The final item of business today is a members’ business debate on motion S4M-08600, in the name of Stewart Maxwell, on Holocaust memorial day 2014. The debate will be concluded without any question being put.
Motion debated,
That the Parliament notes that 27 January 2014 marks Holocaust Memorial Day, the 69th 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; further notes that the theme of Holocaust Memorial Day 2014 is “journeys”; 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 Ruth Laird and William Seaborne, two students from Queen Anne High School in Dunfermline, who took part in the project and who will deliver the Parliament’s Time for Reflection message on 21 January 2014; 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.
17:02
Yesterday marked the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the Nazi concentration camp that has come to symbolise the brutal state-sponsored persecution and mass murder of over 6 million Jewish men, women and children. The 27th of January has become the international day of commemoration of the victims of the Holocaust. Now in its 14th year, Holocaust memorial day gives us all an opportunity to pause and reflect on those atrocities, with commemoration events taking place in communities in Scotland and across the United Kingdom.
In East Renfrewshire tonight, the council is holding its annual Holocaust memorial day event at St Ninian’s high school. I represent East Renfrewshire as part of my West Scotland region, and it is also where I live with my family. Holocaust memorial day is always an important event in the area as it is home to Scotland’s largest Jewish community. This year, two senior pupils from each of East Renfrewshire’s seven secondary schools have been invited to talk about their experiences of the lessons from Auschwitz initiative. As members know, the lessons from Auschwitz project is organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust, with the support of the Scottish Government, to enable Scotland’s young people to gain first-hand knowledge of the horrors of the Holocaust.
I regret that I am not able to be at St Ninian’s this evening to hear the personal reflections of those young people on how their trip to Auschwitz has affected each of them. It is crucial that young people are given the chance to learn about the atrocities of the Holocaust to help them to understand the importance of standing up to senseless hatred and discrimination. Having spoken with some of the pupils who have taken part in the lessons from Auschwitz initiative, it is clear to me that it is a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will never be forgotten. It provides a vital link between the events of the past and the education of future generations.
Last week, we heard from William Seaborne and Ruth Laird, two pupils from Queen Anne high school in Dunfermline, who delivered time for reflection and told us about their experiences of visiting the former concentration camp. Ruth and William both provided moving accounts of the range of emotions that they felt whilst seeing at first hand the setting for one of the darkest moments in our history. They described it as an eye-opening experience, with the stories of those who lost their lives and those who managed to survive being both haunting and inspiring in equal measure.
We have come a long way in the 69 years since the liberation of Auschwitz, although subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur show that we must be resolute in our determination to challenge prejudice, hatred and intolerance.
The greatest weapon to protect against discrimination is education, which is why the work that the Holocaust Educational Trust does to preserve the lessons of the past is so valuable.
The theme of Holocaust memorial day this year is journeys. It offers a timely opportunity to pay tribute to the Holocaust survivors who managed to escape persecution and make new lives in Scotland. The date 9 November 2013 marked the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht, which is known as the night of broken glass, when the Nazis launched a series of co-ordinated attacks on Jewish people throughout Germany and Austria. Thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and places of worship were ransacked and burned to the ground.
Kristallnacht resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Jewish people during the attacks, and a further 30,000 Jews were forced from their homes and incarcerated at concentration camps. Many people consider it to mark the beginning of the Holocaust, and it led to the Kindertransport humanitarian rescue mission, which helped to save thousands of Jewish children from violent persecution.
It is estimated that more than 10,000 Jewish refugee children were separated from their parents and came to the UK as part of the Kindertransport initiative. Approximately 400 of those children came to live in Scotland. We can only imagine what it must have felt like for those children to say goodbye to their parents as they left for places unknown. It helped them to escape almost certain death, but many never saw their parents again.
A number of Kindertransport refugees stayed in Scotland to start families and make new lives for themselves, which greatly enriched our communities in the post-war years. When he was just 15, in 1939, Henry Wuga came to Scotland as a Kindertransport refugee from Nuremberg in Germany. I had the honour of hearing him speak during an event that the Association of Jewish Refugees held last year at Garnethill synagogue to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Kristallnacht.
