Holocaust Memorial Day

Thursday 29th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Judith Cummins)]

I call Peter Prinsley, who will speak for up to 15 minutes.

13:32

[Peter Prinsley (Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. It is an honour to be able to open this year’s Holocaust memorial debate.

In The Sunday Times of the week before last, the Chief Rabbi described the dilemma of the teacher faced with the question of what to do on Holocaust Memorial Day. Given the polarising impact of the events of October 2023 and the terrible loss of life in Gaza, it may be simpler not to have an event at all this year. In 2023, 2,000 schools held events to mark Holocaust Memorial Day. Some 1,200 schools did so in 2024, 854 did so in 2025, and almost certainly there will have been fewer this year. The Chief Rabbi asked the question that we are all asking: as we lose the last survivors—the eye witnesses of the Holocaust—how will we keep our oft-repeated promise to them that we will never forget?

The Chief Rabbi speaks of the moral foundation of our society, and of how the Holocaust did not start from nothing. It started with a normalisation of division, prejudice and hatred, building on the oldest hatred of all. There is a warning here for all of us: do not imagine that it can never happen again in our time. That is why it is so important to remember, why I believe it is so important for us to build a national Holocaust memorial, and why I am so pleased that that was included in the Government’s legislation. Let us get it done before the last eyewitnesses pass into the history books.

I have lived with my family in East Anglia for 30 years. I am a part of the Jewish community of Norwich, a member of the synagogue and a past president of the community. There is a beautiful restored synagogue and a small thriving community. The community was established in the 19th century following the arrival of Jewish people from Europe, who were largely fleeing discrimination and persecution. I am delighted that Mrs M. Leveton, aged 80-plus, and her husband Mr B. Leveton, aged 90-plus, were both awarded the British Empire Medal in the new year’s honours for their lifelong service to the community.

However, ours is not the first Jewish community in Norwich. Jewish people came to England with the Normans. Communities formed in many cities under the protection of the Crown, at Norwich, Bury St Edmunds, King’s Lynn and Thetford—all over the successfully growing economy of East Anglia. Moneylending was forbidden to Christians, so Jews began to work in finance and moneylending. A special Exchequer of the Jews was established by the Crown to collect taxes. Great chests with multiple locked clasps were made to keep Exchequer rolls and documents. There were five locks, with the keys held by Crown agents and local citizens so that they could only be opened together, to prevent any disagreements. Lately I discovered just such a chest in a church at North Creake.

The county archive in Norwich contains hundreds of medieval property leases and documents, many of which are written in Hebrew. They have curiously wavy and crenelated margins, for they were written in duplicates to enable matching copies and ensure that there were no forgeries. These are called indentures. The leases have allowed a detailed map of the ancient city centre to be drawn, showing the location and the ownership of the houses, and the location of the synagogue, the school and the physician, for there were Jewish doctors in Norwich 1,000 years before I was appointed.

On King Street there is a great merchant’s house, which still stands. It was the house of Isaac Jurnet. It is the oldest house of Jewish habitation in England, and the vaulted crypt is unaltered since the time of Jurnet, who was the financier of the cathedral and much else besides. The house is presently in need of restoration, and there is a plan to create a centre for the study of antisemitism with the department of Jewish studies at the university. Never has this been more essential.

Which country in Europe was the first to expel the Jews? It was right here in Parliament, in 1290, that King Edward decreed that the Jews must leave. They were not allowed to return until the time of Oliver Cromwell, hundreds of years later. We should not imagine that this is a uniquely German idea; this is an ancient hatred and, with the leave of the House, I will tell Members something about it. It was in Norwich, in 1140, that the Jews were falsely accused of murdering a boy called William to use his blood for sacrifice—something that Jews never do. This is the infamous blood libel, which sparked antisemitic hatred all over England and echoes throughout the ages, even to this day.

Some 20 years ago, a shopping centre was under construction. A medieval well full of skeletons was revealed—17 skeletons from three families, including children. A BBC “Hidden History” documentary brought the story to our attention when it was revealed that they were almost certainly Jewish skeletons. The bones were handed to the local community, and here I must name my dear departed friend, Mr Clive Roffe, who insisted that the bones be given a dignified Jewish burial. I held the bones in my hand, and there was a large hole in the side of a skull. Even after all these years, it was obviously not a natural hole. DNA studies by the Natural History Museum here in London showed that there were genetic matches to contemporary British Jews. Here we have scientific evidence of an English pogrom in 1190. Antisemitism is not new.

Holocaust Memorial Day is so important. This year, the theme is “Bridging Generations”. Last weekend, I was privileged to attend the Holocaust Memorial Day events at Wells-next-the-Sea. A small group of non-Jewish people have established a regular series of cultural events at the Maltings arts centre. Diana Cook spoke about her mother, Margot, who escaped in the days before the outbreak of the war to become a nurse and who lost all her family in the Holocaust. Diana is part of an oral history initiative called G2G—Generation 2 Generation—which carries the story of the Holocaust down the generations. Margot spoke little of her childhood, and only after she died did Diana fully appreciate the crucial importance of oral history and of Generation 2 Generation. I thank her from my heart and soul.

On Monday, I attended a most moving service at the Foreign Office, and I must thank the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, the embassy of Israel and the chargé d’affaires, Daniela Grudsky Ekstein, for the invitation. We heard the extraordinary testimony of Marla, who with her brother Ben Helfgott, were the only members of a large family to survive. I have heard Marla speak before, but her haunting testimony only amplifies in significance as one hears it again. We heard the quite incredible voice of Cantor Turgel, the grandson of Gena—the bride of Belsen—who married the British soldier who liberated her. He sang the prayer for the departed, “El Male Rachamim”—“God full of compassion”—the prayer which asks God to grant rest to the souls of the deceased.

On Holocaust Memorial Day itself I was so proud to stand in the cathedral of Bury St Edmunds, alongside local Jewish citizens and the schoolchildren of Suffolk, and to make the declaration of remembrance as the first Jewish MP for this ancient town, for we are living in a time of increasing polarisation and division. This is our struggle. I have seen the marches, and they fill me with foreboding. We have seen the protests, and we have seen the rise of far-right, so-called populists all over the world, including right here on Westminster bridge. Too often, the legitimate street protests against the actions of the Israeli Government have simply degenerated into shocking antisemitic chanting. The murderous attacks on Jews on Yom Kippur in Manchester and in the attack in Australia did not arise from nowhere. This is our real and present danger, and we must not underestimate it, for it is pervasive.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman is making a fascinating opening speech, and I congratulate him on securing this debate. Could I ask him to re-emphasise the point he has just made, which is that such a grouping of an entire religion, race or ethnicity with the actions of a Government is an entirely antisemitic act?

[Peter Prinsley]

I absolutely agree with the right hon. Member: that is exactly the case. He makes the point extremely well, and I thank him for doing so.

The banning of a Jewish MP from a local school in Bristol was simply an outrage. We receive messages from families of isolated Jewish pupils in rural East Anglian schools where there are persistent taunts and worse, and the schools are simply unable to cope. Resources must be found to address this problem, because this is urgent.

Antisemitism, which never disappeared from this country, exploded after the events of 7 October 2023, even before the actions of the Israel Defence Forces. There has been a terrible war in Gaza, but the origins of the political problems are ancient and complex, and it is not the responsibility of the law-abiding Jewish citizens of this country, who have been intimidated and vilified. I welcome the measures that our Government have announced to address this.

I am a Jewish MP for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket, and the very first Jewish MP for the town that was the first to expel its Jews in 1190 following the slaughter of 53 Jewish citizens—commemorated with a steel teardrop in the abbey gardens—so history has come full circle. There is no greater honour in my life and no greater duty than to ensure that we will always remember them.

13:43

[Bob Blackman (Harrow East) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow an excellent opening speech from the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley). I congratulate him on the way he has introduced this debate. I declare my interests as the chairman of the all-party parliamentary group on the Holocaust memorial and education centre, co-chairman of the APPG on Israel and sponsor of this year’s Holocaust memorial reception in Portcullis House, on behalf of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

We gather today to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau on 27 January 1945. That moment exposed to the world the full horror of the Nazi regime’s systematic murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children—for the benefit of the BBC, I say Jewish men, women and children. However, Holocaust Memorial Day is also a moment to remember the millions of others who were persecuted and murdered by the Nazis, such as the Roma, disabled people, political dissidents and others. We remember not only to honour the victims, but to understand how such an atrocity became possible and how we must never allow it to happen again.

The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers and the death camps, and too often we forget the context. In the decades before, hatred was allowed to grow in Germany; prejudice became normalised; and language, institutions and social norms were slowly corroded. In the great war, Germany was defeated, and afterwards it was economically shattered. The treaty of Versailles imposed territorial losses, military restrictions and severe reparations, the burden of which fell heavily on ordinary people in Germany. The Weimar republic, although democratic in structure, was fragile, and economic catastrophe soon followed. In fact, hyperinflation in the early 1920s left Germans burning paper money to keep warm, because the currency’s value had fallen away. Widespread poverty took hold, and in times of despair, many people searched for simple explanations—and for scapegoats.

It was in that climate that the Nazi party rose to prominence. Hitler and his supporters offered simplistic answers to complex problems. They promised national revival, strength and unity, while identifying enemies within. Jews were portrayed not as fellow citizens, but as outsiders. They were dehumanised and blamed for Germany’s defeat, its economic hardships and the perceived decline of society. Hatred was not accidental; it was systematic, deliberate and relentlessly reinforced. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, antisemitism became state policy. Just imagine that: it was state policy to outlaw a particular religion. Persecution began not with mass violence, but with exclusion. Jewish civil servants were dismissed, Jewish businesses were boycotted and Jewish professionals were barred from practising law and medicine, and from teaching. Those measures were designed to isolate, humiliate and impoverish an entire community.

It is important to stress that while most people did not actively participate in persecution, most chose to look away while it happened. Silence, passivity and indifference allowed injustice to become embedded and, ultimately, unstoppable. Persecution soon escalated. The Nuremberg laws of 1935 stripped Jews of citizenship and basic rights, reducing them from equal members of society to subjects of the state. Violence became overt. In November 1938, Kristallnacht marked a decisive turning point. Synagogues were destroyed, Jewish homes and businesses were attacked, and thousands were arrested by the state—not by mobs acting alone, but by authority itself.

With the outbreak of the second world war, persecution turned into annihilation. Jews were forced into ghettos, and we will no doubt hear about harrowing testimonies of overcrowding, hunger, disease and despair. From 1941 onwards, death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor were constructed for one purpose alone—mass murder. Trains arrived from across Europe, and people were selected, exploited and killed on an industrial scale. There were some who resisted, often at immense personal risk, and they remind us that choices are always possible, but they were the exception, not the norm.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

Again, my hon. Friend is making a fantastic speech. Does he share my horror and disgust that yesterday, a member of the public thought it was entirely appropriate to dress as a prisoner of one of the concentration camps? Surely this is the hatred he is describing.

[Bob Blackman]

Indeed, I condemn that action, and all actions that seek in some way, shape or form to glorify or justify the Holocaust.

The lesson matters profoundly today. Holocaust Memorial Day plays a vital part in educating the public on the dangers of prejudice, discrimination and hatred—dangers that, if left unchecked, can escalate once again into violence and even genocide. It honours survivors and preserves their testimony, particularly now that the number of first-hand witnesses is sadly diminishing—a point to which the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket alluded. The theme for this year, “Bridging Generations”, is therefore a powerful call to action. The responsibility for remembrance does not end with the survivors. It must be passed on to their children, grandchildren and all of us, so that memory becomes responsibility. That matters, because antisemitism in the UK remains at alarmingly high levels. Following the Hamas terrorist attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, antisemitic incidents surged dramatically. According to the Community Security Trust, 1,521 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the first half of 2025 alone—the second highest total ever recorded for that period. Although that is lower than the number in the record year of 2024, that still represents a sustained and deeply troubling level of hostility that is far above the pre-October 7 averages.

