Foreign Secretary speech on Holocaust Memorial Day: January 2025

Thanks, Ambassador, for organising this occasion with us, and I wish to echo Hazel’s because of Janine Webber.

I vastly admire the willingness of her and different survivors to proceed sharing their tales with the world.

A lot of you should have seen Prime Minister Keir Starmer visiting Auschwitz not too long ago.

I can distinctly keep in mind my very own go to there some years in the past, and the numerous tales on show.

The uncooked emotion of seeing a web site of such evil. Such struggling. Such loss.

80 years on from the liberation, we should withstand the fact described so eloquently by Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi:

Everybody must know that Auschwitz existed…

Auschwitz is exterior of us, however it’s all round us, within the air.
The plague has died away, however the an infection nonetheless lingers and it might be silly to disclaim it.

Silly, certainly.

As a black man descended from the Windrush era, as MP for probably the most numerous constituency in Britain – together with, I’m proud to say, a thriving Jewish neighborhood. And now, as Overseas Secretary, I see all too many indicators of that lingering an infection.

Auschwitz didn’t begin in its gasoline chambers. Genocide doesn’t begin with genocide. It begins with denial of rights. With assaults on the rule of regulation. With a festering resentment of the opposite.

And so, as Levi and so many different survivors rightly insisted, it’s a obligation for us all to mirror on what had occurred. ‘By no means once more’ is a solemn promise which we owe to the victims, but additionally which we should uphold for our personal sake, and for the sake of future generations.

We want Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust schooling. Motion in opposition to antisemitism – it’s how we construct a greater future for us all collectively.

That’s the reason it was an amazing honour to make my first go to as Overseas Secretary to Yad Vashem final July. Why I’m proud to host you all within the Overseas, Commonwealth and Growth Workplace on Holocaust Memorial Day and why I’ve been so glad to come back into this job because the UK holds the Presidency of the Worldwide Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.

I wish to thank all these concerned in working our Presidency, particularly Lord Eric Pickles, whose work as Envoy solely reinforces the cross-party nature of our nation’s dedication to Holocaust remembrance.

One of many initiatives we have now been sponsoring throughout our Presidency has been 80 Objects – 80 Lives. curated by the Affiliation of Jewish Refugees and the UK Holocaust Memorial Basis, this exhibition connects the testimonies of 80 survivors with 80 objects from earlier than.

Wedding ceremony rings. The pages of a prayer e book. A doll. A suitcase. On a regular basis objects, connecting the brave survivors to the communities, the households, the lives they’ve misplaced perpetually.
 
I like this venture as nicely as a result of it charts a path for this work within the years forward. 80 years on from the defeat of Nazism, the variety of survivors nonetheless with us is inevitably dwindling.

The world of the Thirties and ‘40s can really feel ever extra distant from our high-tech world of at the moment. The subsequent era dangers being distracted, clickbait making all of it too simple to not grasp the complete horror of the Holocaust.

We subsequently want to seek out new methods to inform the story.

To seize folks’s creativeness – younger folks’s most of all, and immediate actual reflection.

We want them to know what a catastrophic ethical failure for humanity Auschwitz was, and the way the seeds of such a disaster are nonetheless round us.

One other Auschwitz survivor, Viktor Frankl, wrote that one lesson he drew was how every part may be taken from human beings. However not our capacity to “select one’s personal approach”.

At this time, for all the nice challenges we face, we’re lucky to dwell in a really completely different second. However it’s nonetheless as much as every of us to decide on our personal approach.

For this 12 months’s Holocaust Memorial Day, my hope is that folks right here in Britain, folks everywhere in the world, select to heed the Auschwitz story.

And I’m selecting as soon as once more to work with all who share this hope to attempt to ensure they do.

Thanks.