Now aged 89, Mr Wuga lives in East Renfrewshire with his wife Ingrid, who is also a survivor of the Holocaust. They met each other at a refugee club on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow and they have lived in Scotland ever since arriving here. They are now proud grandparents with two daughters and four grandsons. Mr Wuga was awarded an MBE for his work to help ex-servicemen and women who have lost limbs or the use of their limbs in the line of duty. He and his wife are also well known locally for their dedication to voluntary work and charitable causes over the years.
Mr Wuga regularly visits schools to talk to pupils about Kindertransport and the traumatic and dangerous experiences of being a Jewish child living in Nazi Germany. His testimony is compelling and offers an invaluable insight into life as a Kindertransport refugee coming to Scotland during the second world war.
Most of the Kindertransport survivors are in their late 80s and 90s, and the sad fact is that this will be the last major anniversary that many can take part in. I have spoken previously about gathering the voices—an archive project that records the first-hand accounts of men and women who fled Nazi persecution to come to Scotland. Mr Wuga’s story is one of many that are available through the project, which ensures that his testimony and that of many others are preserved for future generations. I am proud to support the gathering the voices project and the work that it is doing to help to ensure that Holocaust survivors are remembered not just as victims but as people who were welcomed to our country and who contributed to making Scotland a better place to live in.
The atrocities of the Holocaust resulted in a loss of life that is almost too difficult to comprehend. It is right that we refuse to allow those deaths to be in vain. Holocaust memorial day allows us to remember those who lost their lives, but it also gives us the opportunity to celebrate those who bravely resisted the Nazis and survived.
It is a reminder that we all have a responsibility to stand up to prejudice, hatred and intolerance in our society. It is a reminder of the importance of doing all that we can to ensure that the lessons of the Holocaust are never forgotten.
17:09
I thank Stewart Maxwell for bringing forward the debate and recognising in his motion the excellent and moving contribution from Ruth Laird and William Seaborne of Queen Anne high school at time for reflection last week.
Each year, we stop—for perhaps too short a moment—to reflect on the horrors of the Holocaust and on the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We think of all those who perished—the Roma, the gays, the mentally and physically disabled and the Jews. Ruth Laird and William Seaborne spoke about one individual, Kitty Hart-Moxon, who 70 years ago endured two years in Auschwitz and survived the death march through the Sudeten mountains. She survived the Lublin ghetto and the Salzwedel concentration camp and now, aged 88, she continues to make it her life’s work to tell the story of that period and to remind us all of a time that we must never forget. Her story is one of the many journeys recorded by the Holocaust Educational Trust whose work, along with that of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, is so vital in ensuring that we all know the true horror of that time and of the genocides since.
The human failings that led to the Holocaust are not limited to the past. In the past couple of weeks I have been struck by a couple of French words or phrases which have come to my attention. The first is “coup de blues”, which is a typically attractive French expression that is used to describe the very unattractive depression, or blues, that left France’s first lady in hospital.
The second is the downright dangerous “Ia quenelle”, which is the repressed or suppressed Nazi salute that Nicolas Anelka recently used to celebrate scoring a goal in a football match. For those who are not familiar with it, the best description I have seen of la quenelle compares it to the way Peter Sellers uses his left arm to prevent his right arm from doing a Nazi salute in “Dr Strangelove”. The footballer denies any racist intent, but there is no doubting the link in many people’s minds between the quenelle gesture and anti-Semitism.
I find it deeply worrying that in modern-day Europe people are prepared to be photographed pulling la quenelle in front of synagogues or former concentration camps. It is too easy for us to blame our woes on others and otherness—on immigrants from eastern Europe, on Muslims or on Jews.
I was shocked—as I know other members were—by the recent poll that found that 80 per cent of young people and half of all adults cannot name a single genocide that has taken place since the Holocaust. A third of all adults could not even provide a definition of genocide. That survey and the gestures that I have mentioned show why it is so important that we continue to mark Holocaust memorial day—because the lessons from that time remain as relevant today as ever.
The theme for this year’s Holocaust memorial day is journeys, such as the journeys into the ghettos, the Kindertransport—excellently presented in Glasgow central station recently—the reunions in the years after the war and the audacious escapes by people such as Jack Kagan in Poland. There are journeys today too. Thousands are fleeing violence in Syria, Congo, Sudan and the Central African Republic.
I thank all the members who have taken the time to sign the book of commitment from the Holocaust Educational Trust, pledging ourselves to recognise the humanity that is scarred by racism and remembering the sacrifices of those who preceded us. For those who have yet to sign, the book is still available in my office and will be there all week. I am privileged to be able to support the motion that is before the Parliament.
17:12
I congratulate Stewart Maxwell on securing the debate and on the excellence of his opening speech.
The Holocaust or Shoah was specifically a Jewish experience and the full weight of Nazi terror was directed against the Jewish people. Last year, I read two books on the Jewish communities of Europe before the Holocaust: “On The Eve: The Jews of Europe before the Second World War” by Bernard Wasserstein, and “Yiddish Civilisation: The Rise and Fall of a Forgotten Nation” by Paul Kriwaczek.
“On The Eve” details the increasing sense of foreboding and impending catastrophe among many of Europe’s Jewish communities in the late 1930s, caused by not just the rise of Hitler but a growing and almost endemic anti-Semitism across much of Europe, and feelings of claustrophobia, as Jewish people seeking physical security, let alone a better life, often had nowhere to go.
Countries across the world, including the United States and the UK, severely restricted Jewish immigration, while France and the Netherlands set up internment camps for Jews who were escaping from Germany. As portrayed in the 1976 film, “Voyage of the Damned”, in 1939 the SS St Louis carried 937 Jewish refugees from Hamburg to Cuba, which refused to take any, as did the US. Eventually a few nations, including the UK, took several hundred refugees. The rest returned to Hamburg and 254 later perished in the Holocaust.
After Kristallnacht, in the months before the commencement of hostilities, the UK did allow 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children to come to the UK in what was known as the Kindertransport, which has already been mentioned. Most of those children became orphans when the parents they had to leave behind were murdered by the Nazis.
The book “Yiddish Civilisation” explores the incredible religious, cultural and political diversity of the Jewish people—a people that has lasted for centuries and once numbered some 10 million. The Holocaust, assimilation, emigration and decades of Communist repression led to Yiddish becoming very much a minority language, although the culture lives on and is undergoing something of a revival.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest concentration camp in Europe—this death camp held more than 90,000 prisoners at any one time. Between 1.1 million and 1.6 million people are estimated to have been exterminated at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the war. Ninety per cent of those people were of Jewish descent. The remaining 10 per cent who were murdered there were Gypsies, Soviet prisoners of war, the disabled, Polish patriots and those who acted against the Nazi regime.
Auschwitz is the most notorious Nazi death camp but, ironically, that is probably because there were about 7,000 survivors who lived to tell the tale. A further 1.8 million Jewish men, women and children were exterminated in camps such as Belzec, Chelmno and Treblinka, where a total of only 42 people are known to have survived. One of the two survivors of Belzec, out of at least 434,000 people who were sent there, was Chaim Hirszman, who was murdered the year after the war ended by anti-Semitic Poles.
A further 3 million Jewish people were starved, beaten, shot or worked to death in labour camps and in ghettos or killed in huge forest massacres such as Babi Yar in Ukraine, Ponary in Lithuania and Maly Trostenets in Belarus. Often, local collaborators aided those killings, enriching themselves in the process.
There were many individual tragedies. For example, on 24 February 1942, the MV Struma, which was carrying 791 Jewish refugees and crew, was refused access to Palestine by the British and was then sunk by a Soviet submarine. All but one person aboard the MV Struma died.
We should remember that there were many Jewish people who were heroic not only in resisting the Nazis—such as the Bielski brothers—but in fighting to save their families. Indeed, the many Gentiles who assisted them were heroic too. However, we should also realise that the Holocaust never left many of the people who suffered from it. After the writer Primo Levi threw himself to his death in 1987, Elie Wiesel commented:
“Primo Levi died at Auschwitz forty years earlier”.
Richard Glazar, the architect who survived Treblinka, was one of many others who killed himself, so the Holocaust never left people.