[Gareth Thomas (Harrow West) (Lab/Co-op)]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I do not always agree with him, but I very much agree with the case that he is making today and what he is saying. He mentioned the surge in antisemitism in the UK. Would he agree that Ofcom needs to crack down on online hatred—particularly antisemitism, but also Islamophobic tweets? The Jewish community and those of many other faiths are subject to a terrifying amount of online hatred.

[Bob Blackman]

I thank the hon. Gentleman, my constituency neighbour, for that intervention. The sad reality is that following my question to the Deputy Prime Minister yesterday, my social media accounts were loaded with antisemitic tropes. It is a disgrace, and Ofcom has to take action. It is our duty to ensure that hate speech is never allowed to continue. I believe in free speech, but I do not believe in preaching hatred to one another, regardless of religion, and action has to be taken on that.

Greater London and Greater Manchester remain hotspots of antisemitism; there was an attack on the synagogue in Manchester during Yom Kippur. Online antisemitism, to which the hon. Member for Harrow West (Gareth Thomas) just referred, now accounts for well more than a third of all incidents. Holocaust-related abuse appears with disturbing frequency, and there has been a sharp rise in the glorification of the Holocaust. Behind these statistics lies a chilling reality: many Jewish people in Britain feel unsafe, unwelcome or forced to hide their identity in public. Surveys suggest that around half have considered leaving the UK due to antisemitism. That should trouble every one of us.

We must be honest about the ways in which contemporary antisemitism often disguises itself. Increasingly, anti-Israel activism functions as a Trojan horse for antisemitism, allowing ancient prejudice to re-enter public discourse under the cover of political critique. Legitimate criticism of any Government is entirely valid, but when Israel becomes uniquely demonised, Zionism is used as a slur and Jewish institutions and individuals are targeted, regardless of their views, we are no longer in the realm of political debate. CST data shows that a significant proportion of antisemitic incidents now blend anti-Zionist language with classic antisemitic tropes: claims of secret control, collective guilt or global conspiracy. On campuses and online platforms, and in public demonstrations such as yesterday’s, Jewish students and citizens are increasingly made to feel responsible simply for who they are. That not only undermines free speech; it poisons it.

We must confront the disturbing rise of Holocaust inversion: the grotesque distortion that portrays Jews or Israel as the new Nazis. That is not merely offensive rhetoric; it threatens and trivialises the Shoah, inverts reality, and inflicts profound harm on survivors and their families. Equating the Star of David with the swastika or accusing the Jewish state of genocide is not historical analysis; it is antisemitism. We must be clear and unequivocal in condemning it.

On Holocaust Memorial Day, we should acknowledge the historical link between the Holocaust and the modern state of Israel. Zionism long predates the second world war, but the genocide of European Jewry underscored with devastating clarity the need for a Jewish homeland—a place of refuge and self-determination. Many Holocaust survivors helped build that nation, carrying the scars of the camps with them. Attempts to de-legitimise Israel ignore that history and risk erasing the fundamental lesson of “never again”.

Finally, I want to turn to the future. Last week, the Holocaust Memorial Act 2026 received Royal Assent, paving the way for the national Holocaust memorial and learning centre to be built in Victoria Tower Gardens, beside this very Parliament. Proposed by a cross-party commission more than a decade ago, the memorial will honour the victims and educate generations to come. The proposal was started by Lord Cameron and was supported cross-party. As the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket said, we must get that memorial built before the last of the survivors is no longer with us. Its location matters. It will stand as a permanent reminder, at the heart of our democracy, of where hatred can lead when left unchallenged.

As we remember the victims today, we also reaffirm our responsibility to challenge antisemitism wherever it appears, defend democratic values and human dignity, and ensure that history is neither forgotten nor distorted. When we see demonstrations and attempts to blockade Jewish businesses, restaurants and synagogues, we must call it out for what it is: antisemitism, pure and simple. Remembrance is not only about the past; it is a warning for the present, and a duty that we owe to future generations. I and, I believe, the whole House will recommit to carrying out that duty.

13:56

[Charlotte Nichols (Warrington North) (Lab)]

The theme for Holocaust Memorial Day 2026 is “Bridging Generations”. That recognises that as the remaining survivors who can directly bear witness to the atrocities of the Holocaust pass away, living memory must become collective memory. As Jews, we know all about collective memory. The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, of blessed memory, said:

“One of the most important halachic responses to tragedy is the act of remembering, Yizkor. More than it has history, the Jewish people has memory. There is no word for history in the Tanach, and modern Hebrew had to borrow one, historiah. But the word zachor (remember), occurs no fewer than 169 times in the Hebrew Bible. The difference between them is this: history is someone else’s story; memory is my story. In history, we recall what happened…so that it becomes part of us and who we are… We cannot bring the dead to life, but we can keep their memory alive.”

This Shabbat, Jews around the world will be reading Parashat Beshalach. The Torah portion opens with the Pharoah pursuing the Israelites into the desert and the miracle of the splitting of the Red sea. It ends with victory over the Amalekites, the first enemy that the Israelites face upon escaping Egypt. There are so many biblical teachings through which we can approach the Shoah in Beshalach. In particular, we can approach it through grappling with the evil of Amalek and the Pharoah, and we can contemplate the act of remembrance through how we are commanded to commemorate these events. This year, I came across a perspective that is both subtle in the closeness of the reading of it, and also completely striking in its depth.

I have been reading “Esh Kodesh”, written by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, of blessed memory, the Rebbe of the Warsaw ghetto. Composed between 1939 and 1942, it is a truly astonishing body of work. Reflecting on Parashat Beshalach, he notes that in the text, Exodus 13:21 begins:

“And God goes before them by day with a pillar of cloud to guide them along the way, and by night with a pillar of fire providing them with light to travel day and night”.

This is the first place where the text uses the present tense. With extraordinary faith and courage, and recognising the “bitter reality” that people were living through, he concludes:

“we must use the judgments and suffering we endure properly, utilising them to worship God, to keep going day and night”.

That this present tense speaks of the presence of God in their midst at a time of unimaginable privation, and is a source of strength for them to draw on, is profoundly moving as a contemporary reader. Later on in the parashah, Exodus 15:1, it reads:

“And they spoke, to say, I will sing to God for his great victory”.

Noting here the future tense, Rabbi Shapira says:

“Already, when still in Egypt, they could see God’s salvation, and so they were able, in their minds, to ‘sing in the future’—‘to say’ implies that they succeeded in establishing this for future generations”.

Rabbi Shapira did not live to see this victory, to sing in the future. He was murdered in Aktion Erntefest—Operation Harvest Festival—at Trawniki concentration camp on 3 November 1943. Jewish prisoners were separated from non-Jewish prisoners, and up to 43,000 Jews at the Majdanek, Poniatowa and Trawniki concentration camps were killed in two days—the single largest German massacre of Jews in the Holocaust. In all three camps, Jews were forced to strip naked and walk into dug trenches, where they were shot dead. Loud music was played to cover the sound of the gunfire.

Rabbi Shapira’s writing, however, survived to inspire future generations, buried in milk cannisters as part of the Oneg Shabbat underground archive, established in 1940 by Emanuel Ringelblum and a secret group of scholars and writers, to document the suffering, resistance and daily life of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto, ensuring their story was not lost. They said:

“It must all be recorded with not a single fact omitted. And when the time comes—as it surely will—let the world read and know what the murderers have done.”

We mourn the 6 million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. We mourn the lives cut short, the lives never lived, the children and grandchildren never born; the art, music and literature never written; the enormous loss to humanity itself of a tragedy at a scale we can barely fathom that reverberates through modern history and into our present. But as we mourn, we remember. As Jews, we can take forward our cultures, teachings and traditions to future generations, as we have always done, from the Exodus onwards, denying Hitler what the theologian Emil Fackenheim called “a posthumous victory”. Many Jewish communities around the world read and learn Torah from Czech scrolls from the desolated synagogues of Bohemia and Moravia, honouring the communities who were killed and keeping the flame of their memory alive.

[Dawn Butler (Brent East) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend is making a powerful and educational speech; I thank her so much. Will she join me in thanking John Hajdu MBE, who came to Brent yesterday to share with us his story of how he survived the Holocaust? As a young boy, he survived only because a non-Jewish family hid him in a cupboard for days on end. Will she join me in thanking him for sharing his story, so we can keep it alive?

[Charlotte Nichols]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention and share her thanks to the survivor she mentions, but I also send our thanks to that generation of survivors who were so determined to ensure that their stories were carried forward so that we can learn from them.

Right hon. and hon. Members can visit the museum not far from here at Westminster synagogue, home of the Czech Memorial Scrolls Trust, to see the scrolls I referred to and artefacts from those communities.

Remembrance of the Holocaust is, however, a society-wide effort that Jews cannot undertake alone. At a time of rising antisemitism globally, when Jews in Manchester and in Bondi Beach are killed just for being Jews, this same antisemitic poison is again taking root and must be confronted. We should remember the evils of the past to fight the evils of the present, taking strength from the everyday acts of resistance, large and small, and bringing their stories with us to secure for us all a safe and secure future. Eight decades on from the Holocaust, that is more important now than ever.

14:04

[Mr Tom Morrison (Cheadle) (LD)]

I am honoured to be here for this debate. I thank the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) for leading the debate, and opening it with such an incredibly moving speech.

Genocide does not just happen. There is always a path: there is always a terrifying and evil journey towards it. The intention to destroy a group of people is an unspeakable idea. It is difficult to comprehend and yet it has happened not once but multiple times across the globe. Remembering the Holocaust is not just a Jewish issue; it is a human one. Education, reflection and, crucially, action become more and more important each day as we face increasingly fractured communities, inflammatory online rhetoric, and the casual othering of minority groups. Recent events both in the UK and abroad reiterate that “never again” cannot rest on remembrance alone; it needs conscious action.

The Nazi regime systematically murdered 6 million Jews, including 1.5 million children. That is 6 million stories, 6 million people who loved, 6 million people who added immeasurable value to this world. That murderous regime also killed Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, gay men, political opponents, Jehovah’s Witnesses and others that they deemed undesirable. In total, around 10 million people were murdered. But the Holocaust was not carried out by mobs and Nazis alone. It was enabled by the systematic involvement and compliance of institutions, including the police, civil servants, universities, courts and local authorities—the very institutions that were created to protect and serve. Instead, those institutions enforced discriminatory laws, facilitated deportations, and normalised othering and, eventually, murder. Prejudice becomes policy when institutions fail to act against hatred.

We are talking about a scale of suffering and terror that is beyond comprehension, and that is why personal stories are so crucial to our learning and reflection. I would therefore like to share some stories of my constituents who survived.

In 1939, Leonard Kaufmann’s uncle managed to secure a place for him on the Kindertransport, leaving behind his siblings and parents who later died. At four years old, Leonard remembers sitting on a barstool on his arrival to the UK, all alone and waiting to be collected, not able to speak English, scared and completely unsure of what was to come. Leonard went on to lead a successful career and have a happy family home in Gatley, despite experiencing one of the hardest starts to life anyone could imagine. He was a proud administrator at Yeshurun synagogue, which sits proudly in the heart of Gatley.

