Lord Robathan (Con)

My Lords, may I briefly intervene? I hate to disagree with my noble friend Lord Howard, not least because I have great respect for him, but I was made to speak on this by listening to the noble Lord, Lord Russell, who spoke extremely well, if I may say so. I too have read The Scourge of the Swastika—I was appalled by what I read, when I was about 15 or 16—and The Knights of Bushido. It is appalling. Yesterday when I went to lunch, purely coincidentally, there was a man there who told me that his mother had been on the last train to Auschwitz. She was a German Jew, and her father had been killed on the eastern front. The mother, who was Jewish, put the girl in a convent, but she was found in the last few weeks of the war and sent to Auschwitz—and, luckily, survived, obviously, because this young man was there. The point about that story is that it is not just the noble Viscount, Lord Eccles, and everybody else in this Chamber; there are people still alive who saw the awful things that happened in the Second World War, and we need to remember that. I know that many people here will have been to Yad Vashem. What an astonishing experience that is, to go to Jerusalem and to see that shocking display—certainly shocking to me, anyway. I have also been to Poland, only once. I went courtesy of the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, and thanked them for it. It was amazing. Again, it was literally tear-jerking. By the way, I would point out to my noble friend Lord Pickles, who mentioned the underground bit of the Polish war memorial, that it obviously has not had very much effect on the Polish president, whom he said might have anti-Holocaust beliefs. Is that right?