At the start of Parliament’s summer recess, I led a delegation of MPs to Poland on behalf of the Holocaust Education Trust and the parliamentary committee against anti-Semitism.

This visit provided a fascinating opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of Poland’s complex Jewish past, the devastating and lasting impact of the Holocaust on the Jewish population and the continuing fight against anti-Semitism today.

I’d previously visited Auschwitz twice, firstly with the Holocaust Education Trust, which encouraged me to instigate the successful parliamentary campaign to establish Holocaust Memorial Day, and secondly as part of the UK’s delegation to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation.

This, though, was rather different. We visited the site of the Warsaw ghetto and former Jewish villages in Poland, as well as Majdanek.

We met members of today’s small Jewish community in Warsaw, and with leading Polish parliamentarians and government officials to discuss their efforts to combat anti-Semitism in contemporary Poland.

The first lesson that struck me was how close the Nazis had come to reaching their goal of erasing the Jews from history. In Warsaw, we were shown a road with disused tram tracks, with trees and wasteland on either side.

This did not seem particularly remarkable, until we learned the street had been Warsaw’s equivalent to Oxford Street, a busy shopping centre, completely obliterated when the ghetto was destroyed.

Visiting the village of Kazimierz Dolny was even more poignant. Before the Nazis, 60 per cent of the population were Jewish. Now, not a single Jew lives there. There are no memorials or commemorative plaques to record the presence of the Jewish community before they were rounded up and murdered. Eventually, in a back street we found the old synagogue, locked up and put to a different purpose: nothing to indicate its former use.

The Jews have been airbrushed from the history of that, and many other, villages. Before the war, 3.5 million Jews lived in Poland — more than ten per cent of the population. In Warsaw it was one third. Now, there are only about 4,000.

Majdanek itself revealed how non-Jewish Polish people were helpless witnesses to what occurred. The camp is situated so close to the town of Lublin, it is impossible to believe that the people were not aware of it.

Visiting the Polish parliament also brought home that it was not just the Jews who were the Nazis’ victims: there is a plaque to commemorate the 300 Polish MPs killed by the Nazis and the USSR — practically the whole parliament.

Efforts are now being made to revive Jewish culture in Poland, with non-Jews taking up Jewish traditions, particularly in Krakow, but if this is to be more than a mere tourist attraction, undercurrents of anti-Semitism which still remain in Poland, as elsewhere, have to be confronted.

For this reason, we have to work with Poland and all the other countries affected by the Holocaust, to redouble our efforts to combat racism and anti-Semitism in all its forms, across the frontiers of Europe.