Category: Speeches

Fleur Anderson – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Fleur Anderson, the Labour MP for Putney, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

I congratulate my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) on securing this Backbench Business debate. I thank the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove for his powerful speech.

I thank the Aegis Trust, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust for their constant work to ensure that we always remember the holocaust and all those who died and that we bring that memory into action for what is currently going on around the world. I thank Digby Stuart College at Roehampton University in my constituency for all the work it does on education about the holocaust, and I look forward to its commemoration event in May. I thank all the members of Wimbledon Synagogue for their warm welcome of me whenever I visit for events. I am sad that they have to have security outside the synagogue all the time. It is a reminder to me every time I visit of the growing antisemitism in our country, which has been highlighted by Members and is the reason for us holding this debate here and now.

I also congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) on an assured and excellent maiden speech; I look forward to hearing from him many times in future.

I declare an interest as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on prevention of genocide and crimes against humanity, vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Bosnia and Herzegovina, and vice-chair of the all-party parliamentary group on Ukraine.

My experience of working in Bosnia during the war and speaking to the relatives of those who died in Srebrenica drove my work with refugees before I became a Member of the House and drives my work now on the prevention of genocide, to ensure that when we say, “Never again”, we mean never again. We are also ordinary people but we have extraordinary power to make legislation to put that into action. This year is the 75th anniversary of the convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide, about which there will be lots of soul-searching during the year. I hope that all hon. Members will be part of that, as I am sure I will be: what legislation do we need to ensure that “Never again” means never again?

I join hon. Members in remembering the 8 million people killed during the holocaust and all the survivors, especially those we have lost recently, including Zigi Shipper, who we lost last week on his 93rd birthday. He was a survivor of the Łódź ghetto and the Auschwitz and Stutthof concentration camps. He arrived in the UK in 1947 and spent many decades sharing his testimony in schools across the country. He was awarded the British Empire Medal in 2016 for his work with the Holocaust Educational Trust.

I also pay tribute to all the ordinary people who shared their stories and who I read about growing up, because they had such an influence on me—people such as Anne Frank, Corrie ten Boom and Primo Levi. Their work educated me, shocked me, chilled me, connected me and inspired me. Indifference is all it takes for the spirit of the Third Reich to be resurrected. As holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel once said:

“Indifference, to me, is the epitome of evil.”

How can we ensure that we are not indifferent?

Last year, I visited the Srebrenica memorial with a cross-party group of MPs, including the right hon. Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart). Some 8,000 people, mainly young men, were herded together, taken for a long walk and murdered. Their shoes and clothes were left and are displayed at the memorial, which is a chilling memory of each of them. I saw the video footage of the young men leaving on that walk—they looked like a group of young people going off with bags on their shoulders to walk through the forest for a picnic, not knowing where it would lead them. We met the grieving relatives—the mothers who will never forget and whose whole lives have been blighted by the terror. The row upon row of graves is a shocking sight.

Last September, I visited Kyiv where, on 29 September 1941, the 33,800 Jewish residents of Kyiv were gathered together near a train station and told that they would be taken to safety by train. Instead, they were taken to the edge of the Babi Yar ravine and shot. It was the largest massacre in the history of the holocaust up to then—33,771 people were killed and only 29 survived. Last year, I also visited the memorial to the holodomor, which was another horrific crime of state murder that aimed intentionally to wipe out the Ukrainian people. Some 7 million Ukrainians were starved over just 18 months from 1932 to 1933 on the most fertile lands in Europe. A third of all children in Ukraine perished as a result. In all those cases, the laws were passed by ordinary people and enforced by ordinary people, and led to the deaths of ordinary people.

Every year, we rightly stand here and say, “Never again,” but right now, around the world, atrocities are being committed in Ukraine, against the Rohingya people, against the Uyghur people, and in Tigray. There are several ways to take action to ensure that we mean never again. First, we can create a new pathway outside the UN Security Council to recognise potential and actual genocide. As the International Development Committee and the UK Government have pointed out, the Security Council is failing to act in response to mass atrocities, because Russia and China continue to use their veto to block declarations of genocide and referrals to the International Criminal Court. One way to do that would be to allow time on Report for the Genocide Determination Bill.

Secondly, the Government should take very seriously the recommendations of the “From Srebrenica to a safer tomorrow: Preventing future mass atrocities around the world” report from the International Development Committee. That is a very welcome piece of work by parliamentarians, with strong recommendations about how we can support and strengthen the work of our UK missions. I welcome the new office for conflict, stabilisation and mediation and the mass atrocities prevention hub. These are great moves, but we need to go further to provide early warning and effective reaction to the risk of genocide in areas around the world.

There is always more to be done. My time working in Bosnia during and after the war taught me that we can never take peace for granted. We need to build peace every day. There are words in the playground or on the bus, there is discrimination in the workplace and there is antisemitism online. These must always be challenged and opposed. Holocaust Memorial Day is not just about speeches and gestures. It is about honouring the 6 million victims with our actions, not just our words. I would welcome all Members joining the all-party parliamentary group on prevention of genocide and crimes against humanity, and I look forward to working together to ensure that we, ordinary people though we are, can take extraordinary steps as legislators in the years to come.

