Good afternoon. As always on a Wednesday, our first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leaders today are Liam Beattie, a secondary 6 pupil at Hawick high school and a member of the Scottish Youth Parliament, and Rachel Connolly, an S6 pupil at Hawick high school.
Visiting Auschwitz—let alone going there and back in one day—is something that many young people would never consider doing. No amount of pictures, videos and books about Auschwitz and other concentration camps prepares you for seeing the sites where millions of innocent people were killed. What hit me the most was witnessing the vast cabinets with the discarded shoes and the real hair of 40,000 people. My reaction after seeing the harrowing images was to cry. I was not crying for myself; I was crying at how sad it was that all that suffering had been caused by the selfish drive of one man. Auschwitz II might have been the biggest of the three concentration camps, but today its site has the least to see physically. The remains of the vast huts where prisoners were cramped together, the barbed wire that was left and the overbearing presence of the watchtower as you enter gave me a cold shiver up my back. I do not live my life any differently, but to have seen Auschwitz through my own eyes puts a whole new perspective on how little human life was valued there.
The lessons that I learned from visiting Auschwitz are ones that I believe I can pass on to others. The Holocaust touches so many social issues that still cast a shadow over our society. It saddens me to think that there is still racism, anti-Semitism, homophobia and unfair discrimination in this nation of ours. It has been 64 years since world war two came to an end, but so many people still believe that there is little to be learned from the events that unfolded during the Holocaust. When Rachel and I visited Auschwitz, we learned how simple name-calling can escalate into something as terrible as the Holocaust, and we need to ensure that the majority protects society's minorities by putting equality and fairness at the core of our society. A fact that I learned while visiting Auschwitz was that if people stayed silent for a minute for every person who died as a result of the Holocaust we would be silent for six years. I would like to finish with this quotation from George Santayana, who said:
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