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Holocaust Memorial Day

I am sure the whole House will be in accord with the Minister, both in the content of his speech on this important topic and in the manner in which he made it. Occasionally, he and I have our differences, but on this issue he, I and everyone else in this House are entirely united. We are all grateful for the opportunity to debate this important topic. The Minister is right to recognise the importance of Holocaust memorial day and right, too, to recognise the tremendous work of the Holocaust Educational Trust. Many of us will have come into contact with it, and we have found our experience, and our knowledge of this subject, enriched—if that is the appropriate word for so dreadful a topic—by its work. It is right that everyone has the chance to understand the horrors of what happened, so I endorse entirely everything that the Minister said. I, too, am sure that those of us who have had the privilege of meeting holocaust survivors will have been profoundly moved by their testimony. As the generation who suffered in the holocaust leaves us, it is all the more important that their memories are kept alive and that the lessons are learned. I was particularly struck by the comments of Members who have visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. My hon. Friends the Members for Ilford, North (Mr. Scott) and for Upminster (Angela Watkinson) and I have visited it with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust. Not only was it a deeply moving experience, but two things about it particularly struck me. First, it might seem trite, but it is worth restating the sheer banality of the circumstances that gave rise to such horror, and the ordinariness of what had been a run-of-the-mill army barracks but was suddenly turned into an industrial machine for the mass murder of human beings. We were standing in an office that could have been something like a 1930s local government office, but in fact millions of people were consigned to their deaths there. That brings home the fragility of what we take to be civilisation and sophistication in an advanced western society.