Holocaust Memorial Day

Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath Excerpts

Monday 26th January 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Ramsey of Wall Heath (Lab)]

My Lords, it is an honour to follow the noble Lord, Lord Shinkwin, and to have heard the brilliant speech from the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Coventry—I am pleased to welcome another sort-of West Midlander—and so many powerful speeches from all noble Lords. I look forward to listening to the rest of the debate and, if I may be allowed to say, particularly to my fellow West Midlander, the noble Lord, Lord Austin, whose father was my inspirational head teacher at secondary school.

My father, Jim Ramsey, was a soldier during the Second World War, in a flail tank in the Westminster Dragoons and he was part of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945. Sadly, he died in 1990 but, while I was growing up, he told me what he had seen there. He was deeply shocked and appalled, and told us, his children, about it during the 1970s and 1980s because he wanted us to know, and for us to then tell others what he had told us, making a reality of Bridging Generations, the theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day.

Survivors of the camps are now dwindling to tiny numbers and their stories must live on through their families and fantastic organisations such as the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, to which I pay tribute. I share my father’s conviction of the importance of bearing witness by continuing to repeat accounts by the men and women who saw what had happened in the camps. This extract was kindly given to me by the Westminster Dragoons Regimental Association; it is taken from a report on the concentration camp at Belsen, Germany, by a fellow member of my father’s regiment:

“Belsen is a small village 11 miles from Celle, which is in the province of Hanover. About a mile south of Belsen there is a concentration camp … The conditions at Belsen camp were ghastly. Obviously it was used as a place where the prisoners could be exterminated slowly and with least trouble to the Reich. This extermination took place in the form of slow starvation; the rations were a bowl of swede or turnip soup per person every day and a loaf of rye bread between 12 persons every week. Thus the bare minimum was given; a minimum which would not allow anyone to die quickly of starvation, but which would make him or her gradually waste away into a living skeleton. When this happened death either followed by typhus or mere collapse. It was reckoned that at least 400 persons died every day.


When the camp was first entered by British troops, they were met by a sight which we in England would think impossible of a ‘civilised’ nation such as Germany. All over the grounds of the camp lay the bodies of what had once … been men and women. It was impossible to miss seeing bodies. Two over there—nine in front of the barbed wire, a large pile of 40 outside one of the huts—it was hard to walk without stepping on them as they lay on the ground. They were there because to begin with the prisoners were too weak to move their comrades away to bury them, and secondly because the SS guards were either too lazy to move them or because there were too many to move, and as they were buried more died. In one part of the camp there was a large pit. It was 80 feet deep, and in the bottom there was a mass of corpses, half buried with earth. It was said that the pit had been 20 feet deeper, but that the last consignment of bodies had filled up that 20 feet. At this moment Hungarian guards are digging another pit for those prisoners whom our doctors know will die shortly from typhus.


Today is the 25th of April 1945. The British have been at the camp for almost a week. They buried 1,200 people yesterday and 1,700 the day before, and there will be more to bury tomorrow. But things will gradually become better as the food we are giving them builds them up.


It is quite probable that many of the people in England who read accounts of this concentration camp, despite the fact that there are photographs to prove it, will think that the whole thing is vastly exaggerated and that it is just a move in the effort to foster the feeling of hate against the Germans—a feeling which admittedly the average Englishman does not like to show. He believes in sport and fair play … and anyhow, how in the world could another country do such terrible things when we don’t do them? Also we haven’t seen with our own eyes so we don’t believe, and it’s better forgotten anyhow”.


I have read only extracts from the report; I apologise to Members for how upsetting it is, but, bearing in mind the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, it seems appropriate to read them today. The final line written by that solider is:

“Do you think it’s better forgotten?”


I do not know who he was addressing that to, but I think he agreed with my father.

That anxiety that the testimony of returning soldiers would either not be believed or not be passed on to future generations was shared by my father, as well as the utter horror of what he had witnessed. How dismaying it was therefore to learn, from the Equality and Human Rights Commission’s October 2020 report, that the Labour Party had been dealing so inadequately with antisemitism under its previous leadership, and that complaints of individual members sharing Holocaust denial on social media had not even been investigated.

When Keir Starmer became leader, he was determined to root out antisemitism in the party. As part of this vital endeavour, I was asked to lead the work needed to address the recommendations made in the commission’s damning report. It was terrible that such work was necessary, but what a fitting opportunity it was for me to honour my father. The EHRC had identified political interference in the handling of antisemitism complaints, so I had the task of developing an independent complaints system from scratch. I also established a proper process to engage with Jewish community stakeholders, and I oversaw the devising and delivery of a programme of antisemitism awareness training for use across the party for all staff and parliamentarians.

I worked closely with the Jewish Labour Movement, which was led so effectively at that time by my now noble friends Lord Katz and Lady Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent, as well as Dame Louise Ellman, Rebecca Filer, Peter Mason and Adam Langleben. I worked with Danny Stone of the Antisemitism Policy Trust and Adrian Cohen of the Jewish Leadership Council, as well as Marie van der Zyl, the then president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and her successor, Phil Rosenberg. I also came to hugely respect Dave Rich and all those at the Community Security Trust; obviously, that work is ongoing, for reasons that other noble Lords have mentioned today.

Under Keir’s leadership, and with the support and challenge of all those wonderful people, the Labour Party succeeded in turning things round. The EHRC lifted its legal enforcement action against the party, and no longer did the Chief Rabbi find himself needing to intervene publicly in the general election, as he had done in 2019. But, of course, antisemitism is still very much with us today, as we all saw last October with the horrific attack on worshippers at the Heaton Park synagogue in Manchester on Yom Kippur. Therefore, Holocaust Memorial Day retains its vital role in ensuring that we all remember and—more than this—that we all do whatever we can to tackle antisemitism wherever we see it.