Peter Kurer was taken in by a Quaker family in Manchester with his brother and parents after they learned the SS were coming for his father. Later, Peter selflessly volunteered considerable time towards the establishment of a retirement home in Didsbury for Jewish refugees.

Martin Hyman shared with me the story of his mother who grew up in 1930s Vienna and was expelled from school simply for being Jewish. Aged just 13, she was sent alone to Britain on the Kindertransport. She never saw her parents again.

Sadly, these stories are not unusual. Martin said to me:

“In 1938, 272 Jews were recorded as having lived in the street in Vienna where my mum grew up. She was one of only 13 who survived the Holocaust.”

They reflect the experience of thousands of children whose lives were saved only because others acted. I am asking everyone in this House today to imagine the pain and suffering inflicted from just these singular stories and multiply that by 1,000 and then multiply it again.

I would like to pay tribute to Paul Porgess, a survivor of the Holocaust who was not only my friend, but a mentor to me. Paul was born in Czechoslovakia to parents Victor and Olga. During the second world war, his family were deported to the ghetto in Warsaw. After falling ill, Paul was separated from his parents, but was helped to escape by the Polish resistance. He eventually made it to England, where he earned a doctorate in chemistry at the University of London, before moving to Cheadle with his wife Joan. He was one of the first Liberal councillors to represent the Cheadle area and did so for four decades.

During his time on the council, Paul held a many positions, including on the equal opportunities special panel and the social inclusion and community cohesion working party. His experience so early on in life drove his passion to prioritise inclusion and community in Cheadle, and he also fought tirelessly for refugees in our region. Paul knew more than anyone just how important it was to be the voice for those who could not defend themselves. I was deeply honoured to replace Paul on Stockport council, and still to this day I try to ensure that I live up to his legacy. I miss him dearly.

It is no secret that hate crimes have risen year on year, misinformation continues to spread like wildfire online, and politics is becoming increasingly polarised. I visited the Community Security Trust earlier this week and heard directly about the work and resource that goes into ensuring that Jewish communities are protected. But heartbreakingly, the Heaton Park synagogue attack on Yom Kippur just three months ago shows that despite every effort to ensure people are safe and secure, the evil of antisemitism poses a real and murderous threat to our Jewish communities.

The latest statistics, published in October, showed that Jewish people had a higher rate of religious hate crimes targeted towards them than any other faith group. We have a duty today to remember, reflect and take action to stamp out this hatred now. Martin Hyman highlights that his grandparents, like many others, believed that civilisation, culture and the rule of law would protect them. But that was not the case. The Holocaust was not a sudden collapse of morality, but the end point of an insidious process in which discrimination was legalised, exclusion enforced, and dehumanisation made routine by ordinary people.

Education plays a critical role in responding to that. Organisations such as the Northern Holocaust Education Group and the My Voice project work to ensure that survivor testimony and lived experience continue to reach schools and communities. The Holocaust Centre North provides a permanent exhibition, learning programmes and an archive rooted in local survivor and refugee stories, helping young people and the wider public understand how a global atrocity unfolded through ordinary lives.

When people feel connected and invested in common values, they are better able to work together to address division and tackle hatred. The Common Ground award is an important initiative that goes some way in supporting that aim, and I hope that the Government will keep on funding it. The Government must also publish the community cohesion strategy that was promised last year, so that communities can work together to confront all forms of extremism by building understanding and trust.

Britian is a country of shared values and it has a history of being a nation that offers a hand to those in need. We must never forget that and must continuously pursue that aim. We celebrate the idea that people in our country should be able to live free from discrimination, and that no one’s rights or dignity should ever be taken away or compromised because of who they are, where they come from or what they believe. We must not lose sight of that, even though there are some who seek to undermine it.

A Jewish man in Manchester recently said to the Manchester Evening News,

“My daughter, she wears the Star of David but she puts it away…Ours are the only children that go to schools behind fences with guards.”

That cannot continue, so we must revert to our shared values, celebrate our differences and call out all forms of hatred and bigotry. “Never again” cannot rest on remembrance alone. It requires conscious action, every day. Holocaust Memorial Day offers an opportunity to reflect on not only what happened, but the responsibility we all have to ensure that the legacy of people like Paul Porgess never fades.

14:12

[Paul Waugh (Rochdale) (Lab/Co-op)]

I pay tribute to my hon. Friends the Members for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) and for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) for their powerful and moving testimony. They are a credit to their community and their constituents.

Holocaust Memorial Day is a time when we remember the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust. The theme of this year’s memorial day is “Bridging Generations”. It is the solemn duty of all of us, in this place and beyond it, who have had the privilege of meeting Holocaust survivors, to pass on their testimony to younger people so that we all may bear witness, collectively, to their suffering and their memory.

On that note, it was a real honour last week to meet 95-year-old Mala Tribich MBE in Parliament, and to hear her very moving testimony of how she and her brother were the only members of her family to survive the Nazi Holocaust, following her imprisonment in Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen camps. Many Members will agree how heartbreaking it was to hear of her pleading with the SS guard not to put her on a train. Mala told me afterwards how proud she was of her brother Ben, who went on to represent Britain at the Olympics as a weightlifter. Ben, who passed away in 2023, was one of the 700 Jewish youngsters taken to Cumbria from the death camps.

Ike Alterman, who passed away at age 97 in December last year, was the last surviving Greater Manchester member of that group of so-called Windermere children. I mention Ike because his story is well known by the children of Rochdale, particularly in Falinge Park high school, which he visited three years ago to share his experiences. Ike recalled picking sprouts in the bitter Polish winter for the SS officers’ Christmas dinner. He and the other Jews had no proper clothing and no shoes—Ike strapped straw to his feet to walk in the snow. The SS officer said that if he and fellow children sang “Silent Night” they would get a bonus: a ladle of warm water to put sprout skins in. Ike said:

“To this day I've never touched sprouts again.”

Ike was just 13 when his family were lined up in the town square alongside other Jews. He saw his mother, sister, and brother led away by men with rifles. Later he found out they were likely sent to Treblinka, an extermination camp. At Birkenau, Ike’s job was to take bodies from gas chambers to the crematoriums. He said,

“At Birkenau they had four chimneys and they were glowing 24 hours a day, day and night.”

That is invaluable testimony to the children of Rochdale from someone who was there. Someone whose story cannot be denied, and someone who we still remember with great fondness. Despite his passing, Ike’s testimony lives on because his talk to the students was captured on video and is shown by the school every year, thanks to the great efforts of the excellent teachers, such as the Holocaust education lead at Falinge Park, Adele Turner.

Falinge Park has legacy beacon status as one of the schools under the umbrella of the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education, and has developed a special Holocaust ambassadors and youth champions programme. Its youth champions are year 9 pupils who design and lead the extracurricular lunch time and afterschool sessions on the Holocaust for younger children in the school—beautifully bridging generations even within their school, which is the theme of this year’s memorial.

Last week, Greater Manchester’s commemoration of Holocaust Memorial Day featured a video of Falinge Park high school pupils Abiha Imran, Willow Greenwood and Dylan Ogden, as they joined Andy Burnham to interview Tomi Komoly, another Holocaust survivor. Tomi revealed he had spoken to 27,000 students in his 10 years of work with the Holocaust Educational Trust—27,000 students who will remember his story. His advice to the next generation was simple. He said,

“the one word that immediately pops into my mind is tolerance. Just look at other people in the world and accept that we each have our own way of living and habits…just be respectful of that, and live peacefully side by side.”

This year has shown that antisemitism is not just the world’s oldest hatred, but very much a current one, fed by extremists that blame Jews across the globe for the actions of Israel’s Government. The Bondi Beach attack was truly appalling, but in the north-west, we will never forget the Heaton Park synagogue attack on the holiest day in the Jewish calendar, Yom Kippur. We remember Adrian Daulby, 53, and Melvin Cravitz, 66, who were killed in that attack on that dark day.

Marc Levy, who many of us in this place know, is Manchester’s Jewish Representative Council leader, and his father Alan, is a chairman of the synagogue. They were deeply affected by that incident and the loss of their friends. Alan recently recalled how Adrian Daulby leapt up from his seat and ran the length of the synagogue to help them hold shut the front doors from the terror attack, before he was shot and killed.

It is truly disgusting that within hours of that attack, a local councillor in Rochdale shared on his Facebook page an article called, “False flag…could the Manchester synagogue attack be orchestrated?” which is an antisemitic dog whistle, as clear as day. But there are glimmers of light amid the darkness. Marc Levy told me that his children marked their B’nai Mitzvah at Heaton Park recently—a very powerful moment of resilience and remembering.

Teaching about not just the Nazi Holocaust but genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, and Darfur has been part of the national curriculum for 35 years. Hatred based on race or religion, with victims scapegoated for sins they never committed, demonised, blamed, and punished for things that had nothing to do with them, becomes a narrative that curdles into deadly extremism. Our school children are taught of that danger. But with young people online more than ever, it is not what happens in the classroom that really worries many of us, but what happens outside it. The potential for them to come across antisemitic content and Holocaust denial and distortion—conspiracy theories that the Holocaust never happened or antisemitic theories that it was orchestrated and faked by Jewish people or Israel—is greater than ever.

Meanwhile, we have had regular debate on xAI’s Grok in this House in recent weeks. The AI tool has not only denigrated and degraded women, but generated multiple antisemitic comments, including praise for Hitler, denying the scope of the Holocaust and using so-called Jewish-sounding surnames in the context of hate speech. I hope that Ministers will engage with the Antisemitism Policy Trust to see how the Online Safety Act 2023 can actually crack down on such memes on Reddit and other online platforms.

As others have said, Holocaust Memorial Day is also a time to remember all the Roma and Sinti people, gay men, disabled people, political opponents and others murdered by the Nazi killing machine. We also remember all those affected by the subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur and Bosnia.

Speaking of Bosnia, it was a truly humbling experience to visit the Srebrenica memorial centre and cemetery in Bosnia last year. In July 1995, more than 8,000 Muslim men and boys were murdered by Serb paramilitaries driven by religious, nationalist and ethnic hatred to commit the worst genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. I went to pay my respects and meet the incredible Mothers of Srebrenica campaign group, and to see the very moving testimony in the memorial centre itself.

[Charlotte Nichols]

I want to add my voice to my hon. Friend’s comments about the Mothers of Srebrenica and Žepa Enclaves association. I had the real honour of meeting them myself around a decade ago, and their work is absolutely extraordinary. Will my hon. Friend join me in encouraging all Members of the House to take the opportunity to learn from them about what we can do to ensure that we do not carry into the future the hate that caused them to lose their husbands and sons?

[Paul Waugh]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. I encourage all Members of the House to take a trip to Srebrenica to see for themselves the mass graves, the cemetery and the museum. It is incredibly moving. The centre director, Emir, and the head of oral history, Hasan, were encouraged to hear that Rochdale schoolchildren are taught about the Srebrenica genocide as part of their Holocaust education.

As the MP for Rochdale, it is my duty to remind everyone in my constituency of the horrors of 7 October, the worst pogrom of Jews since the second world war. It is also my duty to call out the deaths of the men, women and children in Gaza that followed. The need for testimony, evidence and accountability is as important as ever.

I signed the Holocaust Educational Trust’s book of commitment in Parliament, which is part of the trust’s ongoing effort to educate children about past and present atrocities across the globe. It is only through education that we can tackle the ignorance that fuels hatred. The responsibility of remembrance does not end with the survivors; it lives on through their children and grandchildren and, of course, through all of us.

I will finish with a poem sent to me by Zeeshan Shafqat, a 17-year-old student at Rochdale’s Hopwood Hall college:

“In ashes of pain, where names were erased,

We stand together now, face to face.