We must recognise those who suffered through the Holocaust yet live on as witnesses to the atrocities that occurred throughout Europe. Their persecution teaches us the horrifying consequences of unimpeded racism, hatred and bigotry. Holocaust memorial day is a call to the people of Scotland to stand against prejudice and intolerance every day. As Robert Burns opined,
“Man’s inhumanity to Man
Makes countless thousands mourn!”
We must try to make the world a better place. Holocaust memorial day reminds us of the consequences of not so doing.
17:17
I have spoken before of my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau in 2009, as other members have spoken of their visits over the years. At the time of my visit, a debate had begun—one that was touched with obvious controversy—on the future conservation of the Nazi concentration and death camp. Just as the shadows lengthen and the people who have first-hand recollections of what was suffered and—by a few—endured there, pass into history, so too have the buildings that constitute the camp begun rapidly to disintegrate.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, along with Dachau, Theresienstadt and a handful of other camps—several dozen—remain. For 70 years, they have served not just as a testament to what was done, but often as painful but necessary destinations to visit, for those who survived to remember those who did not survive, and for the families of those who survived to bear witness and—in some all too painful cases—to speak words of farewell at the location of their forebears’ darkest hours. Other camps—for, example, Sobibor and Treblinka—exist no more, because they were ruthlessly demolished and concealed at a point in the rout of Nazi Germany when the retreat of Hitler’s armies was not yet confused or panicked.
Many in Parliament have borne witness to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the striking and harrowing images, remnants and sense of evil that emanate from that place. More than 1 million people died—were murdered—there. Today, the annual number of visitors exceeds that figure, and the infrastructure is crumbling. Since my visit in 2009, the number of buildings that are open to the public has been further restricted, and anyone with an eye for these things can see that it will soon not be safe for any of the buildings to be available to those visiting.
The discussion over what to do has been resolved in favour of restoration. That decision cannot have been easy. With the Polish Government appealing for $150 million to preserve something so ghastly, it is a thought that, however correct it is, must have troubled the soul. On balance, however, it is the right decision. Germany has pledged $80 million, the United States has pledged $15 million and Poland has pledged $13 million. At least 23 other countries, including the United Kingdom, have pledged considerable sums, in addition to those.
Work has begun. By last summer, only three of the 45 brick barracks could be entered safely, and an immediate restoration of the others is under way at a cost of $1 million per barrack, each barrack having housed 700 victims at a time. The ruins of the gas chambers, which were sinking significantly, have now had their foundations underpinned.
The hundreds of thousands of personal effects, many of which have lain untouched since being collected and displayed decades ago, are receiving individual attention. For example, each of the 100,000 shoes that were left behind at the war’s end takes some two hours of careful cleaning and, even now, there has been the heart-stopping revelation of a note from history—the testimony of one desperate individual, that had been tucked into the sole of a shoe, being discovered seven decades after the liberation, and brought to public light.
I say with a heavy heart that it is the right decision. That is not because I believe any longer that the history of Nazi Germany and its genocidal extermination of 6 million Jews across Europe can or will be forgotten; it is more because Auschwitz remains as a grotesque physical representation of what evil is capable of. It has to be seen to be believed in its scale and, uncomfortably, in its proximity to the normal life of those who lived adjacent to it and carried on in ignorance or fear of—or complicity in—what was happening on the other side of the perimeter wall. It has evolved into a place of education and, in the darkest sense, of memorial. However, it must surely be an exception, if not the only one.
I can find far less excuse or rationalised argument for the debate arising from the gruesome find in the Bavarian national museum in Munich of a Nazi guillotine that was used to behead one of Hitler’s youngest and bravest opponents, Sophie Scholl, her brother Hans and other members of the White Rose group in 1943. Perhaps 1,500 others were also executed by that vile instrument. The options that are under consideration appear to be to hide it away or to put it on display. Franz Josef Müller, who at 89 is the last surviving member of the White Rose group, has argued that
“no entertainment should be made of their violent deaths”.
Surely he is right. What, other than a puerile sense of the macabre, will draw people to a museum that is exhibiting a guillotine—the blade and apparatus of which dispatched so many to their deaths? There is a sharp distinction between the restoration of Auschwitz-Birkenau—which is being undertaken with the support of the international community—and the tawdry lust for a good turnout at a local town museum, however well intentioned the exhibition’s aims.
