Paul Waugh

I, too, pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hendon (David Pinto-Duschinsky) for his powerful and moving testimony. His grandparents would be truly proud. As many have said, 2025 marks 80 years since the liberation of the Nazi concentration and death camps, and that awful milestone means that this is likely to be the last landmark anniversary at which a significant number of Holocaust survivors will be present. Holocaust Memorial Day encourages us to remember, yes, the 6 million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators during the Holocaust, but also all those who were persecuted by the Nazis, including the Roma, the Sinti people, gay men, disabled people, political opponents and others. We remember, too, all those affected by subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, of which I will say more, and Darfur. When it comes to remembering, Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and scholar who has already been quoted by my hon. Friend the Member for High Peak (Jon Pearce), put it best when he said that “whoever listens to a witness becomes a witness, so those who hear us, those who read us must continue to bear witness for us.” Yesterday in Portcullis House, thanks to Mr Speaker, many of us did indeed bear witness as we heard the extremely moving testimony of two Holocaust survivors, Yisrael Abelesz and Alfred Garwood. We all know many old soldiers who, quite understandably, never recount the trauma they suffered in the war, often because they have blanked it out and moved on. However, many of those who were not soldiers but survivors of genocide have shown an extraordinary strength and perseverance to keep telling their story, however painful, through a need to keep their memories alive, and they do so again and again. Their testimonies are so direct and so powerful that when we hear them, we become part of that remembering process. Yisrael Abelesz, now aged 96, was just 14 when he and his family were deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his parents David and Haya and younger brother Aaron, aged just 11 years old, were sent to the gas chambers on arrival. That sense of the history books becoming all too chillingly real jumped out at us yesterday when Yisrael said he was greeted on arrival at the camp by the infamous Angel of Death, Josef Mengele. He said: “Mengele asked me, ‘How old are you?’ I understood a bit of German, and said, ‘I’m 14, it’s just my birthday’. And he replied, ‘That’s very good, very good’, and sent me to the right side.” As Yisrael said: “I didn’t know it at that time, but what he meant was, ‘Very good, you can stay temporarily alive’.” Alfred’s story, too, should show us all that, while hate is immensely destructive, there is strength in community. He told us how he was a blonde babe in arms carried by his father—a father who saved the life of another inmate in Bergen-Belsen by giving them bread across the barbed wire. It was so moving to hear him recall that, after the war, his father met that same fellow camp mate in the east end of London. It was moving, too, to hear how Alfred became a doctor and a psychiatrist to help other trauma victims, and how he said that hatred, even hatred of those who committed the genocide, was a corrosive force. That desire to rid ourselves of hatred was echoed by Muhammad, one of the pupils at Falinge Park high school in my constituency of Rochdale, who wrote this in a poem about the Holocaust: “Revenge is never sweet… It is a monster willing to prevail”. Falinge Park high school is a multicultural school that has legacy beacon status as one of the schools under the umbrella of the University College London Centre for Holocaust Education. Two years ago, it hosted Holocaust survivor Ike Alterman to deliver his testimony. Yesterday, those from the school again attended the Greater Manchester Holocaust commemoration, hosted by Andy Burnham. I am delighted that the Prime Minister has said that it will be a national ambition that every schoolchild should hear the recorded testimony of a Holocaust survivor, and the Chancellor announced a further £2 million for Holocaust education in the Budget. As the Minister said, the Holocaust Educational Trust’s innovative free digital education programme Testimony 360 will allow students to have a virtual reality conversation with a Holocaust survivor long after the survivors themselves are no longer with us. The prioritisation of Holocaust education in our schools has been praised across this House today, and rightly so, but the prevention of Holocaust denial cannot be left just to passing laws or to education. It must be a cultural or grassroots change that exists alongside formal education. Education does not begin and end in our schools. Some children will go back from a lesson to a home where parents and older siblings fill their heads with misinformation and unchecked sources from social media. Sadly, there is now a depressingly familiar routine of a sharp spike in attacks on synagogues or on mosques whenever news breaks about an atrocity—an atrocity that has no personal connection to the people worshipping inside those buildings. There is a well of simmering loathing that lurks unseen and is topped up by casual racism that formal education alone cannot fix. As the hon. Member for Brigg and Immingham (Martin Vickers) powerfully reminded us, 2025 marks the 30th anniversary of the genocide in Bosnia and the massacre at Srebrenica. The tragedy is that the story of what happened in Srebrenica 30 years ago is not being told in Srebrenica itself. The enclave went into Serbia as part of the peace deal, where denying the massacre is now official policy in and out of schools. The issue was raised by Baroness Helic in the other place, who is a fierce advocate for justice on the massacre. A Srebrenica Memorial Centre report last year identified prominent public figures involved in denial of the holocaust, including Republika Srpska President Milorad Dodik, and Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić, among others. Last year my former newspaper, the i, reported election posters in windows in Republika Srpska with the slogan “Genocide Didn’t Happen”. One billboard praised convicted war criminal Ratko Mladić, the Bosnian-Serb military chief known as the Butcher of Bosnia. His crimes included the massacre of 8,000 Bosniak Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica in July 1995. The bloodbath was the worst episode of mass murder in Europe since the second world war. I am proud to say that my wife was among the Channel 4 news team who exposed those horrific war crimes. Genocides do not come out of the blue. They depend on what Professor David Feldman has described as the reservoir of hate. He pointed out that the danger in the case of antisemitism is not just the virus of antisemitism that captures the minority of antisemites; the wider danger is “a widely diffused reservoir of stereotypes and narratives about Jews. This reservoir has accumulated over centuries and has become a part of our common culture.” That applies to Islamophobia, just as it does to antisemitism. When weaponised by extremists, the legitimate and proud celebration of one community’s identity curdles into the denigration of another’s. History is used and warped; territory and belonging are weaponised into separation and segregation. Dates are cited as battle cries, and the cycle perpetuates. Anger is a legitimate emotional response to atrocities, but hatred is not. Peace is hard, compromise is painful; violence, and the prejudice it relies on, are easier. But everyday racism can be countered only by everyday engagement, and disinformation by information. The Holocaust was the industrialisation of murder, but the difference was only one of scale from the many pogroms that Jewish communities have had to suffer over the centuries. In Soho this month, the National Holocaust Centre and Museum has devised a new touring exhibition called “The Vicious Circle”. It links five Jewish communities decimated by violence. Objects are on display to represent co-existence and integration into the host country before five particular pogroms: Berlin in 1938, Baghdad in 1941, Kielce in Poland in 1946, Aden in Yemen in 1947, and of course Kibbutz Kissufim on 7 October 2023. That is history, this is the present. The well, the reservoir, is there and it needs to be drained. I end, like many others, with another quote from Elie Wiesel: “Much depends on us, on our sense of justice and integrity, on our dedication to truth, on our willingness to share our innermost memories. And we survivors have promised that we shall try.” As the number of survivors dwindles, it is on us. It is our duty in this place to follow their heroic example and honour their memory every day.