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Holocaust Memorial Day

As someone who has spent my life, in Parliament and before, defending human rights and civil liberties, I find it offensive that someone like David Irving uses freedom of speech as an excuse to propagate such hurtful lies. It causes huge distress, not only psychological but physical, to victims of the holocaust when they hear people such as him saying the things that he does to the audiences that he has been given. It is essential to hear the voices of survivors, who have shown the resilience of the human spirit, and essential to honour the memory of the victims, whose stories we must not forget. To truly learn history's lessons, it is essential that we ensure that the baton passes from the citizens of today to the citizens of tomorrow: our young people. It was my privilege to attend the national Holocaust memorial day commemoration in Coventry last Sunday. That started, for me, with a reception for survivors. About 100 survivors were present at St. Mary's Guildhall for the lunch. I was humbled and deeply moved to meet and hear the stories of just a handful of them. I would like to pay tribute to their vitality and dignity. So much hatred was thrown at them, for no reason other than the accident of their birth. The way in which they refused to be robbed of their dignity, and displayed such courage and determination, serves as inspiration to us all. The theme of this year's Holocaust memorial day was ““Standing up to hatred””. That message, though inspired by state-sponsored atrocities, should resonate with us all in our everyday lives. It was a privilege to attend the event with my right hon. Friends the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and the Home Secretary. My hon. Friends the Members for Coventry, South (Mr. Cunningham) and for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs. Ellman) were also present. The holocaust teaches us that, tragically, too many people are prepared to stand by or look the other way when they see acts of hatred occurring. At that event we heard the testimony of Regina Franks, a survivor of both Auschwitz and Belsen, a woman whose experience of hatred never conditioned her to hate in return, and whose voice—just one voice out of millions who suffered in the concentration camps or in subsequent genocides—somehow helps us to understand how a single person can make a difference. That is why it was right that we heard contemporary voices say how they would stand up to hatred. Among them were the Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, but so too was a 15-year-old boy from Coventry, who had been moved to stand up to hatred because of what he had seen on a visit to a concentration camp. We all need to commit ourselves to challenging prejudice, wherever we see it in our society. In a month when we celebrate the election of the first black president of the United States, it is appropriate that I should quote what Martin Luther King said 40 years ago:"““In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.””" We all know that, left unchecked, racism and prejudice can have catastrophic consequences, and on Sunday it was good to hear that 15-year-old confirm that he would not allow prejudice to go unchallenged. I was proud to stand with him, and with all the others there, to show our shared resolve. I pay tribute to the work of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust. I shall not talk about the funding that the Government have given them, because that would be crude. This is more about the values that we share with those organisations and about standing with them shoulder to shoulder, standing up against hatred and saying with a shared voice, ““Never again.””