Muslim and Jew, hand in hand,

Guarding the truth that history demands.

Never again, our shared vow remains—

To honour the lost, and break hatred’s chains.”

14:33

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke (Wetherby and Easingwold) (Con)]

I think it is important that I start with some of the realities as vividly as I can. Six million Jews were murdered in a deliberate attempt at the extermination of European Jews. I think it is shameful that the BBC did not speak about Jews in its opening report about Holocaust Memorial Day.

One million of those Jews were children. One million were killed in the forests by bullets. In order for the Nazi regime to save bullets, they would make mothers hold their babies to their heads so they could shoot both at the same time. One of the reasons the gas chambers were put in place was not just to mechanise mass murder, but because the German authorities recognised that there was a large psychological impact on the soldiers who were getting covered in brain matter and blood from murdering children. They decided that they must stop the people doing their bidding feeling like that; it was far simpler to herd the Jews into gas chambers and then get Jews themselves to remove the bodies and put them into the furnaces.

Dehumanisation happened in order for millions of people to accept what was going on, and I very much doubt that there were a great many people in Germany who did not have an idea of what was going on—none truer than in Bavaria, the region where Nazism had its roots. As has been described, there was a long history of growing antisemitism; with those decades and decades of hatred, when Germany faced tough economic circumstances coming out of the first world war—feeling that it had been punished by the whole of Europe, despite not losing any territory—and Adolf Hitler looked for a scapegoat, one was easy to find.

Germany paid a price for that—not just in terms of the price of the war and what happened, but because it led to an incredible brain drain of academic talent. Albert Einstein is one example. It drove huge intellect—scientists, engineers, doctors—out of Germany, because among those who were murdered, as has been mentioned, were academics and anybody who might challenge the regime. I am afraid that we are now seeing levels of hostility in the United Kingdom that mean that many people are thinking that they might be better off leaving. Beyond the absolute moral outrage of the issues of 80 years ago happening in front of our eyes today in the 21st century, our country will be far poorer for that.

Leeds has a large and proud Jewish population. They are strong and resilient. Jews have been in Leeds for more than 150 years. They have added hugely to the businesses, community and fabric of society that Leeds has become. I am proud that I have so many friends in the Jewish community, including, I am proud to say, the Lord Mayor of Leeds, Councillor Dan Cohen. However, they are frightened. They find it difficult to go into Leeds city centre on Saturdays during protests. They want to stand up to what is being said, but get pursued down the street and have vicious abuse thrown at them.

I stand here today not just to remember the Holocaust, but to say that remembrance is not enough. Speeches today, including the opening of my speech, have outlined what happened in the Holocaust; other Members have outlined the causes that led up to the Holocaust. But we are sitting back and not naming and shaming those who are encouraging the root where this started.

I have said this before in this Chamber and I am going to say it again today. There is a councillor in my city of Leeds, Councillor Mothin Ali—who has now become the deputy leader of the Green party—who put out social media on 7 October 2023 praising Hamas and what they had achieved. He was not a councillor at that point, but he was a candidate. There is a complex issue between what is freedom of speech and what is agitation, but there can be no doubt, frankly, that he agitated a mob that forced the Jewish priest of the University of Leeds, Rabbi Deutsch, into hiding. The leader of the Green party on Leeds city council, Councillor Penny Stables, who is a councillor in my constituency, brushed that aside. She said that it did not matter what he had said before he was elected, as he was not a councillor. I really have to take issue with that. As we have heard, it is the acceptance of people making these comments that eventually leads to history repeating itself.

The hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) made some very important points. He talked about fake news and how things are twisted. I cannot remember who it was, but another Labour Member said that Ofcom must take a much stronger view with regard to content being put online. We know what is poisoning children’s minds, but that is a different debate. I was knocking on doors and I met a gentleman, who must have been retired. He started off by absolutely laying into me for my support for Israel defending its security and saying what a disgrace of a human being I was, and then he said to me, “You know as well as I do, because you will have seen the video footage, as I have, that Hamas had nothing to do with 7 October. It was the Israelis who murdered their own people so that they could invade Gaza.” He said that to me as a fact, with absolute conviction. That is the level of hatred being generated because the Israelis are Jews. Let us call this out. This is beyond politics; this is Jewish hatred.

Huge protests have been taking place. People have a right to protest and to condemn what they see going on in the world, but where are the protests about what is happening in Sudan or against the Iranian regime, which may well have murdered a five-figure number of people?

[Peter Prinsley]

The right hon. Member is making a really powerful speech. Does he agree that there is a strong suspicion that some of the hate marches we have seen on the streets of Britain have been orchestrated by Iranian agents?

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

There is a lot of evidence to back that up. The phrase passes me by, but there is a sphere of influence that Iran wanted to put in place through Iraq and Syria, with Hamas and Hezbollah as its proxies to run things, and we have debated in this Chamber so many times the malign influence of Iran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the proscription of that body that that is undoubtedly true.

We have tolerated things for too long. We tolerated streams of cars along Marylebone Road, many years ago, beeping their horns and claiming that the Jews should be murdered and the women should be raped. That did not get the crackdown that it needed. On the flipside—I will not go over this again, because we know what happened—we see West Midlands police deciding that it was far easier just to ban Israelis. Let us remember that the fans were not all Israelis; there were plenty of British citizens who are fans of Maccabi Tel Aviv who wanted to go to that football match. Rather than protecting the laws that fans who go to a country should respect, people in authority thought, “It is far easier just to stop them.” How did we get to that point? For an easy laugh, we decided, “The Jewish community is so small, and there are lots of people who hate it, so it is easier just to say, ‘You can’t come’.” That is shameful.

I have given notice that I am going to name the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn). When he led the Labour party—a great and highly respected political party in our country, with much history —I am afraid that he gave a safe space to antisemitism. I praise the Prime Minister for the action he took in driving antisemitism out of the Labour party.

I look around, and I look at the agitation of the councillor I have named and of the people associating themselves with some political parties, and I say this: it is the responsibility of the leadership of the Green party to follow the example of the Labour party in how it addressed the creeping in of antisemitism into its party. I am not saying that it is the policy of the Green party to be antisemitic—I am not saying that at all—but it must address the issue far more seriously than it has done, because I see a repeat of the years from 2015 to 2019.

As I bring my comments to a close, I want to mention the actions of Leeds city council. The protests that take place in Leeds are one thing—the police give permission, and we have powers in place so that when there is hate speech and laws are broken, people can be arrested and prosecuted—but West Yorkshire police has made it clear to Leeds city council that when protesters want to use its land, it should charge them rent. The reason West Yorkshire police wants that is that it attaches an organisation to what is happening. Leeds city council has refused to do that; it is giving permission to bodies to protest, but it is not using the system, which is in place, to charge for the use of land. West Yorkshire police has said that it will be able to crack down on hate speech, violent speech and incitement to violence if it has somebody held accountable. That accountability on its own may temper what is happening.

There was a speaker called Dr Rehiana Ali—quite frankly a vile individual—at one of those rallies, and she called for the targeting of the Jewish schools in Leeds. That has nothing at all to do with the war in Gaza. Schoolchildren—let alone British citizens or anybody, quite frankly, who is not running the Israeli Government—have nothing to do with the actions of the Israeli Government. That is antisemitism as raw as it gets, but it was difficult to bring her to justice, because it was difficult for West Yorkshire police to be able to prosecute directly. I believe that the Met Police prosecuted in the end.

Let me finish on a point about Sudan, Iran and the Russians in Ukraine. The one thing that they all have in common is that they are not Jewish. That shows the level of antisemitism in this country. If we are dealing with a Jewish community, people think, “Let’s whip up a mob. Let’s say what we like. Let’s watch authorities like West Midlands police stand back and think it is easier to just stop the problem happening.” The road to hell is paved with alleged good intentions.

[Carla Denyer (Bristol Central) (Green)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. Can you advise me on what course I can take when a Member of this House repeatedly uses speeches to misrepresent members of the public, who are not able to be present to speak for themselves?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

The hon. Lady will be aware that that is not a matter for the Chair. At any point, she would have been able to seek to intervene on the right hon. Member for Wetherby and Easingwold (Sir Alec Shelbrooke).

14:29

[Rachel Blake (Cities of London and Westminster) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a privilege to speak in this important debate, and I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) for opening it in such a powerful way. I was struck by his earlier reflection on whether it is sometimes easier not to commemorate and remember. That testimony is combined with the moving speech made by my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) about the words for history and the words for remembrance. I want to make the case that it is important to remember, and that how we remember, and the actions that remembrance brings to us, are hopefully what will matter most today.

As has been mentioned, the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “Bridging Generations”. Every day, the recollection of survivors passes from memory into history. Like most hon. Members here today, I have had the privilege of hearing my constituents’ recollections and memories, and those of Holocaust survivors, of what this means to them. Passing down their experience is increasingly vital to preserving our understanding as a society of the atrocious crimes committed in the Holocaust. We must never allow ourselves to forget or minimise these horrors, and bridging the generational gap is more important than ever.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

In talking about the events that happened, we have spoken about the dehumanisation. The Holocaust Educational Trust runs visits to Birkenau-Auschwitz, as part of which, at the end, family photographs and things like that are displayed to rehumanise people. I do not know whether the hon. Lady has been able to attend, but I think it is one of the most exceptionally moving things anyone could witness.

[Rachel Blake]

I thank the right hon. Member for recalling that exhibition for us. What we have seen in Parliament over the last few weeks has been incredibly powerful.

A key part of bridging the generational gap are the very youngest generation of survivors, many of whom first arrived in the UK on the Kindertransport. A memorial to that stands in my constituency at Liverpool Street station, where many of the children met their foster families. Most of them remained in the UK, and they and their descendants are our neighbours, our families and our friends.

This week, I joined City residents and workers in the congregation at Bevis Marks, the oldest synagogue in continuous use in Europe, for the Holocaust Memorial Day service. Bevis Marks is a testament to London’s history of tolerance, openness and pluralism. I pay tribute to the work of the local community in creating the Jewish Square Mile project, which is bringing together the community and recording this long and deep history.

The City of London’s Jewish population dates back to the time of William the Conqueror, and it has long held a stake in the City’s civic life. This early history was a painful one. London’s Jewish population was falsely accused of practices such as coin clipping, and it was barred from the coronation of Richard I and subjected to multiple massacres across the middle ages. However, moving into the 18th and 19th centuries, as pogroms swept across the continent, it was to London that hundreds of thousands of European Jews fled. Many of their descendants later hosted the refugees from the Kindertransport.

The Kindertransport is a reminder not just of what Britain and its people can achieve when we work together, driven by compassion, but that we cannot be complacent that good intentions are enough on their own. That complacency has too often been the case when we, as politicians, have failed adequately to address the rise in antisemitism in recent years. We have condemned and lamented hate crimes, but have we done enough to prevent them from recurring? We have spoken with Jewish leaders, but have we truly heard their concerns? I know that many of my Jewish constituents do not believe we have made the progress that is needed.

I am not the first today to mention last October’s horrific attack in Manchester. In the months leading up to it, we will all have spoken to or heard directly from community leaders who warned that something exactly like that might happen. I have spoken to young constituents who are fearful of walking to shul. Jewish people across the country are experiencing prejudicial antisemitic hate. It needs to end, and we need to end it. Every Member of this House has a role to play in bridging generations and communities. We are leaders in our neighbourhoods, villages, towns and cities. At a time when relations between and within communities remain so broken, our time to act is now. I ask each and every one of us: what is next? What are we doing to convene leaders of all faiths and none? What are we doing to ensure that our children are being taught about the reality of the Holocaust in school and online? What are we doing to address the hatred and violence of the past few years head-on? Will we remain determined to tackle online hatred and antisemitism?

The road to ending hatred sadly takes years to travel, and the results will take longer to show than many of us would like, but we have gone down the road of detoxification before, so a way exists. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) for his suggestion on how to proceed. It centres on the human contact, recognition of shared values, empathy and respect that was shown to the 10,000 Jewish children whose lives the British public were able to save.

We must remember the Holocaust alone in deep reflection, but we must also come together to remember the extremes of good and evil that regular people are capable of. If we leaders recognise that we can shape things through our empathy, compassion and respect, we will stop it happening again.

14:46

[Liz Saville Roberts (Dwyfor Meirionnydd) (PC)]

It is an honour to be here, representing my Dwyfor Meirionnydd constituents and Plaid Cymru, to remember, first, the 6 million Jewish children, women and men murdered in the Holocaust, and also the millions more murdered in the Nazi persecution of other communities, which many other Members have mentioned.

I hand my greatest congratulations to the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) on his excellent introduction, and to the hon. Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols). We will bear in mind those words:

“history is someone else’s story; memory is my story.”

Of course, there has also been reference to our history in the United Kingdom. When we look abroad, it is very important that we know what has happened here.

As we commemorate the victims of the Holocaust, we remember other atrocities: the Holodomor in Ukraine, and genocide against the Armenians, and in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Forgive me, but that is not, and cannot be, an exhaustive list. There have been, there are and there will be other crimes of genocide. We cannot comfort ourselves by presuming that these events are consigned to history.

The convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide is the treaty that criminalises genocide. The definition is deliberately narrow:

“any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such: Killing members of the group; Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group; Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

We know that this is happening now, and that it will happen in the future. We need international bodies and the rules-based order to hold people to account for genocide, to define it, and to take criminal steps as necessary. We know that we need that, because we can look back and learn that from history.

In the noise and confusion of present events, we are required to call out genocidal actions, wherever and by whomever they are committed. It is our duty to be the watchdogs warning against genocide, be it in Myanmar against the Rohingya Muslims, in China against the Uyghur Muslims, or in Gaza against the people of Palestine.

The International Court of Justice is, as we speak, deciding on the application of the convention of genocide to Myanmar. This decision will be of immense significance in relation to forced displacement and Myanmar’s military attacks on the Rohingya. If the Court rules that mass deportation was a motive, not a defence, for genocide, that may become a precedent for a similar ruling against the Israeli Government; it is important that that is said today.

The theme for International Holocaust Memorial Day this year is “Bridging Generations”. It is a reminder that the responsibility of remembrance lives on through not only survivors, but their descendants, and all of us. It is also a reminder of our fragile link to the Holocaust. A 2026 study from the Claims Conference shows that approximately 196,000 Jewish holocaust survivors are still with us. They are a living testimony to the horrors imposed by Nazi Germany, and a lesson from history to never repeat those horrors. They are also ageing. The median age of Jewish holocaust survivors is 87. By preserving the link with our past, we can ensure its retelling. It is vital that we keep listening to and sharing their testimonies, so that future generations can understand how distortions of truth can lead to the greatest crime of all: genocide.

The manipulation of truth is a vital component of genocide. The Nazis played on prejudice and stereotypes to scapegoat and dehumanise people they regarded as subhuman. The Nazi regime also practised a propaganda of deception by hiding details about the “final solution”; there were press controls to prevent the public reading statements by the allies condemning Nazi crimes. One booklet printed in 1941 glowingly reported that in occupied Poland, German authorities had put Jewish people to work, built clean hospitals, set up soup kitchens, and provided Jewish people with newspapers and vocational training. The authority of the written word and the broadcast word was abused to manipulate the truth.

[Carla Denyer]

The right hon. Member is giving a most powerful speech. On her point about false narratives, I wonder whether she agrees that it is so important to distinguish between legitimate criticism of the actions of a state, and hate directed towards people because of their religion. It is worrying to have heard remarks in today’s debate—a debate on the Holocaust, of all things—that seemed to blur the line between those two things.

[Liz Saville Roberts]

The hon. Member makes an important point. I think that we can be sophisticated enough to call out the horrors of Hamas while criticising actions that may well be found in future to comprise genocide. We have not reached that point in law yet, but we in this place should be open to questioning received narratives.

Most Members here are trying to phrase our arguments in the measured way that the debate deserves. We are talking about horrific crimes against humanity in the past, and possibly in the present. That needs to be done in a balanced way. All of us are horrified by the actions of Hamas and the attacks in Manchester last year. At the same time, there are wider questions—how we find a balance, and how we, in our privileged position, use the language at our disposal to make sure that we are not pushing truth further and further into the undergrowth.

Jan Karski was a Polish Catholic diplomat who brought eyewitness reports of the true scale of Nazi atrocities to western leaders as early as 1942. He risked his life to alert the world to murder. Largely ignored at the time, Karski argued that

“the common humanity of people, not the power of governments, is the only real protector of human rights”.

His memory is a challenge to all of us who speak as public leaders.

If this year’s theme teaches us anything, it is to be alert to those who would distort the truth for their own ends. We must listen to genocide survivors and support those who shine a light on grave injustices, wherever they are. It is only through listening to testimony, and through our common humanity, that we can learn from the past and secure genuine justice for victims. We must stand against actions such as the terrible attacks in Manchester last year.

In an increasingly troubled world in which the rules-based order is threatened, we would all do well to remember that the genocide convention obligates state parties to pursue the enforcement of the prohibition on genocide. Though the promise of “never again” has been ignored time and again, we must all play our part in listening and learning from the stories of the victims of genocide.

14:54

[Jas Athwal (Ilford South) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) for opening the debate, and everybody else who has spoken so compassionately, with clarity and authenticity. The feeling that has come out is clear for everyone to see.

The Holocaust inflicted pain on a scale that most of us will never truly comprehend—pain that did not end in 1945, and that still echoes through families, memory and generations of the Jewish community. This is not history at a distance; this was cruelty by design. It was mass murder, carried out deliberately on an industrial scale. Its trauma did not disappear; it was inherited.

Today, I will speak about one survivor—one voice that we must listen to while we can. Her name is Susan Pollack. She is a Holocaust survivor who recently turned 95, and whom I had the privilege of meeting and interviewing. Susan was born in Hungary. Long before the camps, hatred crept into her life: graffiti on walls, Jewish students barred from universities, and her brother being beaten at a boy scout meeting. Each sign carried the same message: “You do not belong.”

Then came the order. Susan’s family were forced from their home. They were told that they were being resettled. She clung on to that word, because hope—even false hope—was all she had. A letter followed; all Jewish fathers were ordered to attend a meeting. Susan’s father went, desperate to protect his family. He was beaten, forced into a lorry and taken away. Susan never saw him again. To this day, she does not know how or where her father died.

Then came Susan’s turn. In May 1944, she and her family were transported by cattle trucks to Auschwitz-Birkenau. She was 15. Somebody whispered to her, “Don’t say you’re younger than 15,” so when she was asked, she said, “15 and a half.” She later learned why. Children under 15 were sent with their mothers directly to the gas chambers. Susan lost her mother, and with that loss came horrors beyond language: mothers watching their children die; children searching for protection that could not come; entire families murdered in minutes. That is what hatred looks like when it is given power.

The cruelty did not stop. Susan’s hair was shaved, she was inspected—yes, inspected—starved and silenced. She watched people die, not by accident but by policy. She was later sent to Bergen-Belsen. By then, she said,

“dehumanisation killed any thoughts in our heads.”

For an entire year, she did not speak. She once recognised somebody from her village. The next day, that woman was dead.

When liberation came, Susan told me something that must never be ignored: there was no joy at being liberated. She had lost her parents, 50 members of her family, her entire community. She did not even know whether her brother was still alive. Liberation could not undo what had been destroyed. That was Susan’s experience, and it was the experience of 6 million Jewish people and millions of others, systematically murdered because hatred was allowed to rule. The Holocaust did not begin with the gas chambers; it began with words—with lies repeated until they sounded like the truth, with people labelled as “other”, with hatred normalised, and with silence excused. That is why remembrance alone is not enough, because “never again” is not a slogan; it is a test—a test of whether we challenge antisemitism when we see it and when it is inconvenient to do so, whether we confront fascist rhetoric when it masquerades as opinion, and whether we defend human dignity when it costs us something.

Six million Jews were murdered not because the world did not know, but because too many looked away. Susan Pollack survived Auschwitz. She survived Bergen-Belsen. She survived an attempt to erase her humanity. But survival alone was not justice, and silence was never safety, so the lesson of the Holocaust is clear: when hatred is tolerated, it grows; when lies go unchallenged, they spread; when humanity is divided into us and them, violence is never far away.

That is why this House must be unequivocal: we will not excuse antisemitism. We will not tolerate fascism. We will not stand by while people are dehumanised, in our politics, in our communities or in our public life. Because remembrance demands resolve—resolve to speak when others stay silent, to act when others hesitate and to defend our shared humanity every time it is threatened. We owe that to Susan Pollack; we owe it to the six million; we owe it to the future. If “never again” is to mean anything at all, it must mean now and it must mean us.

15:01

[Martin Vickers (Brigg and Immingham) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to take part in this debate once again. There have been some profound, passionate, emotional and informative contributions, as is so often the case when we put our political exchanges to one side. As Members have mentioned, this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme is, “Bridging Generations”. Every year we move further away from the horrific events of the Holocaust, it becomes even more distant, and every year more of our Holocaust survivors pass away. I understand that the median age of Holocaust survivors globally is 87. It is becoming harder and harder for those few remaining survivors to share their testimonies in person. Nothing compares to the raw shock of hearing the horrors of the Holocaust spoken from the mouth of someone who experienced it. When those voices pass away, who will pick up the mantle?

That is why this year’s theme is so important. We have to bridge the gap between the generations. We must begin the process of passing on the responsibility of remembrance from survivors to the next generations. Sadly, as a global society, we have not learned the lessons, and we know there have been many examples of genocide since the Holocaust.

Last year, I spoke in this debate ahead of the 30th anniversary of the Srebrenica genocide, which the hon. Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) mentioned— I apologise if I make some of the same points. I have taken a particular interest in the western Balkans because when I studied for my politics degree, one of the units was the break-up of Yugoslavia. When I arrived here in Westminster, I became involved in the various all-party groups that focus on the region, and I subsequently served as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy to the western Balkans.

The Srebrenica genocide took place in July 1995 during the Bosnian war. As has been said, 8,372 Bosniak Muslim men and boys were murdered, and it is legally recognised as the first genocide on European soil since world war two. It was a campaign of war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide against the non-Serb population. The war cost over 100,000 people their lives and caused the displacement of more than 2 million men, women and children.

Like others, I had the privilege of meeting some of the Mothers of Srebrenica, a group that represents the mothers, wives, daughters and families of those who perished. It does magnificent work in keeping the world focused on the terrible events of July 1995.

Today, as we look back on three decades since that darkness fell over Bosnia, we can ask the same question about the Srebrenica genocide. When the voices that speak of that genocide finally fall silent, who will speak for them? Sadly, as with our Holocaust survivors, in the coming years and decades the direct testimonies of Srebrenica survivors will be merely written ones.

I have before spoken in the Chamber about my visits to Srebrenica. As with visits to military cemeteries in Belgium and France, or indeed to country churchyards where a handful of graves are maintained by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, the sacrifice of so many people hits home on those visits to Srebrenica. Like any location where tombstones stretch for row upon row, the harrowing sight and silence of the Potočari battery factory stirs the emotions.

[Sir Alec Shelbrooke]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the gravestones that mark massacres in Bosnia and elsewhere. They emphasise the importance of Holocaust Memorial Day and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, because millions of people were cremated so that there was no evidence of genocide.

[Martin Vickers]

I entirely agree with my right hon. Friend.

Srebrenica is located in Republika Srpska, a semi-autonomous region of Bosnia and Herzegovina controlled by Serbs as part of the Dayton peace agreement. Many perpetrators are still at large, and genocide denial is widespread among some groups of Bosnian Serbs. Had it not been for the involvement of the international community, the Potočari memorial may never have come into being at all.

The decision to locate the Srebrenica-Potočari memorial and cemetery and to secure its funding was made by the UN High Representative. Much of the funding came from foreign countries. The village of Potočari was chosen by survivors and bereaved relatives because it was where many of them last saw their loved ones. The Srebrenica-Potočari memorial complex was subsequently established in May 2001. Beginning as a cemetery, the site was officially opened by former US President Clinton on Saturday 20 September 2003.

The lesson we learn from Srebrenica is that hatred and intolerance can flourish if left unchallenged. In Bosnia, people of many faiths lived as neighbours for generations, and yet in a short time those neighbours were viewed not just as the enemy but as an enemy so threatening that they must be ethnically cleansed. Not only were 8,372 men and boys massacred, but thousands of women and girls—some estimates are as high as 50,000—suffered sexual violence. Thousands of women and children were forcibly deported. For children born today, Srebrenica is as much a historical event as the Holocaust was to my generation. And that is the worry: there is danger in distance as it can lead to detachment, and detachment can allow the seeds of division to grow once more.

That leads me to my next point, on addressing the issue of genocide denial. Sadly, we see a rising tide of genocide denial across the western Balkans today. To bridge generations, we must arm our young people with the truth. We cannot allow the history of 8,372 murdered men and boys to be debated into non-existence by those who seek to revive the same nationalist hatreds that led to those murders in the first place. We must ensure that our schools teach not just the dates of the Bosnian war and the genocide in Srebrenica, but the mechanics of them. How does the slow drip of dehumanising rhetoric turn a neighbour someone has lived alongside for many years into an enemy they are willing to destroy? It is young people we must reach; it is for them that the lessons of Srebrenica, the Holocaust and subsequent genocides are most important. They are our future, and it is they who we will rely on to avoid the mistakes of the past.

We live in an increasingly dangerous world—one in which human decency is sometimes in short supply; one that is forgetting the lessons of the recent past. Let us state today that the story of Srebrenica, the Holocaust and other genocides will not fade into the archives and that we will never forget how stripping people of their humanity can lead to some of the worst crimes in human history.

As is often the case, we can turn to the words of our forefathers who wrote the religious texts of the many faiths that are represented here and throughout our country. The service of Compline in the Book of Common Prayer says that we must

“be vigilant, because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour”.

It is vivid, stark language, but sadly the devil can enter the hearts of people, especially when propaganda and evil leadership are involved. We must never forget the brutality of which man is capable, and it is right that we use parliamentary time to commemorate these horrific events.

To the young people watching this debate today or taking part in Holocaust education events in their schools or communities, I say: pick up the mantle. Do not let these testimonies fade away and be forgotten. Bridge the gap between the generations and carry the lessons of the Holocaust forward. When my daughter was in her late 20s, she went on a social project to Rwanda, where she met people who had survived the genocide there. That had an enormous emotional impact on her, which is why I believe it is particularly important that young people are involved. I attended a Holocaust memorial event in the town of Brigg in my constituency last Sunday, and one of the highlights was the readings from pupils of a local school at the short service. We rely on our young people to succeed where past generations have failed.

15:10

[Melanie Ward (Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers) who, as so often on topics like this, speaks with great authority.

I rise once again this year to remember the Holocaust, one of the darkest chapters in human history. The industrial-scale extermination of 6 million Jewish people and millions more prisoners of war, political prisoners, Poles, disabled people, members of the LGBT community, Roma and others is a horror so bleak that we must ensure the memory of what was done and those whose lives were taken never fades.

The theme for this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “Bridging Generations”. In last year’s debate, we marked the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Like a number of other Members, I shared some of my own family’s story and spoke about my Jewish great-grandfather. In the intervening year, we have lost more Holocaust survivors who were determined to let the world know what happened to them, their friends and their family in that horrific place. Holocaust education is not just teaching history; it should play a crucial role in combatting antisemitism and hatred, and preventing future genocides. As we are able to hear from fewer and fewer survivors each year, there is an additional duty for all of us to educate future generations on the atrocities that were committed on European soil.

In my constituency just last month, a group of masked young men were photographed giving the Nazi salute and brandishing the symbol of the SS on the steps of our town house in Kirkcaldy. It was so shocking that at first, I thought the image must have been generated by AI, because things like that don’t usually happen round our way, but the local police confirmed that it was real. It was honestly frightening that those men felt comfortable participating in such an act in broad daylight, not 400 yards from our Holocaust memorial or the war memorial, which commemorates the hundreds of Kirkcaldy men who died fighting the Nazis.

Acts like this are a warning to us all: hatred spreads in plain sight. There are those among us, including some who sit in this place, whose purpose is to sow and stir hatred and division in our communities. It is fostered and spread online, in the presence of vulnerable young minds. This is an eradication of historical record and memory in favour of misinformation. I am grateful to my local police force in Kirkcaldy for its swift action in identifying, arresting and charging suspects, as well as to the many Fifers who expressed their outrage that such an ignorant, offensive and dangerous act had taken place in our midst. I have said to my constituents that, in the months and years ahead, sadly we—and they—must all be prepared to take a visible stand against hate.

Some of the people in that photograph were not men but boys, who apparently said that they had not understood what the gesture of the Nazi salute meant, nor understood the SS symbol on the flag that they held, but that is why the theme of “Bridging Generations” is so crucial. As the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) said, education and memory must become a responsibility. My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols), in a profound speech, spoke about the difference between history and memory.

We in Kirkcaldy are proud of our Holocaust memorial, designed by students from three Fife schools who visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2005. The sculpture is in the shape of a doorway, and has symbols carved into it that were used across Europe and America in the 1930s to tell others, “This is a safe place.” The UK, and towns like mine in Fife, has long been a safe place for minorities and those fleeing persecution. It is incumbent on all of us to call out racism and antisemitism and those who seek to divide us. I know that the vast majority of my constituents—indeed, of our country—agree with that, but we can take nothing for granted in today’s uncertain world.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) so eloquently said, we cannot assume that it will not happen again. Indeed, in the wake of the antisemitic attacks on Heaton Park synagogue and Bondi Beach, we must be clear eyed about what is happening. In the aftermath of the Holocaust and world war two, international law and the rules-based order were created, to put lines in the sand about right and wrong and to learn the lessons of what had taken place. Now, as the rules-based order is increasingly trampled on by nations that should know better, we the UK must do more to prevent mass atrocities. There must be better prediction, prevention and response to mass identity-based violence.

Data suggests that since 2012 there has been an increase in the number of countries where mass atrocity crimes are occurring, and action is needed to stop it. There is a gap in global leadership on this agenda, and it shows. The UK has never had a strategy for the prevention of mass atrocity crimes. Given the state of global affairs, surely we need one now more than ever. Surely, too, we should seek to build a coalition with like-minded countries to monitor the warning signs and act together to prevent the mass murder of citizens who are targeted simply because of who they are. I ask the Minister to take that away.

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, humanity was determined to prevent genocide, mass atrocities and identity-based violence from taking place ever again, but the warning light is flashing red and it is time for renewed domestic and international action, alongside education. Holocaust Memorial Day is often marked by the lighting of a candle. It is now up to us to light that candle, and carry the memory of those who perished with us always.

15:17

[Kirsty Blackman (Aberdeen North) (SNP)]

It is an honour to represent the SNP in today’s debate on Holocaust Memorial Day. Six million Jews were murdered. I was trying to think about what words to use to describe it. The word “tragedy” was one of the first I thought of, but a tragedy is something that is unavoidable—in my head, anyway, it is something that was going to happen. This was evil perpetrated by humans. The hon. Member for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers) talked about the brutality of which man is capable. That was the phrase that stuck with me from today’s debate. It is about the brutality that human beings are capable of inflicting on one another.

The hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) talked about othering. The ability that human beings have to begin to “other” humans by grouping them together because of some perceived difference is horrific, and something that we should all be aware of and think of when we talk about the lessons of the Holocaust and learning from what happened in Nazi Germany.

The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) talked about what happened, and a number of other Members have also talked about what did not happen. Not every single person in Nazi Germany was a Nazi, responsible for taking Jewish people to the camps, but enough people in Nazi Germany were willing to turn a blind eye to that. I am not blaming individuals for their actions—maybe their family were being threatened, maybe they were terrified, maybe they had circumstances that we cannot contemplate today—but every one of us who has moments when we do not stand up against hatred and othering needs to think about why we are not doing so. Whether we are Members of Parliament, members of the public, community leaders or faith leaders, we need to think about whether we would be able to sleep at night if we knew people would be looking back through history at our actions and considering us to have been bystanders, rather than people who took action when it was needed—when that othering was happening.

Every human being has value. A person’s value is not based on their religion, their country of birth, the colour of their skin, which town they currently live in, how much money they make or what job they do. Every human being inherently has value, and we all have a responsibility as representatives to ensure that whatever differences exist between us, we recognise and stand up for the value of every one of our constituents and every one of the people across these islands. We have a responsibility to stand up to anyone, whether they are a Member of this place, a politician at a different level or a member of the public, and say to them, “No, somebody is not less because you have put them in a box—because you have suggested that they are somehow other. They have just as much value as you do; it does not matter what country they were born in, who they worship, or what religious text is sitting on their bedside table.” We all have value just because we are human beings, and we all have that responsibility.

I want every one of us, whether we are in this Chamber or outside of it, to be able to sleep at night because we know that we have done the right thing—that we have stood up against that drip, drip, drip of the beginnings of hatred that can culminate where we ended up with the Holocaust. I find it very difficult to comprehend how someone can go from being slightly negative about somebody, or about a group, to the mass industrial murder that we saw, because I am not in that situation. I find it very difficult to contemplate how that can happen, but we know that it has—it happened not just in Nazi Germany, but in Srebrenica and Darfur.

The hon. Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) talked about the international rules-based order and the reason why it was set up. None of the international organisations that we have relied on and listened to was set up simply as a trading organisation. The genocide convention was put in place because every country needed to ensure that we had learned those lessons, and were collectively resolved to never do it again. Some comments are being made about international organisations, saying, “We can step away from that trading organisation,” but that is a bit misinformed, because it is not just about that. We must ensure that we are working together to prevent genocide, not by policing one another, but by assisting one another to ensure that every country sees the value of every human and that we never “other” people like that again.

[Jim Shannon (Strangford) (DUP)]

I commend the hon. Lady on her speech. One way to start to address the issue is in schools, at an educational level. Some of the history teachers back home tell me that they struggle to include the Holocaust in the history curriculum. Politics students can come to Parliament and learn all about it and then take it back to their school. I think of my son and his friends from Glastry college back home. They went to Auschwitz as children, and their attitude and life changed dramatically. Does the hon. Lady agree that helping educationally by funding trips to Auschwitz would be a way of addressing these issues?