All those who died defenceless and without compassion or reason at the hands of the Nazis deserve to be honoured and remembered in perpetuity. Official memorials where tributes can be paid, sites of historical significance, or much more personal tributes, are appropriate. However, as I said when I began my remarks, as the shadows lengthen, let us resist and argue against theatre and entertainment being made inappropriately or unintentionally. Instead of hiding away that guillotine or displaying it, let it be destroyed.
Stewart Maxwell’s motion, on which I, too, congratulate him, invites us to celebrate
“the Holocaust survivors who have enriched Scotland as a nation”,
and recommits us
“to ensuring that racism, sectarianism and bigotry are never allowed to go unchallenged in Scotland.”
Let us do that with respect, humility and determination.
17:23
I, too, congratulate Stewart Maxwell on securing this important debate and on the excellence of his speech. Indeed, all the speeches that have gone before mine have been excellent.
The stigmatisation of the Jews did not, of course, begin with the rise of Hitler. For many centuries, the Jews of Europe were marginalised, persecuted and called names. Ultimately, that is what led to their being slaughtered at a rate of 9,000 a day in the Nazi death factories. It is therefore our duty as European citizens to ensure that we fight anti-Semitism as a particular type of racism that is deeply embedded in our shared history. I am pleased to say that its influence has been waning for many years, but we must not become complacent and we must always be ready to root out this evil, which is Europe’s great historical shame. For that reason, I endorse the concerns that Ken Macintosh expressed about anti-Semitism raising its head in our national game of football.
Our Jewish community in Scotland is small, but it will always remain an important part of our country’s rich tapestry. One of the most notable members of the community was a man whom I particularly admired: the late Professor David Daiches of Edinburgh, the son of a Lithuanian-born rabbi. His father believed that there was a strong mutual respect between Jews and Scottish Presbyterians, both of whom revered the Old Testament. He also noted that Scotland was one of the few countries in medieval Europe that never drafted a state law persecuting Jews.
It is important that we continue to make no distinction between people on the grounds of their religion, culture, colour or ethnicity. It is significant that the Declaration of Arbroath, which tends to be remembered for other reasons, also has a little-remembered passage in which it notes that God makes no distinction between
“Jew and Greek, Scotsman or Englishman”.
There is never room for complacency and, in recent years, small far-right groups have made attempts to demonise other religions in the same way that Judaism has been demonised. We must all stand up against that, so I am pleased that every party that is represented in the chamber has done so.
With that in mind, I will use the debate to commemorate some of those who stood up against the evil of the Holocaust. Some of them were household names, such as Oskar Schindler, but others are less well known, although their bravery is equally deserving of commemoration.
Although Oskar Schindler survived the war, many righteous Gentiles paid the ultimate price. One such individual was Jane Haining, who was a Scot from Dumfriesshire in the South Scotland region that I represent. Born in 1897 in Lochenhead farm, Dunscore, she became a carer at a young age when her mother died in childbirth, leaving seven children. After excelling academically at Dumfries academy, Jane worked as a secretary in Glasgow and for the church. Her church work and love of children took her to Budapest in Hungary in 1932, when she became matron of a school and home for orphaned Jewish girls aged 6 to 16. There were 315 students in her charge, 48 of them boarders.
When war broke out, the Church of Scotland advised its missionaries to leave Hungary, but Jane declined. She had heard stories of Nazi brutality towards Jewish people and wrote to a friend:
“If these children need me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness?”
Jane worked on despite police surveillance and with little food and resources. She made trips to the market at 5 am to find food for her girls and patched up her students’ worn-out shoes with her own leather suitcases.
In March 1944, German troops overthrew the pro-Nazi Government in Hungary and, in April that year, Jane was arrested by the Gestapo. She was accused of working among the Jews and showing sympathy for the children by crying when they were forced to wear the star of David.
Jane was sent to Auschwitz and never returned. She was dead within three months—August 1944—and one of the most shocking things that reading about her death brought home to me is that, during the three months for which she was in Auschwitz, 1.3 million people died in the camp with her. Jane was one of millions, but every one of those millions who were murdered was a unique human being.
