MP Daniel Zeichner - Child Refugees through the Ages

DANIEL ZEICHNER –  HMD SPEECH

 

Thank you for inviting me once again to join you as we stand together here in Cambridge, a city of sanctuary, to mark HMD. I want to reflect very briefly on the past, on what is happening today, and what we can do for the future.

In the room today are people who have direct experience of terrible events in the past, their own experience or close family or friends. Both I and my partner Budge have our own stories - her father a refugee from Poland, my father from Austria, both welcomed and then making their lives here in England. Against the background of dreadful times, but showing also the hope that can be taken from acts of kindness when refugees are made welcome. And particularly when that kindness is offered to children. 

 

Between 1938 and 1939, (10,000) ten thousand unaccompanied children came in to the UK , including (2,000) two thousand to Cambridgeshire, in an operation which has became rightly famous and celebrated known as the Kindertransport, the transport of children, a Scheme in which people here in Cambridge played a key part.

 

When I was growing up, we all hoped that we would never see such horrors again. Sadly we have been disappointed, and it is particularly distressing that anti-semitism has re-emerged, and we must all be vigilant. We are also, sadly, in the midst of a refugee and migrant crisis. This scale of human movement has not been witnessed since World War 2. Millions of people are fleeing their homes so they can stay alive, the most fundamental of all human rights. We see genocide in Darfur, and fighting in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

 

But perhaps most distressing of all is that over half of the world’s refugees are children. We are living in a time when millions of children are being forced to leave their homes and to put their trust in the kindness of strangers.

 

And so to what we can do now?  We can try and emulate that generosity, that welcome, that people offered in the past. We have some great supporters in that task. Lord Alf Dubs has been making that case in the House of Lords this week. Alf was one of those children who came here through the Kindertransport, from what was then Czechoslovakia, a Jewish child whose life was in danger. This week, Parliament has been discussing ways of helping today’s unaccompanied children – (CUT sadly despite Alf’s impassioned pleas, and support of the House of Lords, the Government took a different view, and)  but sadly because we have  not yet come to Parliamentary agreement, we therefore will have to find another way to help today’s and tomorrow’s children.

 

And we will! Many children here will be familiar with the stories of Paddington Bear. Paddington too had to leave his home, in Peru, and make a long journey to find a new family and new home in a strange country, arriving at Kings Cross at a station many of us know very well. Paddington’s story resonates as strongly today as it did when it captivated me as a child, when it was first published over 60 years ago - because it speaks to a generosity that is characteristic of all people when they feel secure and happy. They, we, want others to be happy too. And that’s why we stand together today. Because it is that generosity that makes us human.