The speech made by David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, on 27 January 2025.
Thank you, Ambassador, for organising this event with us, and I want to echo Hazel’s thanks to Janine Webber.
I hugely admire the willingness of her and other survivors to continue sharing their stories with the world.
Many of you will have seen Prime Minister Keir Starmer visiting Auschwitz recently.
I can distinctly remember my own visit there some years ago, and the many stories on display.
The raw emotion of seeing a site of such evil. Such suffering. Such loss.
80 years on from the liberation, we must face up to the reality described so eloquently by Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi:
Everyone needs to know that Auschwitz existed…
Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it.
Foolish, indeed.
As a black man descended from the Windrush generation, as MP for the most diverse constituency in Britain – including, I am proud to say, a thriving Jewish community. And now, as Foreign Secretary, I see all too many signs of that lingering infection.
Auschwitz did not start in its gas chambers. Genocide does not start with genocide. It starts with denial of rights. With attacks on the rule of law. With a festering resentment of the other.
And so, as Levi and so many other survivors rightly insisted, it is a duty for us all to reflect on what had happened. ‘Never again’ is a solemn promise which we owe to the victims, but also which we must uphold for our own sake, and for the sake of future generations.
We need Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust education. Action against antisemitism – it is how we build a better future for us all together.
That is why it was a great honour to make my first visit as Foreign Secretary to Yad Vashem last July. Why I am proud to host you all in the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office on Holocaust Memorial Day and why I have been so glad to come into this job as the UK holds the Presidency of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
I want to thank all those involved in running our Presidency, in particular Lord Eric Pickles, whose work as Envoy only reinforces the cross-party nature of our country’s commitment to Holocaust remembrance.
One of the projects we have been sponsoring during our Presidency has been 80 Objects – 80 Lives. curated by the Association of Jewish Refugees and the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation, this exhibition connects the testimonies of 80 survivors with 80 objects from before.
Wedding rings. The pages of a prayer book. A doll. A suitcase. Everyday objects, connecting the courageous survivors to the communities, the families, the lives they have lost forever. I like this project as well because it charts a path for this work in the years ahead. 80 years on from the defeat of Nazism, the number of survivors still with us is inevitably dwindling.
The world of the 1930s and ‘40s can feel ever more distant from our high-tech world of today. The next generation risks being distracted, clickbait making it all too easy not to grasp the full horror of the Holocaust.
We therefore need to find new ways to tell the story.
To capture people’s imagination – young people’s most of all, and prompt real reflection.
We need them to understand what a catastrophic moral failure for humanity Auschwitz was, and how the seeds of such a catastrophe are still around us.
Another Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl, wrote that one lesson he drew was how everything can be taken from human beings. But not our ability to “choose one’s own way”.
Today, for all the great challenges we face, we are fortunate to live in a very different moment. But it is still up to each of us to choose our own way.
For this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day, my hope is that people here in Britain, people all over the world, choose to heed the Auschwitz story.
And I am choosing once again to work with all who share this hope to try to make sure they do.
Thank you.