Many more Jewish Scots have relatives who were murdered and many more are themselves descended from Holocaust refugees. Other members mentioned the Kindertransport initiative in which young Jewish children were evacuated from occupied Europe after Kristallnacht. One of my most moving experiences as a journalist was writing an anniversary piece about the Kindertransport about 20 years ago. I interviewed a lady in Lanarkshire who had come to Scotland as a very young child—perhaps five or six. By that time, she was an elderly lady with a Scottish husband and several children and grandchildren. She began to describe her memories of Kristallnacht and, as a five-year-old, of witnessing a group of Nazi soldiers surround an old Jewish man. They taunted him and she described how they took out a lighter and set his beard on fire.
Telling the story all those years later, that elderly lady became completely traumatised and we had to end the interview. The scars had remained with her all her life. That is why we should not cover up the scar that the Holocaust left on Europe and the lives that it snuffed out with such brutality.
I will finish with the words of the late Ernest Levy, one of Scotland’s leading Jewish citizens who, like Jane Haining, was taken from Budapest to Auschwitz. He explained why he wrote of his dreadful experiences:
“We are trying to tell the world so this cannot happen again and we have learned a lot, although many have still not learned from the past”.
17:29
I thank Stewart Maxwell for securing this historic debate on Holocaust memorial day.
Despite all the recorded history, there are still a few people who question whether the Holocaust took place. That, in itself, is quite horrible to me. I have seen films and documentaries and read books on the subject. As a child, I used to wonder how human beings could treat other human beings in such a way. I could never understand it, and I still do not understand it, despite the fact that I am a part of a minority community and have had a slight glimpse of what can happen when things go wrong. I have seen the heart of Europe being torn apart, and genocide taking place in the modern world. It is, therefore, not very difficult to understand and believe what happened in relation to the genocides that took place—the horror, the suffering, the pain, the inhumanity to humans. I have to say that I am still moved, to this day, when I think about the difficulties and the hardships that people went through. I was particularly moved when I saw films that showed the effects on young children. I am sure that those children carried the scars all their lives and that it was difficult and challenging for them to live fruitful and meaningful lives after those experiences.
It is shameful that, despite the experiences that we have seen, people still continue to hurt one another. I still do not understand why it happens. Kenneth Macintosh is right to point to the horrors that happen in Africa and other parts of the world today. I always ask myself why we are not learning the lessons and why these things are still going on. The United Nations does its best, under difficult circumstances. There is a lot going on in international politics. However, what happened in the Holocaust was beyond what is happening in the world today. It is very important that we never allow ourselves and other people to forget that, if we allow hatred to perpetuate, it can go to that extreme. That is something that I have always carried in my heart. I will always be a witness and I will always remind others of the slippery slope that people can allow themselves to go down. Hatred and the horror of continuous barbarity towards human beings need to be challenged at all times.
My friends, Judith Tankel and Henry Tankel, were my heroes. They were an example of a Jewish family who worked in the community tirelessly, and I turned to them on many occasions for advice and guidance. Their loss will always be a loss to me and to the community.
Today, I want to say that we should always remember our past and guard against repeating it in the future, to ensure that we do not allow human beings again to go down the route that they did at that time.
All that I want to add to the fine words that people have spoken today is that we should always stand up and be counted and always remind people of the horrors that took place, so that we do not allow them to be repeated.
17:34
I also congratulate Stewart Maxwell on securing the debate. I join others in recognising Holocaust memorial day and the 69th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.
My family, of course, was fortunate enough not to experience the trauma of the Holocaust, and I am grateful for that. However, it is at this time that we honour and remember the 6 million men, women and children who were less fortunate than ourselves and paid the price of Nazi oppression.
Ken Gibson mentioned some people affected beyond the Jews—the Gypsies and the disabled—but there were also mentally ill or mentally disabled people, and gays. A wide range of people in that last 10 per cent suffered the ultimate fate of the hatred that the Nazis had for them.
