Meeting of the Parliament

Meeting date: Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Official Report 905KB pdf

Time for Reflection

Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leaders are Ben Petrie and Catherine Bough from the Royal high school in Edinburgh.

Good afternoon. Thank you for welcoming us today. We are Catherine and Ben from the Royal high school.

Last year we took part in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s lessons from Auschwitz project with 200 students from across Scotland. As part of the project we visited Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.1 million Jews were murdered.

I still struggle to put into words my feelings from that visit. We saw children’s shoes and a jumble of prosthetic limbs, taken from the most vulnerable upon their arrival at the camp, and the small concrete path alongside the tracks, marking the spot where families were torn apart.

At the end of the day, we gathered at the end of those tracks. Rabbi Garson, who had been with us all day, led a commemorative service, at which he sang a Jewish prayer for the dead. Here was a Jewish Rabbi singing in Hebrew in a place where more than 1 million of his people had been murdered. I felt so empowered by the beauty of his ultimate act of defiance. It felt like a statement to say that there are still Jewish communities in Europe and that we should remember them. Our final action that day was each to light a candle to commemorate those whose lives were lost. It was beautiful.

One of the main things that I took from the visit was the importance of not viewing the perpetrators simply as monsters. What the Nazis did was incomprehensible in many ways, but we must remember that the Holocaust was committed by ordinary people. Failing to acknowledge their humanity is too easy. The perpetrators had the power to choose.

This year’s theme for Holocaust memorial day is the power of words. Today I ask everyone to consider what happens when we stand by, not using our words, and when we do not call out anti-Semitism, racism and hatred. I have learned about the Holocaust and what happened when people failed to use their voice. When people stay silent, hate can flourish.

We have had a unique opportunity through the lessons from Auschwitz project and, in turn, we have had our perspective changed forever. As Holocaust survivors become less able to share their testimony, it is the duty of the trust’s ambassadors around Scotland to ensure that the Holocaust is remembered and to spread the invaluable lessons that we have learned. If we can encourage people to speak out, perhaps we will see a future where anti-Semitism and prejudice will never again lead to such atrocities.