Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 18, 2012

Official Report 741KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leaders today are Katie McKenna and Dominic Bradley, former pupils of St Ninian’s high school, East Dunbartonshire.

Presiding Officer, ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for the privilege of delivering this time for reflection.

I am Dominic Bradley and this is Katie McKenna. We are former pupils of St Ninian’s high school in Kirkintilloch in East Dunbartonshire and are currently studying at the University of Glasgow. In October 2010, we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau as participants in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s lessons from Auschwitz project. This provided an enormously valuable educational experience.

One key memory that remains with me relates to the rows of pictures of prisoners displayed on the walls of the main corridor of block 6. They had been taken on arrival at Auschwitz 1. It was not the precisely recorded names, dates of birth, arrival and death that stayed with me; it was the look on some of their faces: a few of them were smiling. They had nothing to smile about. Their smiles were not to show happiness or hopefulness. Rather, they were a statement of self-worth.

Our guide described a recent tour she had done that had included a woman whose mother had been a prisoner in the camp. She asked for a copy of her picture—the only photograph of her mother—standing, deathly thin, head shaven, dressed in rags, holding her identification number.

This year’s theme for Holocaust memorial day is “speak up, speak out”. My main difficulty on my return was understanding how ordinary people could stand by while those atrocities happened. Why did no one speak up?

Today, many people believe that they understand all that they need to know about the Holocaust. We said that we would never allow something like that to happen again but, if that were true, man’s inhumanity to man would have ended with the Nazis. Even today, we cannot claim to have eliminated prejudice, hatred or racism from our society, while overseas we have continued to witness the horror of genocide.

Speech can be an incredibly powerful tool. The Nazis realised that, which is why taking away the voices of all of those whom they persecuted was such an important part of their regime.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a voice and we all have a responsibility to use that voice to speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves. That is why the words of one survivor, Margit Meissner, are particularly relevant this year. She said:

“one should not become indifferent to the suffering of others, ... one should not stand by and just raise one’s hands and say, ‘There’s nothing I can do, I’m just a little one person’ because I think what every one of us does matters.”