than 1948, and had been able to take in refugees rather than being blocked by the British, how many thousands or millions of lives might have been saved? In the 1940s it was able to take in the Jews thrown out of other Middle Eastern states whose persecution we should also remember.
In 2023, we saw the new Holocaust threats from the invaders into Israel from Gaza, and their desire to repeat it. This Government are rightly keen on Holocaust remembrance, but they should accept that they have a special responsibility for the protection, safety and understanding of the State of Israel.
The Government should acknowledge that they have failed to stop anti-Semitism being demonstrated in our universities and on our streets. Holocaust remembrance is ineffective unless backed up by supporting and understanding a safe and strong Israel—that is the real meaning of ensuring never again.
We need to teach that the Holocaust did not succeed. Since the end of it, we have had 24 Nobel prizes, business leaders, philanthropy, cultural achievements and a new state. The distinguishing feature of the Jewish community down the ages is survival. Let us go forward on an upbeat note. We survived against all the odds; not death, not victimhood.
It is a matter of fact and a matter of shame that, through a distortion of Christian theology, the Church in almost all its branches has historically contributed to the immense suffering and injustice experienced by Jewish people over the ages. It follows that the Church must have a vital role and duty, in partnership with others, in actively standing against anti-Semitism. This is a major task for our renewed theological understanding today.
The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “For a Better Future”, but to build such a future we cannot be passive; it requires commitment and action from each one of us. Genocide is not inevitable, nor does it happen overnight. It is gradual, beginning with the othering of those whom we consider different from ourselves, and the normalisation of acts of discrimination and hatred. While the horrors of Auschwitz move further into history, sadly, anti-Semitism does not.
One persuasive analogy of anti-Semitism is that of a virus which mutates over time and reinfects society in different forms. The most recent statistics published by the Community Security Trust, cited by the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, underline the dimensions of the resurgence of anti-Semitism in our own time, in our own country. The use of social media has only fuelled this, exposing more people to hateful content and enabling anti-Semitism to spread further and faster.
This is preventable. We can choose to shape a better future, built on our shared humanity and on strengthening the fabric of our communities through mutual understanding and trust. We cannot afford to be complacent bystanders. We must actively challenge anti-Semitism and all discrimination wherever we see it, to seek understanding rather than fearing those who are different from us. We must personally question the small remarks, whether they be so-called jokes or throwaway comments, which can appear insignificant but can so easily build to destructive hate on a greater scale.
Interfaith dialogue plays an important role in this, as well as being an example of how those of different beliefs can come together to find common ground and connection. On Holocaust Memorial Day this year, the Council of Christians and Jews organised a profound morning of testimony, reflection and prayer as a testament to the power and significance of that dialogue.
I finish with some words that Rabbi Charley Baginsky shared at that meeting. She said,
“Optimism, in this sense, is not the denial of pain, but the radical choice to imagine and work toward something better, something more just, something that can heal the divisions we face. This vision of a better future is not a distant dream—it is a call to action. It is a call to reject the forces of hate and division, and to embrace the transformative power of empathy, of connection, of community”.
Let us not forget the horrors of the past, but let the memories of those who experienced them spur us on to build a better future, free from hate and division.
My family was one of the lucky ones. My dad’s father was the last of my forebears to come to Britain, making the perilous trip from Bialystok—then in Russia, now in Poland—to the East End of London in 1911. Sadly, we know little of what and who he left behind. We cannot be sure, but it seems highly likely that some of my family would have perished in the war, simply for the crime of being born a Jew. My grandfather was a tailor, as was my mum’s father, who insisted that before putting down a deposit on one of the new houses being built in Edgware in the 1930s, the site foreman walked him to the school that was promised to be a few minutes’ away. He knew, as so many immigrant families do, of the power of education to transform your life chances.
The lesson stuck. His daughter, my dear mother Doreen, spent her life teaching and passed the lesson on. As someone who attended a comprehensive that, before me, had never sent a pupil to Oxford, I understand all too well the importance of a decent education in promoting social mobility and providing opportunity, from—perhaps especially from—the earliest years, to university access and vocational education.
