Holocaust Memorial Day — House of Commons, 2020-01-23
Topic: Civil Rights
Lyn Carol Brown (Labour, Centre-left): The hon. Gentleman is, of course, right I know I will not be the only person in this Chamber to own a copy of Martin Gilbert’s tremendous yet totally horrific book, "The Righteous", which documents many stories of brave people who defied that law and similar laws, not just in Poland but across occupied Europe. I do not have personal stories that I can recount, but I would like to use the debate to put on record stories of heroic people, and today I want to talk about two Polish families who stood together with the Jewish people in the Warsaw ghetto First, I want to talk about Jan and Antonina Zabinski. Jan was the director of the Warsaw zoo, which was emptied of animals because of the air raids. When deportations to Treblinka began in 1942, Jan and Antonina decided that they had to help. They secretly provided shelter to 20 Jewish people in their two-storey home, and Jan sheltered hundreds more using the only other shelter he had available—the empty animal cages. Jan was employed by Warsaw city council, and he used that privilege to gain access to the ghetto. He used the pretext of looking after small trees and the public gardens inside the ghetto to aid his Jewish friends, and he tried to help them in any way he could One of those that Jan helped was Rachel Auerbach. Rachel secretly compiled records of everything that happened in the ghetto. This was an invaluable record of daily life under Nazi persecution, and she entrusted Jan with her precious manuscripts. He buried them inside the zoo grounds in glass jars. When the war was over, Rachel was able to retrieve her book and publish it, and it provides us all with a precious, dreadful insight into her first-hand testimony of the holocaust, as well as her memories of pre-war Jewish cultural life. Unsurprisingly, Jan was a member of the underground resistance, and he was eventually discovered. He was arrested and deported to Germany, but even after that, when Antonina was alone and even more aware of the terrible risks, she continued to provide shelter. The courage of Jan and Antonina was recognised at Yad Vashem as members of the righteous among nations Another of those recognised at Yad Vashem—one of the very first—was Dr Felix Kanabus. Felix was a young Polish surgeon, a socialist. He was disgusted, as were so many, by the sight of his fellow Poles aiding the Nazis in their persecution of the Jews, because he had many Jewish friends and he had spoken out publicly against antisemitism. So, when the crackdown began, many of his friends reached out to him for help, and he used his skill as a surgeon to help where he could Felix helped several Jews to avoid persecution by performing operations to reverse their circumcisions. In other cases, he provided medical certificates stating that a circumcision had been performed as a medical necessity—anything he could do to throw the Nazis off and stop their attention from falling on those that he could help. Felix protected a colleague and their family when they were summoned to the ghetto, by disguising them as servants, and he and his wife Irena worked with their networks to find safe apartments for many others. Like Jan and Antonina, Felix and Irena risked their lives, and those of their families, to resist the holocaust These are truly moving stories; but they are absolutely nothing compared with the scale of the violence—the 6 million Jewish victims and the millions of others who were subjected to systematic disfranchisement, dispossession, detention and murder. These stories of Jan and Antonina, Felix and Irena tell us something about what it means to stand together; because each and every one of us has a role in standing up to hatred, discrimination, persecution and genocide, whatever form it takes. One person’s actions will never be enough, but it is infinitely important to act, rather than do nothing Dietrich Bonhoeffer is a German theologian that I absolutely love; I love the idea of religionless Christianity. He was an anti- Nazi dissident, and he said: "We are not to simply bandage the wounds of the victim beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself." Bonhoeffer was a Christian pastor and a pacifist, but when he saw what was happening all around him in Germany society, he understood what he had to do. He saved many Jewish lives. This German pastor—this man of God—became involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler, and as a result he was arrested and taken to Buchenwald where, just one month before the Germans surrendered, he was hanged. I can recommend "Letters and Papers from Prison", which talks about his ministry in Buchenwald and is a remarkable testimony Sadly, the reason it is so important to remember these histories is that the poison of racism has not gone away. It is really frightening to see how it rears its ugly head again and again, right around the world; whether it is the treatment of the Uyghur Muslims, who have been put into re-education camps in Xinjiang; the treatment of Indian Muslims in Assam and throughout India—many of whom are being stripped of their citizenship and being attacked; or the attacks on refugees by the President of the United States, who employs the rhetoric of the terrible so-called "great replacement theory" In the spirit of today’s debate, let us reflect on what standing together actually means. I believe it is more than just a passive virtue; I think it is an active obligation, and I believe that every single one of us can learn more, and do more, to stand together against hatred wherever and whenever it emerges.