Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Official Report 665KB pdf

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Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. Our first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leaders today are Mimi Evans-Agnew and James Clements, pupil and former pupil of Hyndland secondary school in Glasgow.

Presiding Officer, ladies and gentlemen, we thank you for the privilege of delivering this time for reflection. My name is James Clements, and beside me is Mimi Evans-Agnew. I am a former pupil at Hyndland secondary school in Glasgow, where Mimi is currently completing her studies. In September 2009, we were given the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau as part of the Holocaust Educational Trust’s lessons from Auschwitz project. For both of us, what began as an historical trip turned into a quite incredible emotional journey that forced us to explore what it means to be a human being and a member of society.

The camp is very difficult to describe to those who have not been there, and not just the physical attributes, but the feeling of the place. There were glass cases full of human hair, shaved from the victims and bought by German companies to make cheap clothes. Perhaps the most poignant of all were the children’s barracks, where the gaudy murals on the walls contrasted dramatically with the utter bleakness of the surroundings. Those are things not easily forgotten, because they say so much about the capacity of humankind for hate.

The trust organised for us to hear Zigi Shipper, a Holocaust survivor, speak. He described how the course of his life was changed forever by the events of the Holocaust and how, aged just 14, he found himself in Auschwitz. Much more than figures and statistics, such stories show how catastrophic the Holocaust was, but they also illustrate how individuals can transcend tragedy and take something positive from it. Above all, they remind us of the infinite power of hope.

Ladies and gentlemen, the theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial day is untold stories. The vast majority of victims were Jews, but we must not forget the other groups who were persecuted by the Nazis, such as political opponents of the Nazi regime, homosexuals, Roma and Sinti, who also have stories that are too often left untold. There will of course come a point when there are no survivors left and therefore no one to tell their stories. For every one story that is recorded in literature or film or through families, many thousands remain, and will forever remain, untold—children whose voices were snatched away from them in the coldest, cruellest way imaginable.

At least 1.1 million people were systematically slaughtered at Auschwitz alone. The most poignant part of visiting the camp for us was that it made that rather abstract number into real flesh and blood. We saw photos of people and families laughing, smiling and loving one another. Imagine those were your family snapshots; now imagine that that is all that is left of them.

Holocaust memorial day is next week. We need to ensure that the Holocaust never becomes an untold story, no matter how uncomfortable it is to retell. The Holocaust exposes the worst of humanity, but only in remembering can we ensure that hate, intolerance and prejudice are never again allowed to thrive. I will end with some words that I remember from a rabbi whom I met on my trip, who said:

“In order to face the challenges of the future, we must address the past”.