This is a vital part of the Government’s economic agenda. We should view human capital as being as important as physical capital when we talk of removing obstacles to growth. I say this as someone who has spent the past two decades working in transport, specifically rail, including for an operator and for the rail union TSSA, where I had the great pleasure and honour of working for Lord Rosser, much missed from this place. So I appreciate the Government’s drive to invest in the infrastructure that our country so dearly needs to thrive. For long a neglected subject, I am pleased to see that this is a real focus for this Government. I am not a died-in-the-wool railwayman. I do not argue rail for rail’s sake but for what it achieves—connecting communities, enabling prosperity and, again, promoting social mobility. We need more rail and more integrated and accessible public transport. I hope to be a strong advocate for it in this place.
More widely, we must build our way out of the economic malaise that we have inherited, using not just infrastructure but housing to address the crisis that young people face—I salute the Government’s ambition on housebuilding and am most definitely a yimby in this regard—nor can we fall into the trap that investment is a zero-sum game geographically. I am a born and bred Londoner but I insist that investing in London will continue to be good for the rest of the country and vice versa. One should not and must not come at the expense of the other.
I pause to reflect that it speaks so highly of both my party and our country that a little over 100 years since Chaim Katz stepped off the boat, fewer than 80 years after Solomon Goldberg left the East End for Edgware and helped found the synagogue there, their grandson is a Peer of the Realm. This is but one thread in the special tapestry woven by immigrants depicting the contribution they have made, and continue to make, in a thousand different ways.
Sadly, the tolerance and generosity of this nation, which helped so many immigrants to settle and thrive, was not to be found for Jewish people in the Labour Party between 2015 and 2019. As chair of the Jewish Labour Movement, a socialist society affiliated to the Labour Party since 1920, I and my colleagues found ourselves defending our members, who faced the vile toxin of left anti-Semitism, which had been allowed to enter, and fester in, the party’s bloodstream. Inaction and passivity from the then party leader sent a clear signal that this discrimination was tolerated. The party that so many of us had joined because it believed in equality and fought discrimination doubled down rather than face the difficult truths. It doubled down out of political convenience.
Too many suffered during those years, but it would be truly remiss of me not to mention my noble friends Lady Hodge of Barking, Lady Anderson, my soon-to-be noble friend Luciana Berger, and Dame Louise Ellman, who were the particular and public targets of much of the hatred. The impact on the wider Jewish community in this country was even greater, considering that at the height of the Labour Party’s membership then, it had a membership of well over 400,000 and there are but 300,000 Jews in this country. I will never forget tear-streaked conversations with people in Hendon and Mill Hill—lifelong Jewish Labour voters telling me they simply could not trust the party, our party, any more. How could we have let them down so badly?
It is for ever to his credit that the first thing Keir Starmer did when he won his leadership election was apologise for and vow to root out anti-Semitism from our party. He understood the moral and political necessity of this mission, and he succeeded. Working with my noble friends Lord Evans of Sealand and Lady Ramsey of Wall Heath, who I look forward to hearing from later, we in the JLM challenged, cajoled and drove Labour to meet the challenges set down by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, following that body’s landmark ruling that the party had broken equalities law. Process and rule change were part of that story, but education and leadership, as ever, much more so. I will for ever be proud of the role we in the Jewish Labour Movement played in helping to save the Labour Party.
My party is still in the foothills of rebuilding trust with the Jewish community, but I think we have returned to a place where Jews voting in the general election last year made their choice on policy platforms, not out of fear, as they did in 2019. We must never—never—allow that situation to arise again. Indeed, if the 2019 election was in part about anti-Semitism in the Labour Party, in turn the 2024 election was, in a smaller part, about anti-Semitism in the whole country. As we have already heard from my noble friend the Minister and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott of Bybrook, following 7 October, which saw the largest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, anti-Semitism has risen to unprecedented levels, not merely as a reaction to the ground war that started some time after that date, but from the day itself.
Anti-Semitism, to paraphrase Conor Cruise O’Brien, is the lightest of sleepers. Any excuse will stir it to life. On our campuses, on our streets, around our homes, our synagogues and our schools, the levels of anxiety and fear that British Jews feel is palpable—the worst I have seen in my lifetime. The Prime Minister has been clear that this spike in anti-Jewish hate is intolerable, just as he has been clear that the remaining hostages taken by Hamas on that fateful day and being held in Gaza still must all be brought home now.