[Kirsty Blackman]

I absolutely agree, and I know that a number of schools in Scotland take part in trips to Auschwitz. It is important that that continues, particularly given the theme of “Bridging Generations”. Fewer and fewer individuals can talk about their experiences, and it is incredibly important that we remember that history and that this was a real thing that happened. There is too much Holocaust denial of all sorts. We need to be showing people, so that they can tackle that disinformation and misinformation with the evidence of their own eyes.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds Central and Headingley) (Lab/Co-op)]

The hon. Member is making an excellent speech. This Sunday, I went to our Holocaust Memorial Day event in Leeds and met Trude Silman, my former constituent from when I was a councillor. She is 97 years old, and we have fewer and fewer of these Holocaust survivors. I pay tribute to the children of Holocaust survivors—the second generation—including my father, who gave oral testimony to the Holocaust Centre North. I hope that by next Holocaust Memorial Day that will be transcribed and available to the public, not just so that my children and I can understand our family’s history, but so that everybody can learn from that and understand our link in the UK to the Holocaust and how it can echo through the generations.

[Kirsty Blackman]

I hope that we see that testimony shared more widely. I have a conflicting thought, however: while it is important that we hear testimony, listen to testimony and amplify that testimony, forcing people who may not necessarily want to relive that trauma to continually relive that trauma for us to learn is not always the best way forward. We have to find a balance between how we can educate people and not retraumatising survivors.

I am contacted by a number of people expressing deeply wrong views—not necessarily teenagers, but older adults in some cases. They are “othering” in their minds and putting ethnic or religious groups in some sort of box. Dealing with disinformation and misinformation is not just about young people, but every generation. We must do more to tackle that.

I do not want to take up too much of the House’s time, but I thank everybody who does stand up, whether in this place or not. It is appreciated when people take a moment to tackle and challenge those false narratives and are willing to say, “This is wrong. It is wrong to dehumanise people. It is wrong to put people in a box based on their religious convictions, their sexuality or the colour of their skin.” Anyone who is willing to do that in any circumstance is appreciated. It is not easy to do, but we all need to do it, because none of us wants to end up in a situation where we are bystanders as atrocities are committed. I thank everybody who does stand up. I thank all those people at the Holocaust Educational Trust and all those involved in Holocaust Memorial Day for bringing the information to us, so that we can make speeches and talk to our constituents about this and so that we can do our best to listen and to challenge those horrific, untrue narratives.

15:29

[Joani Reid (East Kilbride and Strathaven) (Lab)]

I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) for not just his opening remarks but his commitment to this cause, both in this House and outside it. The Holocaust was a unique event in human history in which the state waged external war with expressly genocidal aims, combined with the industrialisation of killing as a transcontinental enterprise.

The Holocaust matters to us today because we owe it to the dead, and to the living who went through that horror, to commemorate their suffering; because we should pay tribute to those still with us, as well as those who have gone before us and who brought an end to the Hitler regime, whose raison d’être was the mass murder of Jews and others whom they saw as less human; and, perhaps most importantly, because we owe it to ourselves to remind each other of where the poison of racist hatred takes humanity.

Holocaust Memorial Day matters more this year, because there has undoubtedly been an appalling rise in antisemitic violence and in the public and private abuse of Jews. If the Holocaust teaches us anything, it is to stand up and call out hatred and racism. There is now a barely hidden campaign to drive Jews out of public and civic life in Britain—a campaign, I am sad to say, in which Members of this House are active participants or complicit. The eruption of antisemitism in Britain since 7 October 2023 has underlined how supposed progressives and anti-racists are fine to speak out, unless it is about hatred of Jews. Campaigners have marched alongside open supporters of fascistic Hamas and shouted slogans advocating a global war against Jews. They have done all this because they believe that their new-found allies are merely “anti-Zionist” and not actually antisemites at all.

The arguments that dominate today’s antisemitic discourse are superficially more sophisticated, and are increasingly shaped by the melting pot of extreme ideas that is provided by social media, but the reality is that the far right, the far left and the Islamists still rely on the old tropes of hidden Jewish power and manipulation, Jewish blood lust, and Jews as the killer of Christ. They now hide this behind the words “Zionism” or “Israel” and hope that people will not spot the difference. Through social media, many of these ideas have seeped into the discourse of what is supposedly mainstream.

In 2019, the right hon. and learned Member for Fareham and Waterlooville (Suella Braverman) told the Bruges Group of the supposed threat of “cultural Marxism”, an idea that has direct Nazi roots. It is a phrase that the former MP Andrew Percy warned others against using. In 2024, Liz Truss was forced to remove a bogus and antisemitic quote attributed to Mayer Rothschild from her memoirs. Then there is the case of Reform’s recently announced candidate for Gorton and Denton, who, like the right hon. Member for Islington North (Jeremy Corbyn), appears not to believe that ethnic minority children born here can ever be British or understand British humour. This is the antisemites’ baseline argument about the otherness of Jews, retooled for the use of today’s insurgent far right and far left.

It behoves all of us to call out the issues in our midst, and there has been too much silence in this regard. Members of this House have been involved in stoking the fires of Islamist hatred, antisemitism and Holocaust inversion. Perhaps some will make very fine speeches about Holocaust memorial, as they did last year, but we should not allow ourselves to be fooled. One Member of this House, writing about the middle east on social media, invoked images of the gas chambers, a barbaric creation used for the industrialised and systematic murder of Jews—Jewish men, women and children. That trivialises the Holocaust.

However, there is not only Holocaust inversion; there are outright antisemitic tropes. Members of this House have shared posts on social media of images of political leaders being “dog-walked” or controlled by Israeli politicians or the Zionist lobby. This draws on stereotypes of Jewish power and control, and alludes to some kind of malign Jewish influence. These classic antisemitic tropes have existed for thousands of years, but are continually being repackaged and updated to fit the contemporary political context.

In the Budget debate, the hon. Member for Coventry South (Zarah Sultana) talked about her constituents “bleeding…dry”, because of our Government’s support of Israel, and we also heard a Member of this House talk about Israel’s—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

Order. I want to make sure that protocol has been followed. First, we obviously do not mention Members by their names, not that the hon. Member has done that. She has, however, referred to a few Members by their constituencies, so can I have her assurance that she let them know that she would be referencing them in the Chamber during this debate?

[Joani Reid]

Madam Deputy Speaker, I can confirm that I have written to all the Members I have included in my speech.

Another Member talked about Israel’s “blood-soaked tentacles”. There is no safe limit of antisemitism that we should tolerate, and no requirement for us to apply weaker moral tests of what is an acceptable opinion because of the religious heritage of our interlocutor. Human rights apply universally, and so do human responsibilities. We need to enforce those responsibilities before it is too late. The warning lights are already flashing. We do not have to look back to the 1930s to see how democracies can crash under the burden of political extremism and contempt for the rule of law, because we see that in the news every day.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

15:36

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

It is an honour to speak in this debate and to follow such passionate speeches, including that of the hon. Member for East Kilbride and Strathaven (Joani Reid). I congratulate the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) not only on such an eloquent introduction to this debate, but on such an interesting history of the persecution of Jews in Britain for the best part of 1,000 years. That was very informative and provided a much-needed context for our discussion.

Many Members spoke about the individuals, charities and organisations working tirelessly to ensure that the nation and schoolchildren in particular are educated about the Holocaust and will not forget it. As the average age of Holocaust survivors is 87, it is very prescient that the Holocaust Memorial Day theme is “Bridging Generations”. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust plays a vital role in ensuring that remembrance is not limited to those whose families were murdered in the Holocaust, but includes those who, having been mercilessly killed by the Nazis, were left with no one to speak their names. The legacy of victims with no surviving family or relatives must be safeguarded through education, remembrance and memorial.

If the words “never again” are to mean anything, they must represent a shared commitment to challenge hatred wherever it appears. Sadly, this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day comes against a backdrop of rising antisemitism. Jewish people in the UK are facing unacceptable and rising levels of hatred and violence—and I know from speaking to my constituents in Winchester just how isolating and frightening that can be. No one should feel anxious or scared when going to their place of worship and no one should be denied the freedom to express their religious beliefs. It ought to be a national shame that we need security measures outside places of worship, but with the murder of two members of the Jewish community just last year outside their synagogue, those measures are, unfortunately, necessary.

For so many British Jews, Holocaust Memorial Day is deeply personal. It is a day of grief, of remembrance and of resilience. Primo Levi wrote:

“The story of the death camps should be understood by everyone as a sinister alarm-signal.”

While hatred and division persist, that alarm signal must be in our minds today, and must remain in our minds for generations to come. On my way to the Chamber today, I walked past the very moving exhibition in Parliament of the replicas of the shoes of people who were killed in those death camps. Some of those shoes are of little children. That is a stark and haunting reminder of what the Holocaust required. The Holocaust depended on the systematic dehumanisation of its victims, casting human beings as non-human to justify the unjustifiable. To murder millions, the Nazi state had to treat even little children not as children with names, families and futures, but as something less than human.

In this Chamber and in our communities, schools and neighbourhoods, let us all stand with Jewish communities, because antisemitism has no place in our country or abroad. We must do all we can to ensure that Jewish people can practise their faith freely, live openly and participate fully in our society without fear. We remain today, and will always remain, committed to creating a society that never stops learning from the lessons of history.

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

I call the shadow Minister.

15:41

[Paul Holmes (Hamble Valley) (Con)]

It is a genuine pleasure to speak as a shadow Housing, Communities and Local Government Minister in a debate where Members across the House have been frank, honest, open and emotional. Debates such as this, about our history and our future, often bring out the best in Members, and I pay tribute to all the speeches this afternoon.

I particularly pay tribute to the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley), who opened the debate. I do not think that I am alone in saying that he is one of the most gentlemanly and honourable Members of the House in conducting his business. He gave us some beautiful words that we all must learn from, as well as a wonderful history tour. His speech brought our history closer to home, and showed what this country was intrinsically involved in. His honesty in that is admirable.

Notwithstanding the serious nature of this debate, I think that the hon. Gentleman should consider audiobooks, because his dulcet tones should be heard far and wide across the country. They are incredibly soothing. He did a tremendous job today, and I pay tribute to him.

My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman) reminded us that the Holocaust was not the start or end of antisemitism. His speech was a stark reminder not just of the need to remember, but to acknowledge what is happening now in this country and the world.

My right hon. Friend the Member for Wetherby and Easingwold (Sir Alec Shelbrooke) spoke in graphic detail, and he was right to do so. Having been to Auschwitz and to the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem only last month, I know that we must not become desensitised to our history. His graphic speech reminded us of the horrors of the past. He outlined some local issues to do with councillors at Leeds council, and he had every right to do so on the Floor of the House. It is a shame that the leadership of any political party did not feel the need to vet people properly or act on an incredibly serious incident. I remind the House and my right hon. Friend that Hamas is a proscribed organisation, and I hope that the police will take action following his speech to bring that person to justice. He is absolutely right that we need to call out antisemitism and challenge those who look the other way not just by making points of order, but by making substantive contributions in this Chamber, as he did this afternoon.

My hon. Friend the Member for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers) said that we must arm young people with knowledge about genocide, despite the dehumanisation and nationalism we have seen in the parts of the world that he mentioned. He is absolutely right. That is just a short peppering of the excellent contributions we have had from across the House today.

Holocaust Memorial Day invites us to pause, reflect and recommit ourselves to ensuring that the darkest chapter in human history is never forgotten. This year’s theme, “Bridging Generations”, is a powerful reminder that the responsibility for remembrance does not end with the survivors. It lives on through their children and their grandchildren, and through every single one of us. As a nation, we must never allow the history of the Holocaust to fade from our collective consciousness. As the events of the 1930s and 1940s move further from living memory, our duty becomes even more urgent. We must ensure that future generations know and understand the horrors, traumas and lessons of the Shoah, for remembrance is not a passive act; it is a conscious commitment to education, and to the memory of those killed in barbarous cruelty.