January 31, 2023
Saqib Bhatti – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Saqib Bhatti, the Conservative MP for Meriden, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

I associate myself with the sentiment of the hon. Member for Stockport (Navendu Mishra) on social media companies doing more. They simply do not do enough, but they have the resources to do so. I pay tribute to my right hon. Friend the Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) for his moving speech. Every time I hear him speak about his experiences, there is never a dry eye. I congratulate the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) on his maiden speech. He was doing so well up until the fifth minute—as a Manchester United fan, I am sure that we will have many sparring sessions inside and outside the Chamber, but I wish him well.

I thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid), the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) and all Members who have contributed to ensuring that we have this really important debate. I pay tribute to the Holocaust Educational Trust for all its work, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Community Security Trust. I also visited a school in north London and got to see at first hand the sad situation of our children—and they are our children—who are struggling to be educated without fear. I wish we did not have to live in a society where that is the case. I am sure that we will all work together to make that so.

I thank Solihull Council, which had its civic reception this morning as part of its holocaust remembrance events. I urge all Members to spend some time going through the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website, to read the stories of those who survived and those who perished—the mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, brothers and sisters.

“Never again.” So many times we have heard that phrase, and when speaking not only of the holocaust but, sadly, of subsequent genocides, such as those in Rwanda, Cambodia and Srebrenica, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove said. I am a patron of Remembering Srebrenica. In the week that the doomsday clock moved 10 seconds closer to midnight, and when incidents of mass murder and atrocities are unveiled with too much regularity—whether in Ukraine, Xinjiang or in the stories of harrowing abuse suffered by the Rohingya communities—this debate seems particularly poignant. Sadly, that list was not exhaustive. One thing is clear: we cannot be complacent. We cannot assume that it will never happen again. We cannot forget.

The theme today is ordinary people. I want to speak about the extraordinary Paul Oppenheimer, who settled in my constituency after the war, in the village of Marston Green. He was born in Berlin in 1928 and lived in my constituency after the war for over 40 years. In 1940 his family moved to Amsterdam and, within six months of the German invasion, the persecution of the Jewish communities in Holland had started. He was only able to complete one term in the local grammar school before the Nazis banned Jewish children from attending non-Jewish schools. In January 1942, it was decreed that Jews could only reside in Amsterdam, and from April 1942 it was decreed that Jews must wear a Jewish star. The Nazis then went block by block, clearing Jewish families and taking them by train to the Westerbork transit camp, before they were sent on to other camps such as Auschwitz, Sobibor and Bergen-Belsen.

The Oppenheimers were exempt from wearing the yellow star by virtue of a small piece of fortune. In 1936, Paul Oppenheimer visited England with his parents. During their visit, his sister, Eve, was born, and therefore she had entitlement to recognition as a British subject. It was due to Paul’s father’s foresight in registering Eve as a British citizen that the whole family were treated differently, with blue exemption cards. They were kept in the slightly—slightly—better star camp, where they did not have to shave their heads, could wear civilian clothes and would often be protected from the random beatings and shootings, by virtue of that citizenship.

But they were not safe from the unsanitary conditions, and disease was rife. Paul lost his mother and father to disease in 1945, but he and his brother and sister eventually survived and found their way to England. Later in life, Paul checked to see what happened to those who were sent on transit trains to camps from Westerbork. Of the 34,143 people who left Westerbork for Sobibor camp, only 19 survived. Of the 58,380 who left for Auschwitz, 854 survived.

The thing about this story is that, in line with the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day this year, you would never have known it about Paul. He started as an engineering apprentice in Marston Green in my constituency and ended up working in an automotive company on braking systems for passenger cars. In fact, he was so good that his work on anti-locking brakes, which are standard in cars today, earned him an MBE in 1990. It was only when he got that award and journalists started asking him about his life that the horrors he had seen and his story became clear. Paul was the ordinary neighbour. He was the ordinary co-worker. He was the one who ploughed his efforts into rebuilding his life here in Britain. Paul settled in my constituency of Meriden. He brought up his children just streets away from where I live. That is when it hits us how the extraordinary evil of the holocaust touched the lives of so many ordinary people.

As I conclude, I wonder about all the Pauls who did not survive and all the Oppenheimers who did not make it to a place of safety, all the engineers who did not make it, all the doctors, intellectuals and artists, and all the great contributions that could have been made. They were not just a loss to their families; they were a loss to humanity, at the hands of a warped and evil ideology. Whether it is Xinjiang, the Rohingya community or Ukraine, one thing is clear: we must all come together and work with our international partners as a coalition of free, democratic countries and make sure that “never again” is not just something we say but something we live by.

January 31, 2023
Navendu Mishra – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Navendu Mishra, the Labour MP for Stockport, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for this important debate. I also thank the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) and my right hon. Friend the Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) for jointly sponsoring the application, among other MPs. As a fellow Greater Manchester MP, I was particularly pleased by the maiden speech from my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western). I am keen to associate myself with his remarks about cricket, because he and I are known to enjoy a match or two at Lancashire county cricket club, although I should declare an interest as a member of that club.

