Holocaust Memorial Day

Charlotte Nichols Excerpts

Thursday 29th January 2026 Commons Chamber

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.”