Holocaust Memorial Day plays a vital role in sustaining that commitment. On this day, we commemorate the genocide of 6 million Jews—men, women and children—murdered by Nazi Germany and its collaborators. We also remember the millions of others persecuted and killed: Roma and Sinti people, the disabled, gay men, political opponents, and countless others targeted by a regime built on hatred and dehumanisation. The focus on bridging generations reminds us of our collective role in ensuring that the Holocaust remains a lesson for all those in positions of influence and responsibility. We in this place have a special obligation to ensure that the stories of those who came before us continue to be told accurately, compassionately and courageously to future generations. As we reflect, we must also remember that the Holocaust was not the final genocide of the 20th century. The world has witnessed unspeakable brutality again and again. We all, in this House, send our thoughts to those affected by antisemitic terror, particularly those in Australia, whom many Members across the House mentioned.

The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust reminds us that commemorating these tragedies is not only a moral duty, but a hope that through memory we can build the vigilance needed to prevent these horrors recurring, yet remembrance alone is not enough. We must also confront the reality of antisemitism today. Any discrimination or intimidation based on religion or race is deplorable and must never be tolerated. In 2016, the United Kingdom became the first country in Europe to formally adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism—an important step, but one that we must build on with action against a rising tide of antisemitism.

I am afraid to say that data from the Community Security Trust shows deeply troubling trends. In the first half of 2025 alone, 1,521 antisemitic incidents were recorded across the UK—the second highest total ever reported over such a period. The surge in antisemitism that followed the horrific terrorist attacks of 7 October 2023, before there had been any major military response in Gaza, is a stark reminder that antisemitism remains a persistent, poisonous force. In that context, initiatives to strengthen Holocaust education and public memory are more important than ever. That is why the Holocaust Memorial Act 2026, which received Royal Assent just last week, marks a historic and meaningful milestone. It will finally bring to life the vision first announced in 2015 by Lord Cameron of a national holocaust memorial and learning centre beside Parliament, in Victoria Tower Gardens. It will serve as a lasting tribute to the 6 million Jewish victims, and to all victims of Nazi persecution. It will stand as an enduring educational resource, and a totemic reminder of the consequences of unchecked hatred and the vital importance of resisting it.

At the very moment when education is most urgently needed, we face a worrying decline. As the hon. Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket mentioned, in 2023, more than 2,000 secondary schools across the UK took part in Holocaust Memorial Day commemorations, and the number had grown each year since 2019; but in the wake of the 7 October attacks, participation fell to under 1,200 in 2024, and to just 854 in 2025—a drop of nearly 60%. This is alarming, to say the least. Holocaust education should never be seen as political, nor should it be treated as contingent on world events. The Chief Rabbi expressed this with clarity and moral force when he said:

“Holocaust Memorial Day is not a platform for political debate. It is not an endorsement of any Government, perspective or conflict. It is an act of human memory. To insist that it must justify itself by reference to today’s headlines is to fundamentally misunderstand it.”

The Chief Rabbi also reminded us of another essential point:

“The Shoah was not inevitable. It was the end of a road paved with normalised scapegoating, constant disinformation, violent autocracy and a culture of the most extreme hatred. It began not in concentration camps but in classrooms, newspapers and public squares where people learned to look away.”

Holocaust education, then, is not a parochial concern, and it is right that by law children are taught about the Holocaust in the key stage 3 history curriculum. I welcome the Government’s commitment to ensuring that the Holocaust remain a compulsory topic in the reformed national curriculum, which will be required teaching in academy schools, when it is implemented. It is only through education that we can honour those who were killed. To reference the Chief Rabbi once more,

“Honouring Jewish victims of genocide does not diminish compassion for any other people. On the contrary, it enlarges it, because collective memory is not a finite resource.”

Today, as we work to bridge generations, and connect the testimonies of survivors to the responsibilities of our children and grandchildren, let us ensure that the horrors of the Holocaust are never forgotten, and most importantly, never repeated. Let us, across all generations, all parties and both sides of this Chamber, stand together in remembrance, but also united in hope.

15:51

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government (Miatta Fahnbulleh)]

I start by thanking my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds and Stowmarket (Peter Prinsley) for opening the debate with such a poignant and thoughtful contribution. He set the tone of the debate impeccably. This debate has shown, powerfully and painfully, that the past few years have not been easy for British Jews, or for Jewish communities across the world. Many colleagues have spoken today with a frankness and empathy that reflects the deep concern felt across the House.

Britain is rightly proud of being one of the world’s most successful multi-faith and multi-ethnic democracies—it is part of who we are—so it is with a particularly heavy heart that we recall the attack on Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar, and the shocking attack at Bondi Beach in Sydney. These events remind us that antisemitism is never a problem for someone else to solve. It is a threat to all of us—to our values, our cohesion, and our shared sense of safety.

This debate, however, is not only about confronting rising antisemitism; it is first and foremost about honouring the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered in the Holocaust, and the thousands of Roma and Sinti, disabled people, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gay men and political opponents who were also persecuted and killed. It is also about remembering the genocides that have happened, tragically, in more recent times.

More than 80 years have passed since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, yet the lessons about where hatred, dehumanisation and violent bigotry can lead remain painfully relevant. Many of us in this House have had the immense privilege of hearing directly from Holocaust survivors. This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day theme, “Bridging Generations”, feels especially poignant. The survivors, who have carried the heaviest of burdens, and who have shared their testimony with extraordinary courage, are fewer each year. We owe it to them to ensure that their voices never fade.

My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) spoke incredibly powerfully of the memories and stories of that dark period, the profound impact they have, and how sharing them is more important today than it has ever been. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal) for sharing the heart-wrenching story of Susan Pollack, which is a harrowing reminder of where hate and othering can lead us.

Over the past two weeks, colleagues will have walked through the atrium in Portcullis House and seen “In Their Footsteps”, an extraordinary exhibition of ceramic shoes. It is a quiet but powerful reminder that trauma and memory echo across generations, and that remembrance is not passive, but active, creative and deeply personal. The exhibition also pays tribute to Danny Herman. Danny and his family arrived in the UK on the eve of the second world war, eventually settling in Liverpool, becoming British citizens and contributing to this country in ways large and small, in everything from wartime industry to professional sport. In the atrium, the shoes created by his family speak of love, survival and legacy. They remind us that every survivor’s story is unique, and that everyone deserves to be remembered. The message today is clear: we cannot remember the victims of the Holocaust while ignoring antisemitism in our own time.

Despite the words “never again”, we continue to see violent conflict across the world, and civilians are caught in its path. That underscores the urgency of the work we are discussing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) set out so effectively, we all know that social media can be an extraordinary force for connection, but it can also be a vehicle for spreading Holocaust denial, hatred and division faster than ever before. That is why we must remain vigilant, and why it is so important to safeguard our children—not only to protect them, but to equip them with the critical skills and confidence that they need to challenge hatred when they encounter it.

The Department for Education launched the tackling antisemitism in education innovation fund on Holocaust Memorial Day to address misinformation, improve media literacy and encourage tolerant, informed debate. Some £7 million has already been allocated to tackling antisemitism in our schools, colleges and universities. That includes £500,000 for the University Jewish Chaplaincy, and further funding for the Union of Jewish Students and Palace Yard to train staff to recognise and address antisemitism.

Many Members have spoken today about the importance of testimony. The Prime Minister has made a clear pledge that every student in the country should have the opportunity to hear recorded survivor testimony. Testimony 360, a free digital education programme from the Holocaust Educational Trust that uses virtual reality and digital eyewitness accounts, will help to deliver that promise and ensure that survivors’ voices remain accessible long after they can no longer speak in person.

This Government continue to support high-quality Holocaust education through the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education, and the Holocaust Educational Trust “Lessons from Auschwitz” programme—programmes that have transformed the understanding of thousands of students and teachers, and will continue to do so. This education is vital. As Members have said, it is more important now than ever.

My hon. Friend the Member for Cowdenbeath and Kirkcaldy (Melanie Ward) provided powerful testimony about the rising tide of hate and division, both at home and abroad. She is right to demand that we be vigilant, and that we do better. I will take away her call for a strategy to prevent the mass murder of innocent people simply because of their faith, race, ethnicity or identity. My hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake) was right to remind us that we all have a responsibility to tackle the antisemitism and the rise of hate and division in our communities, and that we must use our empathy, compassion and respect to bridge and hold our communities together. I echo the words of the hon. Member for Aberdeen North (Kirsty Blackman): we must all stand up against this hate, and thank everyone who does stand up against it.

I finish by paying tribute to Karen Pollock, the chief executive officer of the Holocaust Educational Trust, whose leadership and passion continue to inspire so many; to Olivia Marks-Woldman and the team at the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, who deliver the national ceremony and countless local events across the country; and to the many other organisations whose work enriches and protects the memory of the Holocaust: the Holocaust Survivors’ Centre in Hendon, the Anne Frank Trust, the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Association of Jewish Refugees, Generation 2 Generation, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum in Newark, the Holocaust Centre North in Huddersfield, and the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education.

I ask the House to take a moment to remember the survivors who shared their testimony with us and who are no longer here. Their courage, generosity and determination to educate others, despite the unimaginable trauma that they endured, is a gift to this country. We honour their memory, and wish their families a long life.

15:59

[Peter Prinsley]

It has been an immense privilege and honour to listen to the many brilliant speeches in the House this afternoon. I thank anybody who said anything kind about me.

I have made some notes about what people said—there is no time to go through all of them, but I must mention one or two. My hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols) spoke with such gravitas; I think she has a future as a distinguished rabbi, should she ever wish to go out of politics, which she perhaps will not. The hon. Member for Cheadle (Mr Morrison) spoke about Peter Kurer BEM, who is my sister-in-law’s father. He will be so chuffed to learn that he was mentioned here in Parliament, and I thank the hon. Member for that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Rochdale (Paul Waugh) spoke about the Windermere children. We all know that story, but Samantha, who was a University of East Anglia student, became a close friend. She is one of the granddaughters of a Windermere boy, so it was great to hear about that. We will never forget the Heaton heroes.

If there is time, let me quickly explain Bevis Marks, which was mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster (Rachel Blake). Bevis Marks in the City of London should actually be “Bury Marks”, but I have to stop.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Ms Nusrat Ghani)]

No, you don’t!

[Peter Prinsley]

Oh, there is time! In that case, I will tell hon. Members the story. The great Abbey of Bury St Edmunds had large landholdings all over the country, including land in the City of London. Wooden stakes were put out each year to define the land, which were called the Bury marks. “Bevis Marks” is simply a spelling mistake.

[Rachel Blake]

My hon. Friend may know that Bevis Marks synagogue is very close to Bury Street. I wonder if that is part of his story.

[Peter Prinsley]

I thank my hon. Friend for that information, which I was aware of.

If I have a little time, let me thank the leader of Plaid Cymru, the right hon. Member for Dwyfor Meirionnydd (Liz Saville Roberts)—I simply cannot pronounce the name of her constituency. She was correct that we must remember the other genocides, some of which really are a memory for me, not history; many of us can remember several of them.

I was particularly taken by my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford South (Jas Athwal), who spoke about the expression “never again”. As he correctly said, “never again” is a test for all of us. What will we do to ensure that it will never happen again?

Finally, I would like to say something about my hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride and Strathaven (Joani Reid), who is the most powerful advocate for the Campaign Against Antisemitism. If it were up to me, I should appoint her as a righteous gentile.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered Holocaust Memorial Day.