Before I go into the main segment of my speech, I pay tribute to the Jewish Representative Council of Greater Manchester and Region, as well as the Jewish Leadership Council, and in particular Marc Levy, for all the work they do in celebrating the Jewish community in our city region and shedding light on antisemitism for the vile racism it is. There are also such organisations as the Jewish Labour Movement, which has done a lot of work within my party, and I am grateful to it. Several Members on both sides of the House have mentioned the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, and I have noticed that many, including you, Madam Deputy Speaker, are wearing a badge from the trust. The Holocaust Educational Trust is well known for all the work it does in educational establishments across the country.

We have come a long way since the horrors of the holocaust, but it is important to remember and reflect on the atrocities and the lives taken. I had the privilege of listening to the testimony of Ike Alterman at the Yom Hashoah commemoration at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester last year. His story of surviving in four concentration camps was remarkable. Although tragically his family did not survive, as one of the Windermere children he was able to build a life here in Britain from almost nothing.

At a local level in my constituency, I am grateful to Councillor Dena Ryness and Stockport Council for organising the civic event in my town for Holocaust Memorial Day, where we come together to remember all those people whose lives were tragically taken from them. I will be attending the event in my constituency tomorrow.

My constituency of Stockport is in Greater Manchester. The region has the second largest Jewish community in Britain. In Greater Manchester the Jewish community is thriving and outward-facing but, like Jewish communities in the rest of the country, it has to deal with appalling hate crimes, both in person and online. The hate has sadly persisted, and there was a report last year on the rise in crimes against the Jewish community in Greater Manchester, which was covered by local and national media and must be tackled.

In the Online Safety Bill, work has been done to clamp down on online racial harassment and bigotry, but it is clear that social media companies and tech giants must go further and do a lot more to ensure that this issue is controlled. Bigotry is still bigotry, even if it is typed. I had the privilege of being on the Bill Committee. Lots of organisations got in touch with us. In particular, I highlight the contribution of Mr Danny Stone MBE, the chief executive of the Antisemitism Policy Trust. He was quite helpful to me and other Committee members on both sides of the House.

I recently visited the site of Europe’s most recent genocide in Bosnia-Herzegovina, as part of the International Development Committee delegation. I heard at first hand real and growing fears that the renewed weaponisation of hate speech and polarisation will lead to even more violence. We must all reflect. It is clear that Governments across the world must do more.

Last year the International Development Committee produced the report “From Srebrenica to a safer tomorrow: Preventing future mass atrocities around the world”. The report provides a concrete and practical road map for how Britain can show global leadership in preventing genocide and crimes against humanity. That includes establishing a national strategy on the prevention of mass atrocities and ensuring that all embassies, high commissions and diplomatic posts receive atrocity prevention training, with priority countries receiving specialist support and training and adequate resources.

Last week I signed the book of remembrance in Westminster Hall on behalf of the people of my constituency. Like everyone in this House, my message was “never again.” In order for us to do good on our promise of never again, we must commit to more than just words.

January 31, 2023
David Mundell – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by David Mundell, the Conservative MP for Dumfriesshire, Clydesdale and Tweeddale, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

My thanks to my right hon. Friend the Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) for bringing forward the debate and my commendations to the new hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) on an excellent maiden speech.

I want to tell the House the story of an ordinary person who became extraordinary through her love and courage, who did not look the other way and who eventually laid down her life for her commitment. When Jane Haining was arrested by the Gestapo at the school where she worked in Budapest one morning in April 1944, she told the children in her care:

“Don’t worry. I’ll be back by lunch.”

She did not come back. Instead, from one of Budapest’s police stations, Jane was taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Unlike the 12,000 Hungarian Jews who were arriving daily to the horror of Auschwitz, Jane’s journey started not on the cobbled streets or Budapest or the Someşul Mic side town of Cluj but in the rolling farmland of my native Dumfriesshire. Her so-called crime, unlike the Hungarian Jews she arrived with, was not her ethnicity but her faith and courage. Like almost all who arrived at the camp at that time, Jane died within a few weeks—at just 47—in conditions that few can comprehend. She was the only Scot to die in the holocaust.

Jane had, in a very literal sense, given her whole life to others. As a young girl in Dunscore in eastern Dumfriesshire, she had given it to her younger sisters for whom she had become the carer on the death of her mother. After her graduation from Dumfries Academy, where she had excelled in languages, she worked as a secretary in Paisley and Glasgow before finally finding her calling as a missionary in the Church of Scotland.

From June 1932, Jane was the matron of the Scottish Mission School in Budapest, a boarding house for Jewish and Christian girls. Life and work at the school was overtly Christian, but Jewish parents were keen to see their daughters attend the school not only because of the quality of the education but because of how the girls were accepted. As one commentator noted:

“Jewish girls who came here were not seen as second-class pupils. They were just welcome.”

That must have felt precious to the pupils and their parents as the persecution of the 1930s become more prevalent and pernicious.

Even before the start of world war two, the Church of Scotland had repeatedly advised Jane to leave Budapest, but she refused. After her final visit to her home in Scotland in 1939, she wrote

“if these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me now”?

