Plenary, 02 Feb 2000

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 2, 2000

Official Report 579KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Today, to lead our time for reflection we welcome someone who had more than a passing hand in the creation of this Parliament—the Reverend Canon Kenyon Wright.

A memory that will haunt me as long as I live is that of the three weeks that I spent nearly 30 years ago—revealing my age—working with young people from Coventry, Germany and Poland in the horror of the death camp of Auschwitz. In the past week, we have marked the 55th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, and the full grim reality of that greatest stain on human society of the 20th century—the Holocaust.

One memory of the camp museum is very strong—its almost unimaginable record of mass murder and inhumanity, and at the exit, a full-size figure of an emaciated man draped in death on the electrified barbed wire, a suicide that many chose rather than the misery of existence. Above that figure are two words: NEVER FORGET.

Never forget; but there is a right and a wrong way of remembering. We can remember to perpetuate the myths and reinforce the prejudices and the hatreds—we have seen only too much of that, and not just in the Balkans—or we can remember to ensure that the future will be different. The Government is right to declare that, from next year, 27 January will be Holocaust day, reminding us all that those who forget the past are condemned to relive it. I am sure that together we will find relevant ways of observing that day in Scotland.

My second memory of Auschwitz is tied to something I found while cleaning the area between the barbed wire fences. I have it with me now. It was identified as part of a musical instrument that the camp orchestra was grotesquely compelled to play each day as the slave labourers marched out under the cynical motto on the gate: Arbeit macht frei—work makes us free.

My most poignant memory is of one day finding a young German girl who was weeping inconsolably. At length, between her tears, she told me why. She had found in the camp records what she feared to find—her father's name recorded among those of the SS guards. Her words I will never forget. She said, "I feel unclean. I will never be clean again." I could say to her only that, in the story of the infamy and cruelty of humankind, all of us are unclean. None of us will ever be clean again, but for the mercy, forgiveness and grace of God and our fellow human beings.

What we all share, I am certain, is the resolve that the new Scotland will be a nation free from racism and prejudice—a land fit for all our people. Hugh McDiarmid once wrote:

"He canna Scotland see, wha yet Canna see the infinite, And Scotland in true scale to it".

I offer you now the poem "Mind Without Fear", which was written by the Nobel prize-winning poet Rabindranath Tagore as his hope for his own nation, India—a nation in which I spent many happy years.

"Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high; Where knowledge is free; Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls; Where words come out from the depth of truth; Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection; Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit; Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action— Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake."

That is my aspiration for Scotland. I hope that it is yours, too.