The Holocaust has touched Scotland in many ways, and it continues to have a lasting impact on our young people. Last week, Ruth Laird and William Seaborne spoke to Parliament, and that was an appropriate thing for them to do. They come from Queen Anne high school, where my mother taught 80-plus years ago. I am sure that she would have very much admired the spirit in which they spoke to Parliament. They tried to put themselves in others’ shoes and to live some of the experience of people in the concentration camp. William spoke of his great uncle, who was a survivor. He had never met him, but that is an important link to the past for youngsters today.
I read my first political book, a biography of Lloyd George, when I was seven. On the back of that and having watched “The Brains Trust” on the BBC on a Sunday afternoon—Jakob Bronowski used to refer, in that forum, to his family’s experience at Auschwitz—I thought that I should try and read some of the political books that had affected the 20th century. I started with “Das Kapital”—in English, I hasten to add—which I found very difficult to read. I got “Mein Kampf” from the library and managed to read three chapters, before my utter disgust at its content—it got worse as it went on—made it unreadable for me. My sensibilities found it intolerable.
Jakob Bronowski was a very intellectual man, and covered a wide range of different subjects. He came to these islands in the 1920s and was not personally involved in the Holocaust, but many of his relatives were. When he recorded “The Ascent of Man”, a great history of the human race from its origins to its present situation, he visited Auschwitz. One of the most moving things that I have ever seen on television was Jakob Bronowski at the camp, speaking off the cuff. He did not use a script in the series at all, and wrote the book afterwards, based on what he had said. He looked at the camera, and said nothing. He stooped down, put his hand in a puddle and lifted up some mud. He looked at the mud in his hand and said, “This is my family.” That is the most moving thing that I have ever seen on television. It resonates with me to this day.
Something else that means something to me involves a survivor of the concentration camps—a Russian Jew who left Russia at the time of the revolution because he had criticised the new regime. He came to Germany for safety, ironically, and then criticised the Nazis and got put in a concentration camp. That was Jakow Trachtenberg. To keep himself sane, he used his time in the concentration camp to develop new mathematical algorithms for training young people how to do arithmetic—some good has come.
We must protect the memory of the evil that happened in the Holocaust. The end of the motion before us talks about
“the Holocaust survivors who have enriched Scotland as a nation”,
and recommitting the Parliament
“to ensuring that racism, sectarianism and bigotry are never allowed to go unchallenged in Scotland.”
I look forward to hearing what the minister has to say—I am sure that it will be of interest.
17:39
I, too, offer my congratulations to Stewart Maxwell on securing the debate, and to all members who have participated. Clearly, this is a subject that unites all the members in the chamber and makes them think about the issues that it presents.
The theme of today’s Holocaust memorial day is journeys. There is a sense in which we all talk about the journey of understanding that we have been on to understand the sheer scale, size and horror of the Holocaust. Mr Malik referred to that, and to the way in which it is difficult for the mind to grasp that horror.
Journeys have other meanings, too. There is the other journey of genocide, which is represented by the end of the track at Birkenau. I was there this year; I will talk about that in a moment. At the end of the track there were two enormous gas chambers and one individual who, as people came out of the carts in which they had travelled across Europe, chose who lived and who died. That was the journey of genocide. It is an extraordinary fact that the vast majority of people who arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau were dead within two hours. It was a real Holocaust—an enormous death, which took place almost instantly.
Journeys can be journeys of survival and hope. Some people, although very few, escaped from the camp and some, although very few, survived. Some escaped mentally by writing about what they saw and what they heard while in the camp, even though the penalty for the possession of writing instruments was death.
Journeys of survival have been referred to, such as the Kindertransport, whereby 10,000 mainly Jewish children were offered a new life in a new country. About 400 of them settled in Scotland, many in Glasgow, and helped make this country the diverse and inclusive country that we have today.
Last October I went to Auschwitz with the lessons from Auschwitz project, which is organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust and part funded by the Scottish Government. Every year the Scottish Government helps hundreds of secondary 5 and secondary 6 pupils make that journey and it supports them to go on to be ambassadors for the project, teaching others about the importance of understanding and of never forgetting.
Visiting Auschwitz is something that I wanted to do and which I am glad that I have done, but I did not aspire to do it. Those who have been there will recognise what I mean; it is an absolutely overwhelming experience. The details and images of the visit will stay with me forever.