It is a testament to Jane and a reminder of our capacity for good that her concern was always the children’s needs, not her own safety. Her courage and selflessness, though, cost Jane her life.

When the Nazis swept into Budapest in March 1944, Jane was arrested within a month. Her crimes, according to the Gestapo, included that “she had wept” when, as prescribed by law, she had sewn yellow stars on to the pupils’ clothes. Her sympathies for the Jewish people had been revealed to Nazi authorities by the son-in-law of the cook at her school, whom she had scolded for eating food intended for the girls in her care.

Jane was rightly recognised in 1997 by Yad Vashem as one of the righteous among the nations. She is also recognised as a national hero in Hungary. It was there in 2019 that I, as Secretary of State for Scotland, had the privilege of leading thousands of people through the streets of Budapest on the march of the living, an annual event to mark Hungary’s Holocaust Memorial Day, which movingly that year was dedicated to Jane and started in a street named after her.

Here in the UK, Jane is remembered with a cairn outside Dunscore parish church, and an informative exhibition within it. For those wishing to know more about her life, I encourage them to look to Mary Miller’s book on Jane’s life, “A Life of Love and Courage”, to find out more. While her life, like all those taken in the holocaust, cannot be restored, it can and must be remembered, and I would certainly like to see it remembered more fully and more widely.

As the holocaust and its victims move further into memory, it is right that we do more to ensure that current and future generations comprehend the scale of the horror, but also the impact of each individual loss, and through Jane’s example—the example of an ordinary person—remember that for all the evil in the world, if we do not compromise or look away then, like Jane, there is always something that each individual can do to combat it. As Rev. Aaron Stevens of St Columba’s Church of Scotland in Budapest eulogised:

“Jane Haining’s service and sacrifice shows that caring for people from different backgrounds in no way compromises our faith. In fact, it just might be the fullest expression of it.”

May God bless Jane Haining. She was truly a light in the darkness, and may her light shine even brighter in the future.

January 31, 2023
Lyn Brown – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Lyn Brown, the Labour MP for West Ham, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

It is an absolute honour to follow the right hon. and gallant Member for Beckenham (Bob Stewart) and to hear again his powerful testimony about what he witnessed. He is right that we simply must never forget. His speech is one of many excellent speeches in this debate.

I will speak about the 1943 uprising at Treblinka, where very ordinary people with very little hope rose to destroy the machinery of death and to escape. Treblinka, as we know, was created for the sole purpose of exterminating the Jewish people. It was not capable of holding many people for long periods. There were no forced labour factories. In little more than a year, an estimated 925,000 people were murdered.

The people who fought back had personally seen tens or even hundreds of thousands of innocent people being murdered. They had been forced to cut off the hair of their fellow victims just before they entered the gas chambers and sort through the clothes of the newly dead. They had to pick through the ashes from every day’s thousands of corpses to remove fragments of bone, which were crushed and burned again so that no evidence of this enormous evil would be left. They had been forced to do all that, to endure all that, and still they had the strength to plan, to work together, and to fight for their right to live.

I believe it is important that we understand just how difficult and extraordinary any form of resistance was within the camps, because we know that the control by the guards was almost absolute. All the prisoners knew of the immediate brutality that would be inflicted upon resisters if they were caught. But it was more than that. The Nazi regime sought to break the very spirit of the prisoners—not only their hope, but their solidarity among themselves. Chil Rajchman, who survived Treblinka after taking part in the uprising, said that the victims

“were so abused, victimised…that they wanted to die… Our vision was overcast. We did not know what was happening to us… The whole world forgot about us. Our lives were worthless.”

Despite the devastating impact of years of unceasing trauma, courage and solidarity remained and could not be broken. In the summer of 1943, news came to the camp of the Warsaw ghetto uprising a few months earlier, so against enormous odds, plans for an uprising to destroy Treblinka began. The guards had built an armoury and selected a Jewish locksmith to work on the lock. He was able to make an extra copy of the key and pass it to the organisers. Others were brought into the conspiracy, including the Jewish boys of just 12 or 13 years of age who had been given the weekly task of cleaning up after the camp guards. The uprising began on 2 August 1943. Those brave, brave young boys smuggled guns out from the armoury underneath the rubbish in their carts. The barracks were set alight, and the main gate was attacked, but the towers could not be captured and the guards fought to maintain their brutal control. All that could be done was to run and hide.

Of the 840 people in the camp that day, only 200 fully escaped the pursuit, and just 100 survived the rest of the war. Let us remember that those who rose up in Treblinka were ordinary people willing to die that day so that others would have a chance to live. They were not bound together by training or ideology, but were thrown together in the midst of utter horror. Their desire to survive and resist came from within and from each other. We must remember them. As a country, we must try to match just a fraction of their resilience as we stand against atrocities in our own time, because—as we know and as we have heard—people in this world are still systematically murdered because of their identities.