It surely cannot be difficult for us all to grasp that we must not blame British Jews for the actions of the Israeli Government, just as we do not blame British Muslims for the actions of Hamas. From this basic proposition, surely all else must follow. As ever, it is through education that we must tackle hate on all sides. Integral to this is ensuring that Holocaust education is, in the words of our Prime Minister, “a truly national endeavour”.
On the words “never again”, what happened in Israel on 7 October was an appalling tragedy, and with some of the events in Gaza, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur and Syria—and what has happened to the Yazidis—I am afraid it seems that we as a world are not learning what we should.
I shall refer again to Nikky Winton, who organised the Kindertransport that brought me to this country. I became a good friend of his before he died and we chatted occasionally. He was a marvellous example of a human being who devoted himself to helping other people. He got to Prague in 1938-39, he saw what was happening and, unlike other people who say, “This is awful” and walk away, he said, “This is awful. I’m going to do something about it”, and that distinguished him. I will put in a plug for the film “One Life”, which came out about a year ago; I have seen it twice, and I have to say it brought me to tears both times. It is a remarkable tribute to a remarkable individual.
Through the Kindertransport, Britain took 10,000 children, mainly from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia. Some argue—though this is not the real point of this debate—that 10,000 was not a very large number, but if we did it then we can do it now. Still, that is for a future Bill on another occasion. It is interesting to read Hansard from the time when the Commons was debating whether Britain should take Kindertransport children. There were voices then of the sort that we have heard more recently, but the fact is that this country took the people. As I am sure your Lordships will be aware, just off Central Lobby in the House of Commons, there is a thank-you plaque on behalf of the 10,000 children who arrived in Britain on the Kindertransport, thanking Britain for having given us safety. When I take people on a tour, I show them that and say, “Look, this is where we thank Britain for what they did to save us”.
Like many people, I have been to some of the camps. I went to Auschwitz and I found it a painful experience; it is even painful to think about it today. I was with a friend who had also fled from Czechoslovakia, standing there looking at the suitcases. In those days, people had initials on their suitcases, and we were looking to see if there were any people we knew whose cases were there and who had then died in the camps. I did not see any.
More recently—I think I mentioned this last year—I was invited to Berlin along with Hella Pick, a wonderful journalist, to a commemoration of Kindertransport in the German Bundestag. They had an exhibition about Kindertransport. It was a very moving thing, all the more so because it took place in Berlin in Germany.
I want to reflect on an experience that I think I referred to in this debate last year. Some time ago, I was invited to a school in east London. It was a maintained school, but it was all Muslim boys. The project they were working on was Kindertransport and the Holocaust. I did my little piece about refugees and the Holocaust. The first question in the Q&A came from a 14 or 15 year-old boy, who said, “What do I say to somebody who denies the Holocaust ever happened?” That was such a powerful question. It was a sign that the school was doing a good job and the message was getting home. This was a statement he wanted to be able to repudiate if somebody mentioned it to him elsewhere. Whenever I have spoken to schools about these issues, they really get it. They understand what is going on and it is very rewarding to talk to students. That is why I pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for the work they do.
If anything is going to come out of the tragedy of the Holocaust, it is the next generation who will carry this forward when those of us who were closer to it are no longer here. That is why I was so shocked when Elon Musk was photographed doing a Hitler salute. Maybe he did not mean it; maybe he did not understand, but it is quite shocking when these sorts of things happen.
I sometimes wonder whether decency and the values we uphold are a thin veneer and these things can even be swept aside. I remember reading some years ago about a German soldier who was working, I think, in Auschwitz and who wrote to his wife back in Germany saying, “Make sure the children clean their teeth”. What a contrast between somebody who was murdering Jews—gassing them, day in and day out—and yet was worried about whether his children were cleaning their teeth. I find that difficult to understand. Last year, tragically, we saw some riots. Again, it made me think that sometimes there is a thin protective layer of decency in countries. Our job is to make that layer much thicker. It is a thin protective layer, because the way those riots exploded and people tried to petrol-bomb hostels housing refugees, I found deeply shocking.
I have spoken to many faith groups, which are all supportive of the cause of refugees. It is a tribute to the many Jewish groups I have spoken to that they are very supportive of refugees. Pretty much all the refugees happen to be Muslims, but the Jewish community is very supportive. That is the sort of thing that should be said more often.
