Mike Hancock News
Speech on Holocaust Remembrance
Mr Mike Hancock (Portsmouth South) (LD): It has been a privilege today not only to chair this sitting of Westminster Hall, but to have a chance to take part in
19 Jan 2012 : Column 358WH
the debate. I have listened carefully to what hon. Members have said, and anyone who was in the room when the hon. Member for Dudley North (Ian Austin) spoke could not fail to have been moved by his personal explanation of what his adopted father had been through and the way that it had harnessed his life and his philosophy. Today is a good example of when Parliament comes together-all parties, both sides and many different backgrounds.
I was privileged enough to go to Auschwitz 20 years ago when I was the leader of Hampshire county council. I went to the region of Cracow as the guest of the wojewoda-the governor. When we went to Auschwitz, there were just five of us; otherwise, the place was completely deserted. I will never forget the experience of standing inside the remaining gas chamber at Auschwitz and trying to come to terms with what people went through as the door to the gas chamber closed. I then went to the other part of the camp-the old camp-and stood where the firing squad had operated. There was a wall, where literally thousands of people had been executed by gunfire.
Those sorts of things stay in the memory, but for me the most moving thing was to see the pigtail that had been scalped from a child and left on the pile of hair. It was still plaited but was now as grey as my hair. We cannot imagine what that child went through in having her hair cut off and thrown on a pile and then going to her death. Of all the memories that come from visiting a place such as Auschwitz, for me that was the most telling moment.
The other place that I went to, some years later, was Dachau. Dachau is a different camp to Auschwitz. Nevertheless, it is extremely moving to walk around it. The thing that struck me, first of all, was how close people lived to that camp. Dachau is close to the outskirts of Munich, which was the cornerstone of Nazi philosophy; Nazism was born and bred in that city. As I say, the Dachau camp was built very close to the outskirts of Munich and there were houses right up against the camp. Those houses were not built after the war; they were undoubtedly built in the style of pre-war German construction. One wonders what people who lived around the camp must have thought about what was being done inside, in their name.
A few years ago, I visited Babi Yar in Ukraine, which is just outside Kiev, where 100,000 people were shot in three weeks. I stood on the edge of that pit-and remember that it was not Germans who were shooting those people but Ukrainians who were shooting Ukrainian Jews on behalf of the Germans.
We must remember, and we must continue the struggle of trying to get people not to forget, because if we forget, the stories and tales of Bosnia and elsewhere will unfortunately again become a reality. Bosnia was 20 years ago. It already starts to fade-does it not?-in the memory of people, and we have to keep it alive. We must ensure that people remember the enormous price that other human beings have paid because somebody had it in their head that they were not fit to live; we must remember the evilness and the wickedness of that. Such evil should never go unpunished and it should never go unremembered.
The lesson that we have to learn is clear, is it not? It is that those of us who believe that good should prevail over evil must continue to educate people. The hon.
19 Jan 2012 : Column 359WH
Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) was right that this issue is about education and, as she said, about people being prepared to walk the streets of Southampton together-from church to synagogue to mosque to Sikh temple-to show that there is a common bond of goodness that prevails over evil.
I met a young man from Hampshire who was 19 when he joined the Army, and he was present at the liberation of the Belsen concentration camp. He was a constituent of mine, and when I first met him he told me how horrendous that experience was for him. He had fought through the war and had never seen anyone who had been killed, until he walked through the gates of Belsen. That experience ruined his whole life; he never recovered from it. His wife told me that hardly a day went by when he did not have some memory of the nightmare of walking through Belsen concentration camp.
That young man's story taught me a lot about the way that other people can act with such violence and such evilness, and with such scant excuse as believing that they were better than everyone else. If this Parliament stands for anything, it stands for equality-the belief that all of us have the right to live in any way we like, following any religion we like-and I hope that that is long the case.
I have never had the privilege of going to Auschwitz with the Holocaust Educational Trust-I am delighted that so many of my colleagues have-but I felt that I had to visit it and the memory of that visit has stayed with me ever since. I am delighted to be part of this debate today.
Share this page:
