The final item of business is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-11995, in the name of Stewart Maxwell, on Holocaust memorial day 2015. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament notes that 27 January 2015 marks Holocaust Memorial Day, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and an opportunity for schools, colleges, faith groups and communities across Scotland to remember the six million men, women and children murdered by the Nazi regime in occupied Europe; acknowledges that this year marks perhaps the last significant anniversary that will be marked with the Holocaust in living memory; further notes that the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2015 is Keep the Memory Alive; values the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project, which gives two post-16 students from every school and college in Scotland the opportunity to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau; applauds Lucy Paterson and Kieran Smyth, two students from St Andrew’s RC Secondary in Glasgow, who took part in the project and will deliver the Parliament’s Time for Reflection message on 27 January; celebrates the Holocaust survivors who have enriched Scotland as a nation, and recommits to ensuring that racism, sectarianism and bigotry are never allowed to go unchallenged in Scotland.
17:34
On 27 January 1945, 70 years ago today, Soviet soldiers liberated Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration and extermination camp that the Nazi regime established.
As the red army approached, the Nazis began to evacuate the camp. They killed thousands and forced around another 60,000 prisoners to march out of the camp to move them further from the approaching Soviet forces. As many as 15,000 of those prisoners who were evacuated are estimated to have died as a result of the forced march and the privations that they suffered en route to other camps. As a result, only around 7,000 prisoners were left in Auschwitz when the red army arrived, and most of them were desperately ill or dying.
As well as moving the prisoners, the guards ordered the crematoria and gas chambers to be destroyed, in order to obliterate the evidence of the crimes that had been committed there. They wanted to wipe out the past. They wanted to hide the truth. They did that not only at Auschwitz-Birkenau but at other extermination camps. As recently as September of last year, it was reported that archaeologists believe that they have found the site of the gas chambers that were destroyed to hide the truth of what happened at Sobibór.
The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust has published a booklet for Holocaust memorial day this year, listing the path to genocide, and there are eight steps. Step eight is denial: the perpetrators or later generations deny the existence of any crime.
On 20 January 1942, the Wannsee conference met to discuss the final solution—the plans to eliminate the Jews. One copy of the Wannsee protocol—the minutes of the Wannsee conference—survived the war. Here is a portion of the translated minutes:
“Under proper guidance, in the course of the final solution the Jews are to be allocated for appropriate labor in the East. Able-bodied Jews, separated according to sex, will be taken in large work columns to these areas for work on roads, in the course of which action doubtless a large portion will be eliminated by natural causes.
The possible final remnant will, since it will undoubtedly consist of the most resistant portion, have to be treated accordingly, because it is the product of natural selection and would, if released, act as a the seed of a new Jewish revival (see the experience of history.)”
The translation from which I have just read is the English text, based on the original German language version of the Wannsee protocol, from the official United States Government translation prepared for evidence in trials at Nuremberg. There can be no doubt about the chilling meaning of the words that I have quoted.
The theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial day is “keep the memory alive”. That is very pertinent indeed, as those who survived the Holocaust are now old. In a few years, the generation that suffered under the Nazi regime will have passed into history and there will be no one alive to say, “I saw this. I was there. This really happened.” It will be much easier to deny the Holocaust when there are no eye-witnesses left.
A Spanish American called George Santayana famously said:
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
It is vital that we never forget the atrocities that took place in the heart of Europe during the 20th century.
Today, on the 70th anniversary of the very day on which Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated, I believe that we should take George Santayana’s warning seriously. I fear that we are in grave danger of forgetting the past. In Europe, I am sorry to say, anti-Semitism is on the rise again. We are all only too well aware of the horrific events in Paris earlier this month, in which 17 people were murdered—11 journalists, two police officers and four people shopping in a kosher supermarket.
In July 2014, eight synagogues in France were attacked. Indeed, one in Sarcelles was firebombed by a mob said to be 400 strong. In Germany, Molotov cocktails were thrown into the Bergische synagogue in Wuppertal, which had previously been destroyed during Kristallnacht. In May 2014, in Brussels, four people were murdered at the Jewish museum. In Toulouse, in 2012, three children and a teacher were murdered at a Jewish school, a few days after the same gunman had murdered three French soldiers.
Of course, those were attacks by murderous individuals, not organised campaigns by a Government, and they were universally condemned across Europe. However, in November 2012, a member of the Hungarian Parliament, a Jobbik MP, said that officials of Jewish origin should be listed because they might be a “national security risk”. He was, I am glad to say, condemned roundly, but these are worrying times.
Here in Scotland, thankfully, there have been no such terrible incidents as those that I have listed from the continent, but there is no room for complacency. In August 2013, the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities issued a report, “Being Jewish in Scotland”, which was produced with Scottish Government funding. The report found that the experience of Jewish people living in Scotland is largely positive, which is good news. It also found, however, that there is some anti-Semitism that continues to create a sense of insecurity.
In answers to written questions that I lodged, the Scottish Government has indicated that, in 2011-12, recorded religious hate crimes against Judaism were running at 2.2 charges per 1,000 members of the Jewish community, and that, in 2012-13, recorded religious hate crimes against Judaism were—I am sorry to say—running at 4.19 charges per 1,000 members of the Jewish community. That is almost double.
In the three months between August 2014 and the start of November, more than 50 anti-Semitic incidents were reported to the Scottish police, which exceeded the total for the previous three years. The Scottish Government has responded to the sudden rise in anti-Semitic incidents in a most positive manner, by funding a short-term survey, to be entitled “How being Jewish in Scotland has changed”, which will report at the end of March.
Only last week, the First Minister stated in the chamber:
“Tackling anti-Semitism is a key priority for the Scottish Government ... The Jewish community in Scotland plays a massive role in this country and makes a massive contribution. We are proud of that, and we should all stand shoulder to shoulder with it at this time.” —[Official Report, 22 January 2015; c 18-19.]
I echo the First Minister’s words. It is vital that we in Scotland stand together, that we do not isolate any member of our Scottish community and that we value the contribution that all of us make to Scotland, because for hatred to succeed, it must isolate the people who are the object of hatred and separate them from the rest of the community. We must always remember, but not quietly. We must state loudly and clearly that the Holocaust happened, so that we stop those who would attempt to wipe all record of it from the history books.
We must never, ever forget the past, and I commend the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust for keeping the memory alive.
Many thanks.
Before we move to the open debate, I advise members that, due to the number of members who have indicated that they would like to speak, I am minded to accept a motion, under rule 8.14.3, to extend the debate by up to 30 minutes. I invite Stewart Maxwell to move such a motion.
Motion moved,
That, under Rule 8.14.3, the debate be extended by up to 30 minutes.—[Stewart Maxwell.]
Motion agreed to.
17:41
I thank Stewart Maxwell for lodging today’s motion and for giving Parliament an opportunity to commemorate, and to reflect once more on, the events of the Holocaust. It is a full 70 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, yet each year the power of those events—the horror of our capacity for evil, interspersed with all-too-occasional glimpses of humanity—makes me think afresh.
Each year Holocaust memorial day fills me with questions and with hope and anxiety in equal measure about whether we have learned our lessons. This year has been no exception, when I heard again the stories of Bob Kutner and Henry and Ingrid Wuga—Holocaust survivors who made their homes and have brought up their families here in Scotland. Listening to Bob talk to a group of senior pupils at one of his local schools last week, I was struck this time not so much by the scars that he must bear—for the family whom he lost or the damage that was wrought on his life when he was a barely a teenager himself—but by his warmth, hope and lack of bitterness.
In a similar vein, last week there was a fascinating documentary on television, specifically on the scenes that were filmed following the Russians’ liberation of Auschwitz. This time the contrast with the shocking brutality was a dated and frankly rather sexist commentary about powers of recovery. According to the voice-over, within three weeks of liberation many women from the camp were rejuvenated to the point of worrying over their hairstyles and choice of clothes. As I said, the commentary was very much of its time, but the point that really struck home was the resilience of the survivors.
Each year when we mark the Holocaust, the story of those events gives me a fresh perspective, and this year that seems to be about the hope that survives our despair. Yet another example of exactly that is the story of Jane Haining, the Scottish missionary who ended up dying in Auschwitz because she refused to leave her Jewish pupils in Budapest. Like me, members will have been able to see the documentary that was shown in East Renfrewshire last night. It was a powerful and moving film: Jane’s quiet and unassuming heroism provided a welcome counterbalance to the fatalism and powerlessness that the Holocaust can often evoke.
At a time when our communities are under strain from growing inequality and continuing injustice, which are often expressed in terms of prejudice and hate, and when we face yet another rise in anti-Semitism, as Stewart Maxwell accurately described, it has never been more important to continue to learn the lessons of the Holocaust.
I am aware, as I am sure everyone in the chamber is, that soon there will be no survivors to share their memories directly with us. It is up to us, and to the young Holocaust ambassadors who spoke so eloquently at time for reflection today in addressing Parliament, to keep those memories alive. There is so much that we still have to learn. I do not believe that we could pay a greater tribute to the sacrifice of so many than to show that we remain willing learners.
17:45
I thank Stewart Maxwell for lodging the motion and for securing debating time on this important day—the 70th anniversary of Soviet troops’ liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and their discovery of a vast factory of death with all the horrors of mass extermination, slave labour and medical experimentation.
Our remembering man’s inhumanity to man at its most extreme presents an opportunity for us to educate communities throughout Scotland about the tragedies that occurred in occupied Europe, which saw 12 million men, women and children die at the hands of the Nazi regime—half of them were Jewish and they died simply for being Jewish.
In 1933, the Jewish population of Germany stood at 600,000—less than 1 per cent of the total population. However, the Jewish population around Europe numbered more than 10 million in countries that were later occupied in whole, or in part, by the Nazis.
Once in power, Hitler staged an economic boycott of Jewish-owned shops and businesses. Jews were removed from their employment and professions, which made their lives increasingly unbearable. Many Jews tried to emigrate, if they could find a country to take them. Few would do so. France, the Netherlands and Romania all set up camps to intern Jews who were fleeing Nazi rule. Even the Kindertransport, which allowed Jewish children to come to Britain, left their parents to an unknown fate.
Jews were targeted early in the war. German officials confiscated Jewish property and required Jews to wear identifying arm bands. Local collaborators often assisted the Nazis by robbing and persecuting Jews, although one should remember the more than 25,000 righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to help Jewish friends, neighbours and even strangers.
The euphemistic term “the final solution” was used to refer to the annihilation—the genocide—of the Jewish people. In 1941, after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, mobile SS and police killing squads massacred Jewish communities either immediately or soon after deporting them to ghettos.
Operation Reinhard established “killing centres” in Poland at Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibór and Treblinka, for the sole purpose of murdering Jews—men, women and children. In those centres, of the 1.7 million Jews who arrived only 106 are known to have survived the war.
Auschwitz-Birkenau subsequently became the main centre for destroying the Jewish people. Around 1 million Jews of many nationalities were transported from across Europe to be either killed upon arrival—a certainty for the old, young and sick—or worked to death on minuscule rations. About 100,000 others were also killed—mostly Roma, Poles or Soviet prisoners of war.
Towards the final months of the war, as the red army advanced, inmates were sent either by train or on foot on death marches—forced to trek across the chaos of a collapsing Nazi regime in order to prevent their liberation. The few thousand who were left at Auschwitz were to be murdered, but the rapid Soviet advance prompted the SS to flee to save their own skins.
As Stewart Maxwell and Ken Macintosh both pointed out, this year might be the last significant anniversary that will be marked by Holocaust survivors, given their rapidly advancing age and infirmity. In years to come, we must remember for them.
Of course the Jews were not the first people to face genocide in the 20th century. “Who remembers the Armenians?”, Hitler said of the people who were murdered in 1915 in the dying days of the Ottoman empire. At least 1.3 million people—more than half the world’s Armenian population at that time—were killed. Modern independent Armenia, where many of the survivors fled to, is but a tenth of the size of historical Armenia.
In 1945 there was a determination to prevent something as dreadfully unique as the industrialised slaughter that was the Holocaust from ever happening again, yet there have been other genocides, in Rwanda and Cambodia. Through Islamic State, the Yazidi culture is threatened with extinction now.
Perhaps we will never live in a world without such horrors, but whenever and wherever possible we must fight against the inhumanity and intolerance that the Holocaust reminds us is so much part of our human story. Holocaust memorial day makes it clear why we must do so.
17:49
Today, Holocaust memorial day, 27 January 2015, marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in which one and a quarter million souls from across Europe perished: young and old, male and female, Jew and Gentile, were murdered without compunction by a barbarous Nazi tyranny.
Last Saturday evening, among many commemorative programmes on television and radio was Channel 4’s broadcast of an extraordinary documentary called “Holocaust: Night Will Fall”, which tells the story of the film makers who filmed, in the immediate aftermath of the war, the liberation of the various death camps. It is a film that had been suppressed until now, because geopolitical tides shifted after the war and it was felt at the time that it would be inappropriate and inconvenient for the film to be seen.
I learned fresh information from the film—for example, I did not know that much of the footage that we now see of Auschwitz was filmed some time after its liberation. However, that is not the case for the film of the British liberation of Bergen-Belsen. Despite everything that I have seen over the years, I was stupefied all over again by seeing stuff that I had never thought possible and that had never previously been screened. That film is going to be released later this year in cinemas and on DVD. To touch on something that Stewart Maxwell said, because the denial business was already well established at the end of the war, the British contingent insisted that local people were filmed witnessing the events so that they could not subsequently deny what had been seen.
The Jewish community in East Renfrewshire, where I live and grew up, is of long standing. In his magnificent biographical trilogy, which commenced in 1986 with the publication of “Growing Up in the Gorbals”, Ralph Glasser memorably traced the arrival and integration of Scotland’s Jewish community in and around Glasgow over a century ago. As the community migrated south to Newton Mearns in the post-war years, members of it became my neighbours and friends. I learned very little from them about the horrors that had been endured, although many of them had survived or had lost family as the European genocide unfolded. What I did not know was that they kept silent about that not just with neighbours and friends but within their own families. They did so in many cases because the horror of what they had endured had been so great but—horribly—they also did so out of shame that they had survived, and because they were unable to come to terms with that fact or discuss it.
Unfortunately, it is also true that in the post-war years in Britain anti-Semitism persisted in ignorance. Two landmark television programmes in 1973 together transformed public understanding—certainly my understanding—of the issue. They were Jeremy Isaacs’s 26-part “The World at War”; and the outstanding “The Ascent of Man”, which was presented by Dr Jacob Bronowski. I can vividly remember Dr Bronowski’s testimony as he stood ankle deep in water—in his mind, it was water that was mingled with the ashes of his people—in the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau, intensely moved and speaking directly to the camera. That footage is readily available on YouTube. I watched it again recently, and it is as powerful now as it was over 40 years ago. If members have not seen it, please look at it and perhaps also at the remarkable interview that Dr Bronowski gave, just before he died, to Michael Parkinson.
Like others, I have visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. I did so privately a few years ago. It is a desolate place, and I visited it at the bleakest time of the year. My guide was the grandson of a local Oswiecim family. He was full of compassion—to be a guide on that site he had to be. As a father, I looked at the photographs of small children skipping with joy and relief after leaving the confines of a long train journey. What father has not been in that position with his children?. But to know that they were skipping, holding hands and smiling, along a short path to their execution made that as chilling and moving an image as any.
It is an uncomfortable truth that is simply not admitted enough that much of occupied Europe was complicit in sending the Jews to their deaths. Any cursory study demonstrates that the defence of ignorance is shallow, but it suits precious sensibilities that that fiction be maintained. Far too many people in occupied or Axis Europe knew exactly what was going on and far too few raised a hand to stop it.
In this country, we were never called upon by an invading Nazi machine to be complicit; we resisted invasion and helped to win the war. However, I believe that all our island character and history would have seen individuals and communities stand and resist. In the event, only two Britons, from the occupied Channel Islands, were shipped under cover of darkness and transported by sea and train across a continent to Auschwitz, to be murdered at their journey’s end. What madness was that? Yet 70 years later, as was evidenced horribly in Paris a fortnight ago, anti-Semitism is finding a voice again. It must be confronted, challenged and defeated.
Auschwitz was liberated 70 years ago, and 50 years ago Churchill died. I will end with a quotation from him:
“Never give in, never give in, never, never, never—in nothing great or small, large or petty—never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”
Britain did not yield 70 years ago, and 70 years on Scotland will not.
17:54
I congratulate Stewart Maxwell on securing the opportunity to reflect on the Holocaust. I apologise that, owing to the extension to business, I may have to leave the chamber before the debate concludes.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated 70 years ago today, and genocide was deemed to be a crime under international law in 1946. Both happened a long time ago. In a world with an ever-changing and evolving nature that is at times breathtaking, it is somehow reassuring that the Holocaust still resonates, particularly among those who were born two or perhaps even three generations later. It is so important that we remember the atrocities perpetrated by the Nazis—not only those involving the 6 million Jews who were murdered but the 5 million others. Gay people, Gypsies, priests, people with physical or mental disabilities, communists, trade unionists, resistance fighters, Jehovah’s Witnesses, anarchists, Poles and other Slavic people were all sent to the concentration camps.
An estimated 1.5 million Romani Gypsies perished under the Porajmos. Although the atrocities perpetrated on the Jews were acknowledged quite quickly at the end of world war two, it took until the 1970s for the West German Parliament to acknowledge that that persecution had been racially motivated.
Since world war two, other acts of genocide—not on the same scale of course, but utterly horrific—have unfortunately been committed across the world, including in Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and Cambodia, where the Khmer Rouge’s slogan was:
“To spare you is no profit, to destroy you is no loss.”
That attitude towards life, some 30 years on from the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, mirrored the horrors of the Nazi regime. Under the Khmer Rouge’s regime, as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust’s website recalls:
“It was possible to be shot for knowing a foreign language, wearing glasses, laughing or crying.”
Who would have escaped those criteria in Nazi Germany or, indeed, Cambodia?
It is important here that we focus on the Holocaust and the persecution of Jewish people, especially in light of recent events in France.
In reflecting on the horrors of the Holocaust, we should also consider the incredible acts of life-saving bravery by individuals who felt compelled to intervene. I will briefly highlight the story of Dr Feng Shan Ho, a Chinese diplomat in Vienna at the time of the Anschluss.
Dr Ho, so appalled by what he was witnessing, issued visas to any Jews who wanted them for anywhere, so that they had the means to flee the Nazis. His superior, the Chinese ambassador in Berlin, tried to stop the practice as he did not want China’s diplomatic relations with Germany to be put at risk, but Dr Ho stood firm.
We do not know precisely how many visas Dr Ho issued, but it was estimated to be in the thousands. The support that he had given to Jewish people during the Holocaust became known only after Dr Ho’s death in 1997 when Yad Vashem awarded him the title of “Righteous Among The Nations” for his humanitarian courage.
As we mark the 70th anniversary of the ending of the Holocaust, it is, as I mentioned, important that young people—the adults of tomorrow—learn about it and the lessons that should be derived from what occurred. I am therefore pleased that all five high schools in my constituency are undertaking work to commemorate the Holocaust, including having survivors speak to pupils and having pupils and staff who have visited Auschwitz address assemblies, as well as reaching out to feeder primaries to share their experiences.
I note the importance of the lessons from the Holocaust programme. By ensuring that two pupils from every school and college can visit Auschwitz, we can respond to the trust’s concern that “hearing is not seeing”.
I close with the remarks of one such pupil, Rhona Lingard from Webster’s high school, who visited Auschwitz in September 2014:
“We need to make sure that this doesn’t happen again. We can’t just remember what happened, we need to learn from it and teach others about it too.”
That sums up things rather appropriately.
17:58
Like others, I congratulate Stewart Maxwell on securing the debate on the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. He has secured similar debates on a number of occasions. Once again, he set the scene and the tone absolutely perfectly.
A couple of years ago, I took part in the equivalent debate to mark Holocaust memorial day. I recall being moved by a number of members’ speeches, as I have been again this evening. Unlike me, many had visited Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau or one of the other camps, and they were able to draw on that experience and how it made them feel.
Interestingly, most members spoke of their sense of surprise at how they had responded to their first visit to one of the camps. That is perhaps strange, given that so much of the detail and the enormity of the Holocaust are matters of long-established record. However, I think that that reflects the capacity of the Holocaust, and the unimaginable brutality that was involved, to reach down through the years and affect us in ways that we find surprising and unsettling—we heard that again today from Lucy Paterson and Kieran Smyth at time for reflection.
How could anyone act in such a way towards their fellow men? Why did nobody speak up more loudly at the time? How should we judge those who knew but did not act, even if they did not know the full extent of what was happening? Those are all legitimate questions, but we should not delude ourselves into thinking that asking them is solely an act of historical remembrance, important though that is. There are, sadly, numerous more recent examples—even if they do not match the scale of what happened during the Holocaust—that suggest that the lessons of history have not been learned.
This year, for example, marks the 20th anniversary of the atrocities that took place in Srebrenica in 1995—the genocide of more than 8,000 Bosnians, mainly men and boys, which is the largest mass killing on European soil since the second world war. People did speak out and resolve to take action, and efforts have been made to hold the people who were responsible to account. Nevertheless, coming half a century after the liberation of Auschwitz the atrocity was a sobering reminder that such barbaric acts are not consigned to history, and the international response at the time was not above criticism.
Events in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and Syria, which Graeme Dey mentioned, are all poignant reminders that, as Robert Burns would have observed, the capacity for “man’s inhumanity to man” remains undiminished.
The Holocaust Educational Trust is to be warmly commended for its efforts to reinforce that message with successive generations. It does that with no little success. The trust also does great work in translating what to many people is unimaginable horror on a truly mass scale, reminding us that the Holocaust was made up of many millions of individual tragedies that demand to be remembered and acknowledged for what they are.
The last time I participated in this debate, the theme for memorial day—which drew on Martin Niemöller’s powerfully evocative poem, “First they came”—was speaking up and speaking out. The emphasis was on how important it is for all of us to use our voices to challenge what we see and know to be wrong, whether that be anti-Semitism, bigotry, racism or intolerance. The theme for this year’s major anniversary is memory.
I was delighted to hear that pupils and staff at Kirkwall grammar school in my Orkney constituency have again been heavily involved in commemorative events. This week, the customary candle-lighting ceremony at KGS will take place in a room that has been transformed by secondary 2 and S3 pupils to include a black remembrance window wall, which is covered with stars of David that contain messages of remembrance and hope—Ken Macintosh talked about hope. Yellow stars have been hung in the school’s main foyer, as a poignant reminder of the Holocaust, to represent the stars that Jews wore in the concentration camps.
Of course, it was not simply Jews who were singled out. Red triangles were worn by political prisoners, including trade unionists. Purple triangles were worn by Jehovah’s Witnesses and members of small religious minorities. Homosexuals were singled out with pink badges, while black was reserved for people who did not fit in, including the mentally ill, alcoholics, the homeless and pacifists. Brown identified Roma people.
Many people would argue that some of the groups who were persecuted by the Nazis continue to suffer prejudice and discrimination. Therefore, although it is right that we remember, we should redouble our commitment to speak out loudly and act decisively.
Doing that is not always easy or comfortable. Recent events in Paris highlight the tensions that exist. Many Muslims who utterly condemn the brutal killings at Charlie Hebdo nevertheless feel aggrieved at what they regard as the freedom to lampoon the Prophet Mohammed when there are strict laws on anti-Semitism and denying the Holocaust. That presents a real challenge to those of us who passionately defend the right of free speech. The only way of charting a path through these troubled times is by committing to tolerance, education and debate and never losing sight of the lessons from our past.
In that regard, I commend the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust on the contribution that it has made and continues to make, and I thank Stewart Maxwell again for allowing this Parliament an opportunity to debate and commemorate Holocaust memorial day.
18:03
I congratulate Stewart Maxwell on securing this important debate.
Today is a day for everyone to pause and remember the 6 million Jewish men, women and children who were murdered by the Nazi regime in occupied Europe. It was not just Jewish people who were killed. Many other people met their deaths on the same sites, including Poles, Russians, socialists, communists, Christians, homosexuals, mentally and physically disabled people and people from the Roma community.
All were the direct victims of the hate and sectarianism of the Nazis. Today—27 January—survivors will lay wreaths and light candles at the so-called death wall at block 11 to mark 70 years since the camp’s liberation, in memory of those who never left.
We need to recognise that genocide does not just take place on its own; it is a steady process that can begin if discrimination, racism and hatred are not checked, tackled and prevented.
Events are taking place across the United Kingdom to mark Holocaust memorial day. In my own constituency, Glasgow, there will be a memorial meeting tonight in the Scottish Trades Union Congress building. The main aim of such meetings is not only to remember the victims of the Holocaust and why it happened but to draw attention to the modern-day threat of fascism and racism, which is on the rise across Europe and in Britain.
Holocaust memorial day is always an important event in the area, as Glasgow is home to a large Jewish community. Speaking at the meeting tonight will be two of the “Glasgow Girls”, Amal Azzudin and Roza Salih—I hope that I pronounced their names properly—along with community activist Pinar Aksu. All three were part of a trade union-sponsored delegation on a recent Unite Against Fascism Holocaust memorial trip to the Auschwitz concentration camp, and they will be giving a report of their experience of visiting the camps. I regret that I am not able to be at the STUC building tonight to hear the personal reflections of those young people and how their trip to Auschwitz affected them, but I aim to catch up with them as soon as I can to hear about their experience.
Earlier today, we heard from Lucy Paterson and Kieran Smyth, two pupils from St Andrew’s RC secondary school in Glasgow, who delivered an excellent and moving contribution at time for reflection. My colleague Ken Macintosh spoke about their journey and experiences earlier.
We have come a long way since the liberation of Auschwitz 70 years ago. We would think that, after the revelation of such dreadful crimes, those who voiced the same views as the Nazis could never gain any votes or any credibility again, but sadly the spectre of fascism haunts Europe once more.
People with fascist views are being elected in parts of Europe and, after recent events in Germany and France, more than ever across Europe we must learn the lessons of history. All those who believe in freedom and democracy and who oppose racism and fascism must stand together united in order to ensure that the horrors of Auschwitz never happen again. We must keep the memory alive and never forget; enable and support our young ambassadors of the Holocaust Educational Trust Auschwitz project, who aim to keep their memory of the visits alive; and enable and support them to keep the memory alive and never forget.
18:08
I thank Stewart Maxwell for bringing the debate to the chamber today, which is appropriately not only Holocaust memorial day 2015 but, as other colleagues have acknowledged, also marks the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, where more than 1 million Jews were exterminated.
In November last year the Yad Vashem world centre for Holocaust research, documentation, education and commemoration in Israel, in partnership with the Council of Christians and Jews, embarked on a pilot programme consisting of a visit for politicians to Israel and to the centre. The politicians were drawn from different parties, representing approximately every tier of government across the United Kingdom.
I had the privilege of being invited to take part in that pilot programme, which included a three-day varied programme with seminars, discussions and a tour of Yad Vashem and its features. Interestingly, the programme also included a visit to Ramallah in Palestine.
The Yad Vashem centre has an impressive and compelling air of tranquillity, situated as it is on a hillside with a panoramic vista of Bethlehem. In the centre itself and throughout the campus, there are poignant memorials and opportunities are provided for interactive engagement and analytical discussions. It is therefore very much a living and working centre. Its features include the Holocaust history museum and the heart-wrenching hall of names, which contains the names and personal details of millions of victims recorded on pages of testimony by survivors and many of their loved ones. The museum of Holocaust art exhibits the world’s largest collection of art that was created in the ghettos, camps and hideouts, and other places where artistic endeavour was well-nigh impossible. Here, the tenacity and bravery of the human spirit are clear for all to see.
Meanwhile, the visitor centre enables groups such as our party, or individuals, to watch documentaries, films and survivor testimonies on screen. In particular, I found the learning centre challenging and enlightening, as it presents the opportunity to explore historical, thematic and moral dilemmas related to the Holocaust. For example, I understood how important family was to the Jewish community and how that often meant that Jewish families could not take flight, even when they knew that danger was imminent, because it would have meant leaving grandparents or other members of their family behind. Quite simply, they were not prepared to do that.
The group was also privileged to go behind the scenes to see how the centre gathers and forensically analyses historical artefacts using state-of-the-art technologies to decipher even minuscule and damaged material. Consequently, items that may seem to the casual observer to be meaningless scrap are recognised for their potential value in connecting an individual who perished in the Holocaust with their family, who might still not have any concrete proof of what happened to their loved one.
I recommend the programme to anyone in the Parliament who has the opportunity to take part, for it is imperative that we never forget the extensive atrocities that were committed by the Nazi regime. I commend the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust and its commitment to ensuring that we remember the horror of and learn from the Holocaust.
18:12
I, too, congratulate Stewart Maxwell on bringing the debate.
I cannot think of a more appropriate day than the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps to commemorate Holocaust memorial day. The attempted wiping out in Europe of not just Jews but others such as Sinti and Roma Gypsies has proved to be among the most shameful acts in modern times, if not in the history of mankind. If we think of the crimes against humanity in Cambodia, Srebrenica and Rwanda, it is almost as if the world has not listened to the warnings of the early part of the 20th century.
I fully commend and support the work that is carried out by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Holocaust Educational Trust. It is vital that younger generations are taught about the vile actions of the Nazis and their followers from the 1930s until 1945. I would like to think that the education of our younger people will enable them to identify the type of laws that can only lead to persecution of smaller groups. The Nazi Nuremberg laws are a good case in point.
I was born 14 years after the end of the second world war. I grew up in a Scotland in which we had only two or three television channels. That meant that we had no shortage of war films on BBC 1, BBC 2 and ITV; they gave me my childhood view of war. It was only later, when I reached my teens, in the 1970s, that I found out about the atrocities in the concentration camps and death camps that were organised by the Nazis, but there was a limit to what we knew or understood. Perhaps I got a bit more knowledgeable when I was doing my highers, but the atrocities took place way before my time.
The full impact of what happened hit me fairly recently, in the past five years, when I began visiting friends in Berlin. Initially, I accidentally came across places that would have held a great deal of fear for any Jews in the area all those years ago. We travelled on Berlin’s S-Bahn and stopped at Grunewald station in the west of the city. We looked around and saw tiled buildings that had obviously been through the war and had been kept. I was quite impressed by the sense of history in the architecture, given that 80 per cent of the city had been destroyed, and I pointed that out to my friends. They looked at me, pointed and said that it was where the Berlin Jews were told to report for what they thought was going to be a new life in the east.
The penny really dropped with me at that point. I can genuinely say that my heart sank. That was no grainy black-and-white television documentary or even a new colour film on the History Channel; that was living history. The sense of being on the site of the cattle trucks and the mass of people who were directed by SS guards, and the knowledge that most of those human beings will never have returned, had a profound effect.
On subsequent visits to the city, I found myself having similar feelings. I had similar feelings when I saw the inauspicious building that Adolf Eichmann used when he was planning the journeys of those poor souls, who were the victims of the final solution.
Why had I known about that period of history but not really felt it or understood it? Living history is about visiting, talking about what happened and really understanding why it happened.
Back in the mid-1980s, I attended a Bruce Springsteen concert in which he said in a preamble to a song:
“Blind faith in your leaders ... will get you killed.”
Perhaps the Jews, Sinti and Roma peoples did not sign up to Nazism, but many others did and millions paid the price. Seventy years ago is not that long ago, and genocide has happened since then. Evil has not gone away, but the world must do what it can to identify it and do something about it.
