80th Anniversary of Victory in Europe and Victory over Japan

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Friday 9th May 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Dubs (Lab)]

My Lords, this is clearly a day for memories: the memories that came to those of us who were around on VE Day. I was 12 years old, and I remember celebrating in the streets of Manchester, in Piccadilly. I am bound to say, had I been a bit older, I would have enjoyed the day even more—I was 12; I was innocent. This debate gives us a chance to reflect on some of the issues of the war and subsequently.

As a refugee who arrived in London at the end of June 1939, one of my first memories, having left Nazi-occupied Prague, with German soldiers everywhere, was seeing the ATS women marching in Hyde Park. I do not know why that made such a big impact on me, but I thought, “Well, Britain has women in the Army; there’s something going for Britain”. It really impressed me, and it is one of those things in my background.

Then, of course, I remember the barrage balloons and the ration books, which have already been mentioned. I remember that, in 1942, every child in the school I went to got three oranges. I had not seen oranges for three years, and it was quite a thing to have them. Going back a bit, I remember listening to Chamberlain indicating that we were at war with Germany. I suppose I had learned enough English by then to understand what he was saying. Of course, I remember the election campaign of 1945 but, given the broad consensus in this House, I do not want to reflect too much on that particular election campaign, although I think I knew, from the posters that were up in Manchester, the name of every Labour candidate in the various constituencies in Manchester. I think most of them won, but I must not go down that path too far.

In a more serious vein, we began to hear the shocking stories of what happened when some of the concentration camps were liberated, when the British Army went to Belsen. We heard about the horrors of the people in the camps and what had happened to them—some of them walking corpses—and the piles of the dead. The shock it must have been to the British Army when they liberated Belsen and the other camps; I am sure some of them were traumatised for life by what they saw on that occasion.

In more recent years, I visited the beaches of Normandy. I also visited, with the British-Irish Parliamentary Assembly, the battlefields of the Somme. We went to Ypres, and the Irish wanted to see what happened to the many Irish who had fought in the British Army in 1914-18 and, indeed, in the more recent war. There was also the contribution by the Commonwealth, which has been referred to, and, of course, there were the Poles, the Czechs and the French. All of them fought with us in the war, helping to win it.

The question is: have we learned the lessons? That, I suppose, is a sombre thought. We still have antisemitism, not just here but across Europe. We have Islamophobia. We see a dreadful conflict in Ukraine, with encouragement from some countries that we should appease the Russians—never must we do that. Then we have the tragedy in Israel on 7 October, the tragedy of what is happening in Gaza at the moment, and the increasing conflict in India and Pakistan, with two nuclear powers facing each other in a position of conflict. Looking back upon VE Day, I do not think we have done all that well as a continent. We could have done a lot better. In some ways, we have let down the people who fought and gave their lives for a better future than we are seeing at the moment.

I will briefly make two other points. One has not been mentioned before. We should pay tribute to the way the Germans have come to terms with their past. It must have been a horrible thing for them when they realised, during the war and subsequently, just what was happening. I have met the German ambassador to London at various events commemorating the Holocaust and I think Germany deserves credit for having come to terms with the most horrible past. On the whole, it has done it pretty well. I was invited to Berlin about a year and a half ago. There was a commemoration of the Kindertransport and the Holocaust, and I thought, “Really, this country is doing well in dealing with such a difficult past”.

Finally, I think this is a fantastic country, even though some of us criticise and have been critical of what is going on. It is thanks to the people who fought in the war that it is still a free country that is not under Nazi oppression. I give my thanks to the people of Britain for giving me safety.