Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Official Report 898KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business this afternoon is time for reflection. Our leader today is Dr Maureen Sier, the director of Interfaith Scotland.

Presiding Officer and members of the Scottish Parliament, thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today on behalf of Interfaith Scotland and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust.

Today is 17 January. It was on 17 January 1945 that SS units began the final evacuation of prisoners from Auschwitz and marched them on foot away from the camps. Those death marches caused thousands to perish. SS guards shot anyone who fell behind. Prisoners suffered from starvation and exposure. It is hard for us to imagine what was endured in the depth of winter 72 years ago today.

Next week, Scotland will remember the Holocaust and subsequent genocides. Saskia Tepe, who is the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, and Umutesi Stuart, who is a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, will speak at the national memorial event in Bishopbriggs academy. The theme this year is “How can life go on?” Survivors must ask themselves that question. It is a question that we in Scotland must also ask ourselves when we consider the asylum seekers who arrive in our country. Many have already suffered war, deprivation and trauma. Just how can life go on when any sense of normality is removed?

The Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel said:

“For the survivor death is not the problem. Death was an everyday occurrence. We learned to live with Death. The problem is to adjust to life, to living.”

I have often thought how difficult it must be to adjust to life after devastating trauma. My mother-in-law struggled to adjust to life after being sent on the Kindertransport to the United Kingdom and then learning that her parents had been killed in Hitler’s gas chambers. Later, unable to adjust to family life, she walked out on her children while they were still infants. It was only at her funeral 12 years later that the children learned that they were Jewish. Living on can be a struggle that impacts on future generations.

What does this mean for all of us? How do we help individuals, families and communities to live on in the aftermath of terror and displacement?

Scotland is home to many who are living on away from their homeland. Sometimes they face discrimination, and they always live with memories and loss. It is easy for us to feel overwhelmed by the magnitude of suffering and become paralysed by it, but I have read stories of how small acts of kindness during the Holocaust gave people the will to live on, and I have witnessed asylum seekers weep at a kindly gesture. Never underestimate the power of simply being kind.

I will end with a poem by Naomi Nye that has been adapted.

“Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness
you must travel where”

the refugee

“lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing ...
you must know sorrow ...
Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
only kindness that ties your shoes
and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread,
only kindness that raises its head
from the crowd of the world to say
It is I you have been looking for,
and then goes with you everywhere
like a shadow or a friend.”

Before we move to the next item of business, members will wish to join me in welcoming to the gallery the Rt Hon David Carter MP, Speaker of the New Zealand House of Representatives. [Applause.]