I will finish with one story. I was in a refugee camp in Jordan. It was a decent camp; it had sanitation, electricity and prefabricated buildings. I was talking to a Syrian boy, and I asked him, “What is your situation?”. He said, “Well, I’ve finished my education in the camp. I’ve tried to get a job in the camp, but I can’t. I’ve tried to get a job elsewhere, but I can’t”. It made me think that human beings—I refer to Holocaust survivors in particular—can put up with terrible situations if there is some hope for them at the end of the line. If there is a bit of hope, that is what matters. Our job is to make sure that there is hope and that the scourge of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia is eradicated. Our job is to spread that word. That is why I welcome the chance to take part in this debate.
The Holocaust Educational Trust, another trust that does such great work, noted:
“As the Holocaust moves from living memory to history, this Holocaust Memorial Day presented a key opportunity to bring the Holocaust to the fore of our national consciousness”.
This was a seam emphasised by His Majesty the King, who said:
“As the number of Holocaust survivors regrettably diminishes with the passage of time, the responsibility of remembrance rests far heavier on our shoulders, and on those of generations yet unborn. The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task and in so doing, we inform our present and shape our future”.
My Liberal Democrat colleague, Vikki Slade MP, made a similar point in the debate two weeks ago in the other place,
“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”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/1/25; col. 1163.]
Last October, we sadly lost 100 year-old Holocaust survivor Lily Ebert, to whom the Minister referred. She did so much work to ensure that the Holocaust would not be forgotten. I am delighted that her mantle has been taken up by her impressive great-grandson, Dov Forman.
I was struck by a comment by the Prime Minister about how in Auschwitz he saw,
“photographs of Nazi guards standing with Jewish prisoners staring at the camera – completely indifferent – and in one case, even smiling”.
The Prime Minister said:
“It showed more powerfully than ever how the Holocaust was a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary individuals utterly consumed by the hatred of difference”.
The Holocaust was not only a crime wider than the SS; it also did not come out of nowhere. Preceding it there were years, centuries and millennia of discrimination and persecution of Jews, both as groups and as individuals. As my colleague, Vikki Slade, said, before the Holocaust there was,
“a decade of dehumanising a whole community”.—[Official Report, Commons, 23/1/25; col. 1163.]
Dehumanisation of people—which has been called the fourth stage of genocide—is the key to enabling not only persecution but extermination. Amid all the terrible bleakness and horrors of Auschwitz, I found the arch over the entrance gate emblazoned with, “Arbeit Macht Frei”, — “work makes you free”—the most chilling in its utter cynicism.
When I go to Jewish and Holocaust museums, or indeed to Yad Vashem, which I have visited twice, I not only find the photographs of persecuted Jews subjected to pogroms, and other victims of the Nazis, hugely emotional; I also find desperately poignant the photos of hard-working, bourgeois and successful Jewish families in German and other towns and cities who strove to fit in, to do everything to become respectable citizens of their home country. They sought to belong, and they were still destroyed.
On my bookshelf at home, I have a book that I have had for about 20 years—I think I bought it in New York. It is by Vienna-born Amos Elon and called The Pity of It All: A Portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch. It describes how, in the two centuries from the entry of penniless 14 year-old Moses Mendelssohn, later of course a famous philosopher, into Berlin in 1743—entering through the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate permitted to Jews, and cattle—until 1933, the German Jews increasingly and hugely contributed to Germany's intellectual, political and economic development. The Weimar Republic was the high point of the assimilation and integration of German Jews into German life. The writer notes:
“Alongside the Germany of anti-Semitism there was a Germany of enlightened liberalism, humane concern, civilised rule of law, good government, social security, and thriving social democracy”.
But none of that saved Germany’s or Europe’s Jews, because the continuing discriminatory attitudes of their fellow citizens had never been removed and were there to be exploited.
