Miliband remembers his grandfather 70 years after Auschwitz was liberated

Ed Miliband will today attend a ceremony to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz 70 years ago.

Ahead of this, he spoke to Radio 5 live about his grandfather, who died in a Nazi labour camp. He explained:

“It’s 70 years since my grandfather died in one of the camps and I marked that about 10 days ago… It’s a Jewish thing, you light a candle and I know this sounds almost unbelievable, but it’s only about six months ago that we discovered the full circumstances of what happened to my grandfather. He ended up in Germany in a labour camp, which is where he eventually died according to the records. I went to Yad Vashem, the place in Israel where they have records on the Holocaust, and that’s where we discovered more information about what had happened to him.”

It’s awful and it makes me feel incredibly lucky. There’s horror and there’s hope, because it’s also the case that many members of my family were saved because they were Jews who were hidden by decent people. There’s another story, which is that there were 17 members of my family who were sheltered in a Belgian village – that’s on my father’s side – and it was only because of the decent people in that village who helped them.”

He went on to say that “We should always be vigilant about antisemitism” particularly as “there is evidence that there is a bit of a rise of antisemitism in this country.”

He also noted “we should also remember that the vast majority of people right across our country are incredibly decent people who would be as appalled by antisemitism as Jews in Britain are too.”