Holocaust Memorial Day

Debate between John Spellar and Fabian Hamilton

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Fabian Hamilton (Leeds North East) (Lab)]

I should like to start by congratulating the hon. Member for Weaver Vale (Graham Evans) on having secured this timely and important debate. It is essential that we are reminded why we commemorate Holocaust memorial day this coming weekend.

I want to follow the excellent speech that has just been made with some recollections of my own and, if the House will indulge me—I will be as quick as I can—with some very personal stories that I have never before relayed in my nearly 16 years as a Member of Parliament.

I first visited Auschwitz in 1998. I represent the largest Jewish community in Yorkshire, in the city of Leeds. They live mainly in my Leeds North East constituency, where we have five synagogues and some 8,500 Jewish people remaining from the much larger pre-war community. I was persuaded to go, first, because I am myself Jewish and had never been to a concentration camp, but also because so many of my constituents felt that it was right to go that January day. So, at 2 o’clock in the morning, we set off from Leeds to Manchester—we could not fly at that time from Leeds—and then to Krakow. We chartered a plane and all paid our contribution towards the cost, and 24 hours later, we were back home. It was one of the most moving experiences I have ever had.

As I am sure other Members will relay this afternoon, and as the hon. Member for Weaver Vale so clearly and carefully put it in recounting the story of his visit, one cannot but be affected emotionally, and almost physically, by what one sees in Auschwitz-Birkenau. I thought Birkenau, in many ways, was more moving. Auschwitz has become a museum. It is well-preserved and looked after by the Polish authorities. The guides are professional and they give visitors a very clear story, sometimes, quite naturally, with a Polish bias. But on getting to Birkenau, one can see almost unspoilt—if I can put it that way—the horrors of that camp. There is the railway the hon. Gentleman described, that goes from the beginning—from that wall and that gate—right through to the crematorium and the showers: the gas chambers, which were partially destroyed. There are the huts, originally built for horses, which were imported from Germany and, so I understood from our guide, contained up to 1,000 people who were kept captive there. The facilities there were horrifying. The prisoners were treated probably worse than the horses would have been treated. The Nazis destroyed most of those huts, leaving—as other Members who have visited the camp will recall—a sea of chimneys, all in straight lines, where the boilers and fires were, to give some rudimentary heat in the depths of winter.

[Mr John Spellar (Warley) (Lab)]

I am sorry to interrupt my hon. Friend’s moving contribution, but in many ways it reflects other moving contributions that I have heard from schoolchildren who have been on visits organised, very effectively, by the Holocaust Educational Trust, which has become an advocate of the importance of learning about the horrors of the holocaust. Is that not a tribute to the work undertaken by the trust, and to its public funding by both Governments? Long may it continue.

[Fabian Hamilton]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. Other Members have also mentioned the Holocaust Educational Trust. It was founded by my good friend Lord Janner of Braunstone, a former Member of this House, who has done so much to establish it and ensure that its work continues. It is because of the trust that so many young people have an opportunity to visit the camps at Auschwitz and Birkenau.