Different aspects of the visit moved different people. For some it was the poignancy of photographs of loved ones—there are big displays of photographs of individuals who died there. For others it was the things like the piles of shoes, which were mentioned, or the two places in Auschwitz where one is not allowed to take photographs—one is the gas chamber at the original Auschwitz camp and the other is a room that displays human hair in a glass case right along the length of the room. All that human hair came from individuals who died in the gas chambers and it then went to stuff mattresses, which became a commodity.
For me, it was the symbols of journeys that were perhaps the most touching. When one thinks for a moment what people expected when they went on the journey to a concentration camp and then sees what they took with them, it is staggering. People had their house keys in their pockets, which were taken away from them. People who left their homes locked their doors, expecting to return home.
There is a room there that has suitcases and bags along one wall. Many members know that I post a photograph every day of something that I see on a website called blipfoto. My photograph on 30 October last year was of that display of suitcases. In the middle there was a suitcase with a name on it—a number of the suitcases had names on them. The name was Raphaela Sara Tausik. That suitcase represented her personal journey from Vienna. She had a suitcase full of her possessions and her clothes and it had her name on it. She thought that she was being relocated. She thought she might go home, but she ended up on the railway tracks at Birkenau; she ended up in the gas chambers.
The guides and members of the Holocaust Educational Trust who take people round seek constantly to rehumanise what happens. That is why I mentioned her name. I will mention it again: Raphaela Sara Tausik. I have never seen her photograph. She is on the major database, but I do not know what she looked like. We should think of her as an individual with a full, rich, detailed life—a woman who thought that she was carrying on with her life but whose life ended suddenly and arbitrarily in great distress.
Those young people who take part in the Holocaust Educational Trust trips become ambassadors. Yesterday I was with two of them in Tarbert academy in my constituency: Rose Richmond and Hannah Prill. I went because they were holding an assembly and they had created an artwork of handprints. I went to add my handprint to the canvas, which says, “When we understand where prejudice leads, we can stop it in its tracks.”
That takes me back to those railway tracks. If we understand where prejudice leads, we can understand that even the smallest prejudice can grow beyond all expectations and lead to death and disaster. It leads, ultimately, to Auschwitz. It also leads to the end of those tracks and to the most memorable thing about the visit that I paid. At the end of a long, cold October day at the site—it is enormous; the size really strikes one initially—it became very dark. Our whole group stood where the railway tracks finish, between the two enormous gas chambers. We all lit a small candle, and Rabbi Andrew Shaw, from a synagogue in the south of England, led a small service. He told his personal story, which was astonishing.
Rabbi Shaw’s grandfather and grandmother were married in Vienna in 1939. They were told that their future was very doubtful, and indeed, within a fortnight of being married his grandfather was arrested and taken away. A neighbour—a young woman—said to his grandmother, “If you stay you will die. I have a ticket and a visa to go somewhere. Take it. Go.” His grandmother did that, and the place to which she went, which she had never heard of, was Glasgow. She had only just arrived when she fell ill, and while she was in hospital she discovered that she was pregnant. She knew nothing about what had happened to her husband, although she wrote to him every week, telling him how she was doing and telling him that she had given birth. At the end of the war, it transpired that he had died within a fortnight of arriving in Germany.
She felt, and said to her children and grandchildren, that the real issues that came out of Auschwitz were not evil and prejudice but pride and hope. There is pride that survival took place. Despite the worst that anyone could imagine, the Jewish nation survived. Jews continued; Roma continued; life continued. And there is still hope, despite the worst that human beings can do to other human beings.
Those were the odd things that I learned at Auschwitz. As we walked away, leaving our candles on the railway tracks, and walked towards the light and back into the world, we thought about the Holocaust not with despair—certainly with anguish, but not with despair—but with pride in the survival of the human race and with hope for our future. Even the great evils of the Holocaust and the continuing genocide to which Mr Macintosh referred do not extinguish humanity.
If we take that message every single Holocaust memorial day, and if we continue on our journey to eliminate prejudice, we will be doing the right thing, whereby we can build a better world.
Meeting closed at 17:48.Previous
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