Commons marks 80 years since declaration on persecution of the Jews

MPs will stand in silence on Thursday, 15 December to mark 80 years since the UK first publicly recognised what we now know as the Holocaust was taking place in Nazi-occupied Europe. 

The Government’s shocking announcement on 17 December 1942 prompted a spontaneous moment of silence, which was reported to be the first in the history of the Chamber. 

Sir Lindsay Hoyle, Speaker of the House of Commons, will lead a one-minute silence to commemorate the grim anniversary at the start of business on 15 December at 0930. 

To add to the poignancy of the occasion, the MPs will be joined in the Speaker’s Gallery by four survivors of the Holocaust and representatives of Britain’s Jewish community. 

Sir Lindsay Hoyle said: ‘It takes a lot to quieten the House of Commons, but 80 years ago MPs were spontaneously stunned into silence after it was confirmed that the Nazis were responsible for the systematic mass murder of the Jewish population in Europe. 

‘It was a moment like no other and was described by one parliamentary correspondent as being “like the frown of the conscience of mankind”. 

‘Given the genocides that have occurred since, and the horrific war crimes that are taking place in Ukraine now, it is important that we mark this significant anniversary with the people who survived the Holocaust.’ 

Olivia Marks-Woldman, CEO of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust said it was ‘a great privilege’for survivors to be invited to join in the MPs’ moment of silence. 

‘It is immensely fitting that people who 80 years ago were suffering such appalling cruelty will now be honoured in the heart of our democracy,’ she said. 

Back in 1942, then Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden told a hushed House that ‘reliable reports’ had confirmed ‘Hitler’s oft repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe...’ 

His shocking statement led Labour MP William Cluse to suggest that the House should ‘stand as a protest against this disgusting barbarism’. 

Speaker FitzRoy replied that this was a matter for the House itself, which prompted Conservative MP Sir Waldron Smithers to wave the MPs up. 

Percy Cater, the Daily Mail’s Parliamentary Correspondent, wrote at the time: ‘One after another MP stood until all, in their hundreds, sombre-garbed and sombre-faced ranks, were on their feet. I can tell you there were many eyes which were not dry and there was not, I dare swear, a throat without a lump in it.’ 

ends 

Notes to editors 

• During his statement to the House on 17 December, 1942, Mr Eden told the MPs: ‘The able-bodied are slowly worked to death in labour camps. The infirm are left to die of exposure and starvation or are deliberately massacred in mass executions. The number of victims of these bloody cruelties is reckoned in many hundreds of thousands of entirely innocent men, women and children.’ 

• Media outlets are invited to witness Mr Speaker meeting the four Holocaust survivors in Speaker’s House at 0800 on 15 December before they have a breakfast meeting. Reporters will then have 10 minutes to interview Mr Speaker and his guests @0830. Please confirm your attendance.

• From the Speaker’s Gallery the guests will watch MPs stand as Mr Speaker announces a minute’s silence, shortly after 0930.

• Holocaust Memorial Day will be commemorated on 27 January 2023. 

Below are biographies of the Holocaust survivors set to attend 

Retired GP Alfred Garwood is a survivor of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and founder of the Child Survivors’ Association of Great Britain. He was born in 1942 in the Przemysl Ghetto in Poland and was just eight months old when he was taken to the Belsen together with his parents and four-year-old sister. On 7 April 1945, eight days before liberation by the British army, Alfred’s family were among thousands of prisoners put in three trains headed for the gas chambers in Terezin Concentration Camp. The Americans liberated the first train before it reached the camp. The second train reached its destination. Alfred was aboard the third train which lost its way before its human cargo was eventually rescued.   

John Hadju MBE was born in Budapest in 1937. In 1944, he survived a Nazi raid when a non-Jewish neighbour hid him and his aunt in a cupboard. John and his aunt were then forced to endure horrendous conditions in the Budapest ghetto before it was liberated by the Soviet army moments before it was to be blown up by the Nazis. He then lived through the Hungarian Revolution in 1956 before escaping to London via Austria.   

Steven Frank BEM was born in 1935 in Amsterdam. His father was a well-known Dutch lawyer who joined the Dutch Resistance and organised false papers to enable Jews to escape to Switzerland. In 1942 he was betrayed and arrested before being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau where he was murdered. In 1943, Steven and the rest of the family were taken to Westerbork and then to Theresienstadt in Czechoslovakia where they were liberated by the Red Army on 9th May 1945.    

Joan Salter MBE was just three months old when Belgium was invaded by the Nazis. The family moved to France. While all Jews in Paris were obliged to report to their local police station every week, women and children were not then being deported. In July 1942, when Joan’s mother turned up for weekly registration, a police officer tipped her off that deportations of women and children were due to start the following day. Joan’s mother quickly arranged their escape, and they were smuggled out of Paris in a laundry van in the dead of night. More than 11,000 children were eventually deported from France to Auschwitz and other Nazi death camps.