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the start of acts of genocide in Darfur—horrific crimes against humanity that have happened on our watch. In Darfur, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, rape has been used as a weapon on a massive scale, and millions still endure forced displacement. Every year on Holocaust Memorial Day, we say, “Never again”, but I genuinely believe that saying and believing that requires us to act. Atrocities continue regularly in Darfur, and the people accused of those crimes against humanity have faced no justice. We need to recognise that, instead of being put on trial, some of those implicated in Darfur have built careers on the murder and destruction that they planned and organised. Many remain in positions of power and prosperity in Sudan today.

I absolutely welcome the Government’s statement at the UN Security Council yesterday calling on the authorities in Sudan to act. I hope that justice for the atrocities in Darfur is a primary UK objective as we continue to support the movement of Sudanese people who wish only for peace and democracy. We must always remember the victims of the holocaust, and we can never rest content until justice is done for the victims in Darfur and those everywhere else in our world where genocide again threatens our humanity.

January 31, 2023
Bob Stewart – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Bob Stewart, the Conservative MP for Beckenham, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

I congratulate the new hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western)—I know his area pretty well—on his excellent maiden speech, which was delivered with confidence and poise. I hope that he has a very long membership of this place.

I rise to speak because I have been witness to genocide. I consider this remembrance of genocide—the holocaust and genocide since the second world war—to be hugely important. May I just say a little about my own experience to put it in context?

In April 1993, I was the British United Nations commander in Bosnia and I had been there for about five months. My job was to help deliver humanitarian aid, but the best way to do that is when there is no fighting, so I spent a lot of time trying to stop the fighting. At that time, the fighting around my base was pretty horrendous. The fighting was between Bosnian Muslims, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Serbs. It was ferocious.

The European Community monitoring mission ambassador had arranged a ceasefire, but it was not working, so he asked me to go to the frontlines of all the belligerents to try to stop them fighting. On 22 April, I led about six armoured vehicles up into the mountains, above the Lasva valley, to try to do just that. I did not think that I had much chance of success, but I did as he asked.

The first people I met were Bosnian Muslim soldiers on the mountains. When I asked them to please stop fighting because a ceasefire was meant to be in place, they said, “No, no, in the village of Ahmići, women and children have been massacred.” I said, “No, that can’t be. People don’t do that in 1993.” They said that it had happened. I said, “If I go there, look, witness and come back and tell you that it hasn’t happened, will you stop fighting?” They said yes. I took myself off the mountains. It took me about an hour to get to Ahmići. I approached it from the south, from the main road. The first thing I saw was a mosque with its minaret toppled—it looked like a rocket pointing to the sky. The rest of the village of Ahmići was largely destroyed. Houses were burned down.

I went about a mile to the end of the village, and asked my soldiers to check through. There were a few houses that had not been touched. Later, I discovered that they were houses owned by Bosnian Croats. Some soldiers said that they had crosses on the door to identify them, but I never saw that.

A third of the way down, we went into a house and saw the remains of a man and a boy burned at the doorway. The soldier said, “Come round the back, sir.” We went in the back of this house and there was a charnel —it was like a charnel house. When I first saw it, I did not understand what it was. Then the smell hit me. I was horrified. It looked to me like a couple of women and a few children. They were burned and on their backs. They had obviously died in agony. One had an arched back and their eyes were still there—gosh. We just rushed out and were sick. We went on and found the skull of a baby further down. Mostly, though, people were hidden because, after being shot, killed or burned, the roofs had come down on top of them, so we did not find many of them. A day or so later, I found a whole family: mother, father, son and daughter, all dead in a row. The daughter was holding a puppy. She was killed by the same bullet that killed the puppy.

We reckon that about 120 people were killed at Ahmići. I buried in a mass grave what we thought were about 104 people, mainly women and children—Bosnian Muslims, by the way. The holocaust is also about Bosnian Muslims.

I went on the international media and said, “This is genocide. It is the classic definition of genocide: deliberate targeting of a people.” They did not agree with me to start with at the United Nations, but a couple of years later they did, and Ahmići became part of the genocide and was defined as genocide.

I have given evidence in the war crimes trials—five trials, to be honest—and I am still in shock that it happened. My men could not believe it, and they too are still in shock. I am going back at Easter. I will be representing all of us in this House when I lay a wreath at the village of Ahmići for the 30th anniversary of the massacre. I also lay a wreath to the memory of Dobrila Kalaba, my interpreter. When we discovered the village, she interpreted for me. A couple of months later, the Bosnian Croats shot her dead. We put up a memorial to her. She was a Bosnian Serb.

I will finish by saying two things. If the theme this year is ordinary people, it is dead right, because ordinary people suffer, and ordinary people carry out some of these atrocities. Strange circumstances make ordinary people do very vicious things. I must say that I have met people, and even had dinner with them, before they carried out such things, and they were very normal people.

My final point is that the reason why we have this debate and why we must remember the holocaust is that memory fades. We must ensure that future generations do not lose the fact that man can be really inhuman to man.

January 31, 2023
Steve McCabe – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Steve McCabe, the Labour MP for Birmingham Selly Oak, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

I always enjoy hearing the stories of the right hon. Member for New Forest East (Sir Julian Lewis). I do not care how many times I hear them.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to this debate, and I thank the Members who applied for it. I particularly thank the right hon. Member for Bromsgrove (Sajid Javid) for his fine, thoughtful speech, which set the tone for the day.