I was sorry that London’s Jewish Museum closed in 2023. We do, though, have the impressive Holocaust galleries at the Imperial War Museum and the Wiener Holocaust Library. We are privileged to have, as a Member of this House, the Times columnist Daniel Finkelstein—the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein—the grandson of German-Jewish scholar and anti-Nazi campaigner Alfred Wiener, who founded the Wiener library in 1933 in order to warn the world of the Nazi threat. I hope the noble Lord does not mind me referring to him and quoting him in his absence. Within weeks of the appalling attacks by Hamas on 7 October, graffiti was daubed on the Wiener Holocaust Library. The noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein—still, like me, tweeting—understandably reacted, tweeting as @Dannythefink:
“I’m so upset by this graffiti attack on my grandfather’s library. Alfred Wiener had a PhD in Islamic studies and cared deeply about Arab people. To see his Holocaust archive vandalised in this way suggests an attack on Jews not a critique of Israel. It’s dismaying”.
I will finish, as I must, by saying that since 7 October we have seen a distressing rise in anti-Semitic speech and attacks, with hostility to the very existence of the State of Israel. When people chant, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, this is a call not for two states but for the destruction of Israel, based on not only anti-Zionism but anti-Semitism. We have pledged “Never again”, but political developments around the world, not least in Germany, are deeply troubling. Our vigilance must be constant, vocal and vigorous.
For its strategy this year, the UK presidency has adopted a triple-track approach to support empathy around three headings: landscape; archives, including testimony; and objects. On landscape, the IHRA has adopted the safeguarding sites charter, which sets out guidelines for the preservation of murder and detention sites. The UK played a pivotal role in drafting the charter. Across the killing grounds of the Holocaust, sites are deteriorating with the passage of time, neglect and wilful destruction. The charter lays down a set of advice aimed at preserving the sites with dignity.
Complementary to the charter are reminders through people, buildings and places. Our presidency is keen to engage young people, and we did this through the remarkably successful “My Hometown” project. The project invited schools across IHRA member countries to look at what happened in their hometown during the Holocaust. Schools in former occupied countries and those receiving victims of Nazis and their collaborators produced original and moving projects. Participants were from as far afield as Argentina to Greece, and the United States to Poland, and from member countries in between, including the United Kingdom. Most projects attracted favourable media attention, linking familiar buildings and places with the Holocaust locally.
On archives, the presidency has worked with the Association of Jewish Refugees on our legacy project, the Holocaust Testimony portal, which pulls together for the first time testimony from UK Holocaust survivors and refugees who made their home here. This includes testimony from the AJR’s Refugee Voices initiative, the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, the Shoah Foundation and many more archives. We hope that more archives, particularly the smaller and more specialised ones, will join in the coming months. The portal allows the testimonies of individual survivors across the decades to be seen in one place. The IHRA formally established the archive forum, which will encourage the flow of information between archives.
I am a past chair of the Arolsen Archives—the world’s most comprehensive archive on the victims and survivors of the Nazis and their collaborators. The collection has information on more than 17.5 million people and belongs to UNESCO’s Memory of the World programme. In recent years, Arolsen has improved public access to the archive.
To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the camps, the IHRA broadcast over social media “80 Objects/80 Lives”, a digital project of one-minute clips which features 80 objects from filmed testimony of British Holocaust survivors and refugees. The objects represent the personal histories and experiences of Jewish Holocaust survivors, during and at the end of the Second World War. Such objects as teddy bears, a doll, a watch or a spoon take on special meaning. A passport with the letter “J”, a yellow star and a bowl from Bergen-Belsen are bittersweet reminders of a lost world. I thank the Association of Jewish Refugees for its creative help with the 80 objects.
The UK is lucky to have such widespread support for Holocaust organisations, and we used the London plenary to showcase the variety and vivacity of these institutions in the UK. Even in these challenging times, the UK continues to have an excellent reputation in the field of Holocaust remembrance, education and tackling anti-Semitism. The former Attorney-General of Canada, Irwin Cotler, known to many in this Room, described our policy as the gold standard for others to follow.
The UK presidency addressed two pressing problems. We have had special conferences that have dealt with the problems of artificial intelligence and bringing people together across differences, and we organised a conference to deal with the teaching of the Holocaust because there was a lack of confidence after 7 October. We will continue to tackle Holocaust denial and distortion, and will continue to the end to look at the Stockholm Declaration. Next week, we will meet again to look at the next 25 years.
We have moved now. That moment that we saw a couple of weeks ago was poignant on all levels. We will never see the like again. Ten years from now, at the 90th anniversary, there will be no Holocaust survivors to speak. As the Minister said, we are now the custodians of their memory. We have a duty to remember and to tell the truth.