Holocaust Memorial Day: Freedom remains fragile for so many people

I beg to move, that this House has considered Holocaust Memorial Day 2024. I’d like to thank the Rt Hon member for Stratford-on-Avon, the Honourable member for East Renfrewshire and the Rt Hon member for Orkney and Shetland for co-sponsoring the debate.

I pay immense tribute to two organisations, the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Education Trust. They both devote much energy and time to organising the events that help us to commemorate the Holocaust.  

Without their excellent work, we would not keep alive the memory of those who lost their lives in the Nazi death camps, or indeed those who were killed in other genocides from Rwanda to Cambodia and Darfur. Without them, our efforts to learn the lessons of history would weaken and fade away.

This is the last time that I shall have the privilege of participating in this important debate. Yet it could not be a more difficult and depressing time to do so. 

I have just returned from a short visit to Israel. We went to support the people who lived on Kfar Azar, a kibbutz we visited in February last year. Many living on the kibbutz were people committed to peaceful co-existence with their neighbours in Gaza. But tragically many were killed on 7th October, many who survived are distraught because their loved ones were captured as hostages, and many, especially the women, were treated with the most abominable, sadistic cruelty, sexually assaulted in utterly inhumane ways and then murdered. 

Israel is experiencing a national trauma and a real fear of existential survival, with memories of the Holocaust at the heart of their minds. And the same is true in Gaza, with innocent civilians experiencing a similar national trauma, an identical fear of an existential survival, and a comparable terror of genocide, as they live with bombardment, death, injury, displacement and a lack of humanitarian aid. 

So we meet at a deeply depressing time to reflect on the Holocaust, with many thinking, Mr Speaker, when will the world ever, ever, really learn from our past? 

But the truth is we must keep trying. This year’s focus for Holocaust Memorial Day is the fragility of freedom. That theme allows us to reflect on how the horrors we have witnessed in our continue to manage to unfold. How freedom is continually eroded. In understanding this, we could have an impact today to make the world a better place for those fleeing persecution. 

I want to raise these matters in the context of my own family’s experience. Like others, I lost close relatives in the Holocaust. My grandmother, whose last written words to her son were: “Don’t forget me completely.” My uncle, whose wife wrote in a letter pleading for his release: “He’s only a number to you. He’s everything to me.”

But I had other relatives who escaped days before the start of the war and were dispersed across the diaspora as they sought safety. They too, were victims of the assault on Jews. They too suffered hugely. They too should be the focus of our concerns as we commit ourselves to it never happening again.

My grandfather came to England on March 29th, 1939. He was 66 and had just recovered from a prostate operation and an embolism in his leg. We have a powerful account of his experience and his emotions in the diary he kept.

He describes his last visit to his parents’ graves in Vienna, in tears because he would never visit those graves again. He recalls how his parents – my great grandparents – visited the graves of their own parents – my great great grandparents – in Poland in tears, before they were driven out of their homes by the pogroms. A never-ending cycle of violence. 

He describes his feelings a few days after arriving in England, writing: “Because of the lack of language skills very lonely, depressed, cannot memorise, miserable pronunciation. Living like a recluse.” Even six months later, he says that those who stayed in Vienna “may have saved themselves from all the horrors and all the difficulties of emigrating”.

He talks about antisemitism in Britain and how it reached up into the government, when the only Jew in the cabinet was sacked by Neville Chamberlain.

On his arrival in Britain, my refugee Jewish grandfather was classified an “enemy alien”, though that was later changed to being a “friendly alien”.

But at 8:30am on 27th June 1940, in the middle of the war that led to the death of six million Jews, when my grandfather was in the bath, there was a knock on his door. He was arrested, removed from his home and interned. He tried to ring his doctor who could certify to his illnesses – but then, as today, no doctor picked up the phone. 

He was taken to Guyton, in Liverpool, and was given a number: “Group number 28/2, number 1428″.  Housed in overcrowded conditions, with a rubber sheet, straw and blankets. In the early days, he was not allowed to write or receive letters, the sanitary conditions were dreadful and the German Jews found themselves housed with German Nazis. His freedom was indeed fragile, and our treatment of Jewish refugees unconscionable. 

Fast forward to my own experience. I came to the UK, stateless, in 1949 from Egypt. After the creation of Israel, Egypt became an increasingly hostile environment for Jews. My father had a stone thrown through the window of his office, and with the memory of the Holocaust still raw in his mind, he decided to get his family out of Egypt. We were rejected by three English-speaking countries and the UK finally – to my father’s eternal gratitude – gave our family of six entry visas to this country.

His freedom was indeed fragile. Five years later, we were still stateless, and my father applied for British nationality. At that time, my mother was dying in hospital, my older sister and brother were away at school and university, so I was at home with my younger sister. She was six and I was nine.

A Home Office inspector came to tea. I remember the occasion vividly. Instead of our usual boiled eggs and toast, we had to eat cucumber sandwiches and fruit cake (which I absolutely hated, having grown up on succulent fresh fruit in the Middle East). 

Worst of all, we were interrogated – two young girls on their own – for a full hour on who our friends were, what books we read and what games we played. My freedom was indeed fragile. Living in a hostile, not a friendly, environment that remains forever locked in my memory.

What do these stories tell us?  That my family knows, and indeed the families of millions of refugees know, that freedom is never a guarantee. And how we treat those who have had their freedom stripped away is central to our reputation as a country that boasts a humanitarian approach to genocide and the Holocaust. 

Yet we’re not as good as we proclaim ourselves to be. My grandfather didn’t feel welcome; I didn’t feel wanted as a 9-year-old. And the asylum seekers who try to come here today face a similar hostile environment; told by leading government politicians that they pose an “existential threat” to the West’s way of life, that they are part of a “hurricane” of mass migration, that MPs feel “besieged by asylum seekers” and that asylum seekers are ‘invading‘ Britain.

We should reflect on what we say and what we do today before we exercise any moral entitlement to condemn the atrocities of the past. The language we use today matters. The laws and practices of today designed to exclude those seeking freedom from persecution from finding a safe haven in the UK which make a mockery of our commitment to the victims of genocide matter. The fees we charge today for visas matter. And our refusal today to allow those seeking asylum to work matters. 

The hostility my grandfather faced in 1938 and the trepidation I felt when subjected to questioning in 1949 echoes through the generations. All of this contributes to our credibility in the debate on the Holocaust and subsequent genocides.

So, before we applaud ourselves for keeping alive the memory of the Holocaust, we should think about how fragile freedom was then for those who sought to escape death and how fragile it remains today.

We must take responsibility and stand up to genocide wherever it rears its ugly head. And we must protect those who seek refuge in Britain. Because if we stand by while genocides unfold, or fail to protect those who need it the most, the horrors the likes of which my grandfather, father and even myself experienced will have all been for nothing.

Freedom is the basis of our society – so surely we owe it to our children, and our children’s children, to be able to stand up and really mean it when we say ‘never again’.