I support and commend the motion.
18:16
I thank Stewart Maxwell for again lodging a motion on Holocaust memorial day to be discussed in a members’ business debate. I also thank the many members who have taken part in the debate.
As we speak, from Shetland to the Borders, schools, colleges, universities, faith groups and communities are remembering this particularly significant Holocaust memorial day with candle-lighting ceremonies, memorial events, music, drama and poetry. I thank the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and Interfaith Scotland for their partnership in organising the commemorative programme of events this week. I also thank the Holocaust Educational Trust for placing the book of commitment in the Parliament this week and for the outstanding work that I know that it does.
In October 2011, I had the privilege of taking part in a schools’ visit to Auschwitz that was organised by the lessons from Auschwitz project, which is funded by the Scottish Government and run by the Holocaust Educational Trust. I will not readily forget that experience, and the many young people who were with me that day will not forget it either.
It has often been said that the only appropriate thing to say on visiting Auschwitz is nothing at all. Anything that we might offer to say would be inadequate. People are taken aback by different things. For some people, the most shocking thing about seeing Auschwitz-Birkenau is its sheer scale—it is the size of a small town. For some, the most shocking thing is trying to work out how the camp Kommandant, apparently cheerfully, had his wife and children living in a comfortable house on the site. For others, the most shocking things are the photographs of lost families, the house keys that had been left or the piles of shoes and hair. All that rehumanises what happened and makes sense—if that is possible—of vast numbers by focusing on individual victims.
The Scottish Government is pleased to have been able to fund those opportunities for senior pupils from Scottish schools for some six years now, since 2009. As a result, well over 2,000 school pupils have had the experience of visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau.
It is, of course, not only that experience that is so powerful; the lessons from Auschwitz programme supports young people to go on to become ambassadors for the project. The motion mentions two of those ambassadors: Lucy Paterson and Kieran Smyth from St Andrew’s RC secondary school in Glasgow. I understand that they led a very moving and eloquent time for reflection at the start of our meeting today.
Lucy, Kieran and other ambassadors can teach us about the vital importance of understanding and respecting different religions and beliefs and of understanding those who are of a different race or of a different sexual orientation, because the Holocaust teaches us, very disturbingly, about where intolerance of all kinds, and specifically—as Ken Macintosh and others pointed out—anti-Semitism, leads us all.
As we heard, the theme of this year’s Holocaust memorial day is “keep the memory alive”. Ela Weissberger, a Holocaust survivor, and Hasan Hasanovic, a Srebrenica survivor, are travelling throughout this week, sharing their testimonies with young people, community groups and others. Across Scotland, people young and old will be pledging to keep the memory alive, giving a voice to those whose voices were brutally silenced in genocides.
Tonight, in Ayr, the First Minister will join survivors, students, local and national politicians, communities and faith groups, including the Jewish community, at the national Holocaust memorial day event. Tomorrow, in Glasgow, about 400 primary 7 to secondary 6 pupils from across the city will be involved in their own pupil-led Holocaust memorial day event. Schools, colleges and universities will involve students, lecturers and communities in a variety of events including the sharing of stories and reflections. A University of the Highlands and Islands candle-lighting ceremony will take place through a live link-up across the university’s campuses, including those on the islands of Benbecula and Barra in my constituency.
All divisions of Police Scotland are marking Holocaust memorial day, and this morning Falkirk Council hosted an event that included a mix of song, film and poetry by local community groups, telling the stories of the Gypsy and Roma, religious, political and lesbian and gay communities’ experiences of the Holocaust.
On Thursday, the Parliament will host a reception for survivors and their families, including those who came to Glasgow as part of the Kindertransport. The reception will commemorate Holocaust memorial day and will also celebrate the enormous contribution that migrant communities have made over successive generations to make Scotland the successful and diverse country that it is today. That was mentioned by Jackson Carlaw in a very thoughtful speech.
Keeping the memory alive means not only learning about the Holocaust but learning from the Holocaust. It means learning the lessons of our past, and to do that we need to fully understand where intolerance and prejudice take us. We must never be complacent about intolerance and hatred. We must challenge and eradicate all forms of discrimination and prejudice wherever we can. As many have observed tonight, the recent tragic events in Paris should remind us all of the need for vigilance.
I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to this members’ business debate, in which members have reflected their personal commitment to education about and commemoration of the Holocaust and other genocides. As Mr Maxwell and Mr Gibson mentioned, there will come a time when there are no living witnesses to testify to these crimes, so we all have a responsibility to keep the memory alive and to continue to support the important, heartfelt, meaningful activities that we have seen throughout our country today.
Meeting closed at 18:23.Previous
Decision Time