I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford and Urmston (Andrew Western) for his cracking maiden speech. He has set a high bar, so I suspect it will be a full House for his next performance. I thoroughly enjoyed his excellent speech.

This debate is part of the wider commemorations for Holocaust Memorial Day, which was established following the visit of my former colleague Andrew Dismore, the former Member for Hendon, to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust in 1999. He introduced a Bill following his visit calling for a day to learn from and remember the holocaust.

I can well remember my first visit to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust and a group of sixth formers from Baverstock School, in the Druids Heath area of my constituency. It was a cold, bitter February day and a totally chilling experience, as I struggled to answer questions from these young people and keep my own emotions under control. I doubt that I have ever experienced anything quite like it since. So it is right that we have this debate and that we have Holocaust Memorial Day, so that we learn and remember.

The holocaust had a lesser direct impact on this country than on many other places, although we should remember that the Nazis invaded the Channel Islands and that many Jews living there were sent to the death camps. The bravery of Witold Pilecki, a Polish underground resistance leader who volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz and report on what was happening, should leave us in no doubt that the allies did receive reliable intelligence reports on the scale of the horrors. Britain also accepted about 10,000 mostly unaccompanied children through the Kindertransport scheme, which is something those who make light of the plight of unaccompanied refugee children today might do well to remember.

In 1991, at the behest of the Holocaust Educational Trust, the holocaust became part of the English national curriculum. We need to remember these horrific events because still today there are those who would deny and distort the reality of the holocaust. Some seek to minimise the numbers killed and others try to blame the Jews for causing their own genocide. Jewish colleagues of mine, and others in this House, have suffered the most antisemitic abuse and threats, usually only for being Jewish. Of course, too many people fail to understand why Israel remains so important to Jews today. Hundreds of thousands of holocaust survivors left Europe for a new life in the state of Israel, established just three years after Auschwitz was liberated.

Last year, I was privileged to visit Poland with colleagues from across this House on the “march of the living”. It reminded us that for 1,000 years before 1939 Poland was the great heartland of Jewish life, but by the end of the war, it was reduced to having a handful of Jewish people. One of the most powerful memories of that visit was hearing the harrowing testimonies of holocaust survivors. But the march also teaches us that the reality is that despite its grotesque scale, the holocaust failed, and since 1945 Jewish people have survived and thrived in Israel, the region’s only democratic state.

So let us continue to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, to be active and vigilant in the face of antisemitism and to be robust in our challenge of those who would seek to destroy the state of Israel or challenge its right to exist. Finally, may I welcome the cross-party support for the holocaust memorial Bill, paving the way for a new memorial and learning centre so that we will never forget?

January 31, 2023
Laura Trott – 2023 Speech to the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association

The speech made by Laura Trott, the Pensions Minister, to the Pensions and Lifetime Savings Association on 30 January 2023.

Good afternoon, it’s great to be here at the PLSA, as we launch further measures to ensure people saving into a workplace pension are treated fairly, are properly protected and can enjoy the secure retirement they expect and deserve.

Today’s measures are just one part of our wider reforms to the private pensions sector. Reforms, which, together, recognise and respond to a sector that has undergone significant change over the past few decades.

The move we’ve seen from Defined Benefit to Defined Contribution schemes means it is individuals who now shoulder greater responsibility for growing their pension pot.

It is a structural shift that has led to stark generational differences between those who can expect a predictable level of retirement income – guaranteed by their employer – and those for whom there are no such guarantees.

There is increased risk and uncertainty compared to decades previously and often less adequacy.

The introduction of Automatic Enrolment in 2012 under the Conservatives was a game-changer.

For over ten years, it has been embedding a culture of retirement saving for a new generation within a new pensions landscape.

Millions more people are now saving into a workplace pension – with 10.8 million workers enrolled so far and £33 billion more saved in real terms in 2021 than in 2012.

But as well as coverage, we also need to focus on quality and outcomes.

Having created a new generation of savers, it’s only right that we help them maximise the value of their hard-earned retirement in later life.

Pension Freedoms have provided more flexibility for people to choose how and when to access their pension savings.

Alongside a record number of workplace pension savers and assets, there’s more choice and more freedoms.

But with more choice, comes increased variability in terms of the retirement outcomes that schemes are delivering for savers.

More freedoms put more decisions into the hands of individuals to make.

As scheme members, many feel they are navigating through a hugely complex financial world.

There is more that we can do to help. My plans for reform focus on three pillars. Increasing are Fairness, Adequacy and Predictability.

On Fairness, if your scheme is underperforming and you don’t know about it, you could be losing out on thousands of pounds.

When I started this role, I was shocked to see analysis showing a difference in returns between schemes over a 5-year period of up to 48% in some cases.

This means that a saver with a pot of £10,000 will have notionally lost £5,000 over a 5-year period from being in a lowest performing scheme.

This simply isn’t fair. Bringing fairness to our new system is the first pillar of my vision for pensions.

