I thank colleagues for their very fine speeches, and I thank Paul O’Kane for giving us the opportunity to renew, in this annual debate, our Holocaust remembrance through reflection and witness. The need for that becomes ever more pressing year by year, as members of the generation who lived through the Holocaust pass. Their witness must not be lost with them.

The Holocaust is history’s greatest horror. It was both the confluence of ancient hatred and industrial modernity and the fullest expression of nationalism, which was given form by an efficient and ruthless state that tore down the doors of family, faith and fraternity and replaced the human dignity of the soul with collated lists of category, of statistics and of method and calculated means. That project begat the most notorious statistic of all—6 million dead.

In 1949, Theodor Adorno said:

“To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.”

Where could beauty be found in a world that is capable of such horror? Was it not trite to find form? Was it not whimsy to seek prose?

How do you write about the Holocaust? That was a question that the late novelist Martin Amis, who died in May last year, walked around for most of his literary career. He was a late stepfather to Jewish daughters, and the Holocaust gained ever greater salience in his writing, although it had been a feature of it from his early career. His 2014 novel, “The Zone of Interest”, features the idyllic life of a concentration camp commander and his wife, who live just over the wire. Of course, we all live just over the wire. For days and even months, we can avert our eyes, yet we cannot avoid—as they could not—the stench of decay.

The Holocaust draws writers and readers in ever greater numbers. Colleagues have cited some of those works already—they include popular books such as “The Tattooist of Auschwitz”. We also have films such as “One Life”, which is an account of the heroic service of Nicholas Winton and his role in the Kindertransport programme. Such works open the hearts and the minds of audiences, and they prompt the biggest and most essential of questions: “How?”, “Why?” and, most urgently and repeatedly, “Could it happen again?”

It was in Amis’s “The Zone of Interest” that I first encountered this quote from W G Sebald on the Holocaust:

“No serious person ever thinks of anything else.”

Amis wrote of the exceptionalism of the Third Reich: it is our duty as elected politicians to see glimpses of it everywhere. Does our state stray too far? Will artificial intelligence make racism ever more efficient? Is our justice blind? Are we truly free?

On Tuesday night in this Parliament, the German consul general recalled the first expulsion of the Jewish Poles in 1938, in what is known as the Polenaktion. She was discharging the most solemn duty of the German state. She also told us of the hundreds of thousands of Germans who, in recent days, had gone on to the streets of their cities and towns to stand in the face of rising fascism, the far right, nationalism, ethnic hatred and economic alienation, and of time looping and history repeating itself. Never again. Never again.

We speak today in the livid aftermath of the largest and most deadly assault on Jews since the Holocaust. On 7 October, Hamas slaughtered the innocent and raped and tortured 1,269 Jews because they were Jews. It did so in the hopeful knowledge of the horror that would be visited upon innocent Palestinian people.

History tells us that we cannot give up on peace, no matter how forlorn or how remote a prospect that may feel. That is our remembrance.