Contribution
My Lords, I am asked two questions that I always find really irritating. The first is whether I am Jewish and, if I am not, why I am interested in this. The second is, “What got you interested in the Holocaust?” I can tell the House that when I was 10 years old, in 1962, my grandfather got me as a birthday present a copy of The Scourge of the Swastika, which I read from cover to cover. It put the living daylights into me and I have always been fascinated by it. I am sorry that I had not made the connection with the noble Lord. It is a wonderful contribution not just to this country’s history but to its literature.
The noble Baroness made an important point about the loss of the Jewish Museum, which I mourn; I thought it was a really good museum. I am sure she was a regular visitor and I have to tell her that I was too. Without going into detail, there were some management problems that accelerated the problems there, but I make it clear that you can count me in for any revival of the Jewish Museum, because it is important. It fulfils the role that the noble Lord, Lord Moore, referred to in his excellent column about the importance of the POLIN museum in Warsaw. It is a wonderful museum about Polish life and about an understanding of the importance of Jewry in Poland. The hard truth is that the heart was ripped out of Poland by the Holocaust, and Poland has simply not recovered.
I hope noble Lords will not mind me reminding them that the POLIN museum is subterranean. I hope they will not mind me reminding them that the size of the Holocaust section of the POLIN museum is just fractionally larger than the learning centre proposed for Victoria Tower Gardens. I hope they will not be too upset if I remind them that the Berlin Holocaust museum, which goes along with that interesting memorial, is subterranean, and I hope they will not mind me reminding them that it is considerably smaller than the learning centre. Part of the Washington museum is subterranean and, when that museum decided to look at its country during the Holocaust, as we intend to look at ours, the size of its exhibit was smaller than ours. The proposed museum is not exceptionally small. If you look across the world, you will see that, by and large, it meets the numbers.
We have to make it clear that we have the full support of the Imperial War Museum to build it here. We have on the foundation people from the museum in Washington and from the 9/11 museum in New York. We have people who represent the Imperial War Museum. Forgive me, but I have learned throughout this debate what a distinguished historian is: it is a historian who agrees with you. We have a whole list of distinguished Holocaust historians on our academic board who support the memorial.
If we were now to say, “Let’s just build a memorial and find a learning centre elsewhere”, that would be a big missed opportunity, because we are living in a post-Holocaust world. We have just seen the election of a Polish President who has allegations against him of being a Holocaust denier. We cannot wait to do this. This would be an important global institution, and we should not throw it away.
I shall quote two small paragraphs from a letter that we have received from the Holocaust Education Trust, which each Member has received. It is from our friend Mala Tribich, the sister of the late Sir Ben Helfgott. She says:
“I was liberated in Bergen-Belsen by the exceptional British Army in 1945 and London has been my home for most of my life. It feels entirely fitting that a memorial should stand in the country that so many survivors are grateful to and have called their home. My brother and fellow survivor Sir Ben Helfgott … campaigned passionately for this national Holocaust Memorial and dreamed of seeing its opening—it saddens me that he did not live to see it come to pass. It is my hope I will be able to attend the opening and remember Ben and all the family we lost”.
Karen Pollock says in the same letter that more than 10 years ago the memorial was first proposed, and now is the time to act:
“Many survivors like Mala still dream of being present at its opening. Tragically, others—like Sir Ben Helfgott and Lily Ebert MBE —will never have that chance”.
If we split the memorial from the learning centre and do not go along with these proposals, it will be decades, or maybe never, before it is built, and that would be unforgivable.