All savers deserve to be confident that their pension scheme is working hard on their behalf and on track to deliver fair and predictable outcomes – reassurance that the generations that proceeded them would have had from their Defined Benefit pensions.

To date, we have introduced “value for members” assessments which came into force in 2021.

Today I am announcing that we will be going further, with a new Value for Money framework.

The consultation I am launching today will seek your views on proposals to require all occupational pension schemes to publish a full assessment of the value their scheme is delivering relative to others.

But what does value for money mean?

When I talk about Value for Money, I don’t just mean low costs. Value for money means that savings are invested well, they are not being eroded by high charges and that schemes are helping members make the right decisions throughout their accumulation period.

The consultation has been jointly developed with The Pensions Regulator and the Financial Conduct Authority. It proposes a framework that will increase transparency, comparability, and drive competition across the pension market.

It will help to deliver long term value for hard-working savers, and it proposes giving the regulator the powers they need to tackle underperforming schemes.

January 30, 2023
Julian Lewis – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Sir Julian Lewis, the Conservative MP for New Forest East, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

In a debate featuring successive powerful speeches, the one that we have just heard from the hon. Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) has to rank among the most powerful, and I congratulate her on it. I also congratulate the Holocaust Educational Trust, because it is a sign of its success that in these debates, held year after year, such enormously influential contributions are made by new generations of MPs such as the hon. Lady, who I believe has been in the House only since 2019. Clearly the process is working.

I have spoken in two of these debates previously. I find that, as I age, time seems to race along more and more quickly, so it was with surprise that I found that it was fully 10 years ago that I last told the story of two ordinary people caught up in the holocaust. I think I may be forgiven for telling it again, after this lapse of time; I have the permission of my researcher, Nina Karsov.

Some people may see Nina around the Estate, not particularly noticing anything about this petite lady that would ever make them think that, at the age of two, she was thrown by her parents from a train on its route to Treblinka in an attempt to save her life. Somehow the three of them leapt from the train. There was deep snow. Nina, a toddler, landed in it and was badly frostbitten. Her mother was killed instantly in leaping from the train, and it took her father some time to find her in the snow. They got back to Warsaw, and were taken in by separate gallant Polish non-Jewish families.

When the Nazis were closing in on the part of Warsaw where the father was in hiding, he, in order to protect those people who would have been killed if they had been caught with him in hiding, made his way across the square to the top of another building and threw himself off it so that he could not be forced to divulge where he had been kept. Nina, however, was kept safely through the war, and many years later, was able to secure for the lady she called her Polish mother recognition amongst “the righteous”, which was clearly an honour richly deserved. It has to be said that both her Polish mother and Nina herself were then persecuted by the communist regime, Nina spending two years of a three-year sentence in a communist jail before Amnesty International successfully campaigned for her to come to this country. So that is one ordinary person whom one might bump into on the Commons Estate without knowing much about her.

One person who cannot be bumped into on the Estate is my cousin Chana Broder, who now lives in Israel. Chana, her parents Abraham and Rachel, and her grandmother Rivka were holed up in a ghetto in Siemiatycze in November 1942 when they were tipped off that the ghetto was about to be cleared, so they made a run for it. The grandfather was killed, but the other four got away. They were turned away from one place after another, and eventually somebody gave them shelter for a little while, but the people who saved those four lives, as I told the House on a previous occasion, were the Kryński family.

The father was Konstanty, the mother was Bronisława and the children were Krystyna and Henryk. They were a poor farming family, and they had known my cousins before the war. My cousins had had a little convenience store in the main square of Siemiatycze, and I visited it a few years ago—it is now a flower shop. The Kryński parents went to the shop in the days before the war and, because they were very constrained economically, my cousins would sometimes say, “Mr and Mrs Kryński, take what you need for now and pay us when you can,” little imagining that, a few years later, those acts of simple kindness would be rewarded by an act of outstanding bravery.

The Kryńskis took them in for months. They hid them while their farm was occasionally searched by German troops, and they got away with it because they had constructed a bunker underneath a barn, in which the grandmother, the two young parents and my four-year-old cousin, Chana, were able to stay throughout the day. They could not stand up, so they would just sit and wait until they could come out at night.

This went on for months, until the Russians overran the area. The family were able to get out, and they were then taken in by Canada. The grandmother sadly passed away very soon after liberation, but the young parents and the little girl were able to go to Montreal, where my cousin graduated from McGill University. Both she and her mother subsequently moved to Israel, and she is still alive today.

Chana’s mother’s book, originally published in 1967 as “Out of the Depths” because of how the family had hidden underground, was republished in 2020 as part of the Azrieli Foundation’s holocaust survivors’ memoirs programme as “Daring to Hope.” For anyone who is interested in seeing how one ordinary family came through an extraordinary experience with the help of outstandingly brave people—the Kryński family were honoured with the presentation of the Righteous Among the Nations award in Siemiatycze on 24 May 2016—it is all there in black and white.

I hope not to have to tell this story again for another 10 years, and I do not think I will, because this debate has been so well informed by so many MPs of older and younger generations that we are in no danger at all of forgetting what happened.

