Holocaust Memorial Day

Michael McCann Excerpts

Thursday 23rd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Michael McCann (East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow) (Lab)]

It is pleasure to follow the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire (Alistair Burt), who is respected across the House, and his compelling and emotional opening contribution.

The holocaust has always baffled me. If we are going to give away our age, I was born 20 years after those events. I have never understood how human beings in their millions could be so seduced by a message of hate that they could stand by and watch as other human beings were degraded, humiliated and murdered; how people could have stayed at the entrance to the gas chambers in Auschwitz, stripping people of their belongings and their last remnants of dignity, knowing that the fate that lay in store for them was a 20-minute, excruciatingly painful journey to death.

We are in the month of January and the phrase, “Man’s inhumanity to man” was first introduced in a poem by Robert Burns titled, “Man Was Made to Mourn”. As poignant as those words are, I still do not think they convey the horrors that took place over 70 years ago. Probably like everybody else in the House, I have read the books and watched the documentaries. I have watched “Schindler’s List”, “Band of Brothers”, in which the 101st Airborne Division liberated a sub-camp of Dachau concentration camp, and “The World at War”. All those depictions of what took place, however, fail to equal the insight offered to me by a survivor, Harry Bibring.

I had the privilege of meeting Harry in 2012. The Holocaust Educational Trust suggested that I might like to encourage my local authority to have a survivor meet and talk to older pupils from high schools in my area. Harry was born in 1925 and lived in Vienna with his mother and father and his sister, Gertie. His father owned a men’s clothing shop and, for that time and place, his family were relatively well-off. The young Harry remembered having family holidays. He enjoyed swimming and ice-skating, and his mother and father were well-off enough to be able to give him a season ticket membership to an ice-skating rink. He remembered hanging out of a window in Vienna watching the Germans march in, in 1938. He remembered liking the soldiers marching and the bright flags, but little did he know as a child that they were Nazi soldiers and that those bright flags were swastikas.

Harry’s membership of the ice-skating rink was revoked just days later, when a “No Jews Allowed” sign was erected. In November 1938, Harry’s father’s business was destroyed during Kristallnacht. He was arrested soon after. After he was released from prison, the family intended to flee to Shanghai, but his dad was robbed on his way to purchase the tickets. Thinking, as any mother and father would, of the safety of their children, Harry’s parents arranged for him and his sister to flee on a Kindertransport to the United Kingdom.

Harry’s father had arranged for guarantors to pick them up when they arrived in the UK. Harry said:

“I remember going to the Vienna West Bahnhof with my sister and our parents to get on the train at 10pm on the 13th March 1939 with about 600 other kids. The following day the train went slowly through Germany until it reached the Dutch border. Once it crossed over into Holland we were met on the platform by Jewish volunteers from Holland who gave us sweets and toys. We crossed to England on the night ferry from Hook of Holland to Harwich and arrived at Liverpool Street station in the afternoon of the 15th March 1939.”

Harry was not to know, when he left Vienna, that that was the last time he would ever see his mother and father. They were killed by the Nazis. Harry and his sister Gertie survived. Harry is still with us, and the world is an immeasurably better place with him in it.

Looking back from 2014, I would like to think that I would not have followed the crowd had I been in Germany at that time. I would like to think that I would have behaved like Irena Sendler, a Polish lady—the hon. Member for Shrewsbury and Atcham (Daniel Kawczynski) mentioned such people from Poland—who did so much to protect Jewish people. She was honoured in 1965 by the state of Israel as “Righteous among the nations”. During world war two, Irena served as a plumber working in the Warsaw ghetto. She smuggled Jewish babies out of the ghetto in the bottom of her toolbox. At the back of a truck, she kept a dog she had trained to bark to cover the noise of the infants when Nazi soldiers approached. The Nazis eventually caught her, sentenced her to death and broke both her arms and legs, but she managed to evade execution and survived the war. She kept details of all the children she saved in a glass jar she buried in her back garden, and she tried to locate their parents after the war, but sadly most had perished in the gas chambers. I wonder if I would have been brave enough to do something like that.

Holocaust memorial day allows us to remember those who perished, those who survived and those who were brave beyond our comprehension, and it challenges us to learn from history to prevent such events from happening again. That is our aspiration, but sadly Bosnia, Darfur and Rwanda remind us that history can repeat itself.

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

We need to observe Holocaust memorial day, given that across Europe we have national list systems for elections, meaning that a small percentage of a population can elect neo-Nazis. We have to remember that this is happening, and we need to reinforce to people that 6 million of the Jewish community were murdered. We must not forget that Hitler came up partly through democratic institutions, and we must ensure that such a thing never happens again.

[Mr McCann]

I agree entirely with the hon. Gentleman. I appreciate that others want to speak, so I shall move on without taking any further interventions. However, the right hon. Member for North East Bedfordshire said that politics was at the heart of the matter, and we must remember that it was the treaty of Versailles that gave Hitler a platform on which to build the hatred that led to the terrible atrocities of the second world war. It was a twisted variety of politics, but politics none the less.

I want to finish on a positive note. I have been very lucky in my life. I have visited both the Holocaust museum in Washington DC and Yad Vashem. These museums are grim, and going through their exhibits can be an emotionally draining experience. At the end of the museum in Washington, the visitor passes down long corridors, either side of which are huge glass containers filled with the spectacles, shoes, luggage and possessions of the Holocaust victims—a haunting end to an experience that you can never forget—but at the very end is a video loop in which a woman explains her personal story of liberation. When she was emaciated, dehydrated and thought she was near the end of her life, she was picked up by a soldier. She told the soldier that he could not touch her because she was Jewish, and he replied, fighting back the tears, “I’m Jewish too.” The gentleman was a GI. After the war, they married and they settled in the United States of America—a triumph of the human spirit over evil and another reason we should all observe Holocaust memorial day.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—