January 30, 2023
Charlotte Nichols – 2023 Speech on Holocaust Memorial Day

The speech made by Charlotte Nichols, the Labour MP for Warrington North, in the House of Commons on 26 January 2023.

It is an honour to rise today to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, both personally as a proud Jewish parliamentarian, and on behalf of my constituents in Warrington North, many of whom have made Warrington their home after fleeing the horrors of the holocaust and subsequent post-war genocides in Rwanda, Darfur, Cambodia and Bosnia, which we also commemorate today.

This Shabbat, Jews in synagogues around the world will be reading Parashat Bo, a Torah portion described by the former Chief Rabbi, Lord Sacks of blessed memory, as

“among the most revolutionary in the entire history of ideas”

and

“one of the most counterintuitive passages in all of religious literature.”

In the passage—Exodus 10 to 13:16—Moses is addressing the Israelites before their release from Egypt. But his address is not about the freedom they will soon see, or the society they will have to build, but—repeatedly—about education and the duty of parents to educate their children about what they experienced in Egypt. The passage reads:

“Vayomer Moshe el-ha’am zachor et-hayom hazeh asher yetzatem mi Mitzrayim”.

That is:

“And Moses said to the nation: Remember this day, when you went out from Egypt”.

What does “zachor”—to remember—mean? The Jewish concept of remembering is not passive, but active. We tell the Exodus story to our children. We re-experience it and understand it through the elaborate rituals of the Pesach Seder. We reflect on it in our recitation of the central daily prayer, the Shema, in the laying of tefillin—a physical ritual with which to commemorate liberation from Egypt daily—and in the mezuzah, which we hammer to our doorframes. To truly remember is to act. That is as true for the story of the Exodus as it is for the genocides that we come together to commemorate today.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “ordinary people”. We reflect on the fact that its victims were ordinary people, each with their own inherent human dignity, loves, hopes, fears and aspirations—not nameless, faceless statistics, which our inability to fully comprehend the enormity of these atrocities can reduce them to. We reflect that those who committed these genocides were ordinary people, that this capacity for evil is indeed in all of us, and it is a choice, just as courage is a choice. And we reflect on the indifference of ordinary people who stood by while it happened, which was necessary for that kind of industrial-scale murder and the mechanics of genocide to be sustained. There are, of course, stories of bravery, with the kind of heroics that we see commemorated at Yad Vashem by the “righteous among the nations”, but what makes these people extraordinary is the very fact that the vast majority of people—the ordinary people—did not care enough to stop genocide taking place.

However, to reflect on the holocaust, and on the genocides in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and Cambodia, is not in and of itself true remembrance. This week I had the honour of sharing a platform with the holocaust survivor Joan Salter MBE, who has been turning reflection into action through her advocacy for contemporary refugees and her work with Freedom from Torture. We cannot commend historical actions such as the Kindertransport in debates like this and not condemn the inflammatory and hateful rhetoric used in this place and in the media about those fleeing persecution today, or about the LGBT+ and Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities.

I was also honoured, in my capacity as an ambassador for the charity Remembering Srebrenica, to sit with members of the Movement of Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves. As they spoke to me about the trauma of their sons, brothers and fathers murdered in the Bosnian genocide, they also told me about their fight for justice. Many of the bodies have still never been recovered. One mother told me that she felt “lucky”, as they had found one bone of their youngest son to bury. Many of the mothers do not even have that, as mass burial pits were excavated and moved to evade detection, which prolonged the agony of those left behind. One mother spoke at the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia to plead for clemency for the soldier who she knew had murdered her family, for he had recently had a son and she did not want another child growing up without a father.

We cannot remember without justice, and a full and true accounting of all the decisions before, during and after a genocide, to learn, to change, and to ensure that “never again” is not an empty maxim, but a series of actions to which we can all commit ourselves. We know of cases—such as that of the “butcher of Slomin”, Stanislaw Chrzanowski—in which war criminals have evaded justice because of active collusion by the British police, the Crown Prosecution Service and the security services, who protected them and allowed them to live among the rest of us as “ordinary people”. It is time for an inquiry: the Board of Deputies of British Jews has called for one, but the Government have so far ignored its call. How can we have confidence that these things will not happen in future—perhaps with Russian war criminals—if we cannot account for how and why they happened before?

This is why education, and the education of children in particular, is so very important—from Moses and the Israelites in Parashat Bo to our contemporary society. The holocaust is rapidly fading from living memory, and so too, one day, will the genocides that followed it. The testimony of survivors, which the sterling work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust allows so many to access and experience, is an important part of our collective memory, but the survivors cannot be expected to bear this responsibility themselves and to bear this burden alone. While Elie Wiesel was right when he said that if the holocaust was forgotten

“the dead will be killed a second time”,

we remember not for the sake of the past, but for the sake of the future.

The message from today, and from this week’s sedra from Exodus, must be this: through education we can aspire towards liberation, solidarity and community, and build empathy and understanding as we march together with all people on the path out of Egypt and refuse to go back. We observe, we remember, and, inspired by our histories and our faiths, ordinary people across all our communities will act. It is in education that a good society is won or lost.

January 30, 2023