Hansard

Many members have rightly said that it is a privilege to speak in this debate, but if I may say to Mr Johnson, it is a particular privilege to follow his speech, which was courageous, brave and right.

At time for reflection today, Stephen Stone, from St Roch’s Secondary School in my city, Glasgow, talked eloquently about Holocaust teaching and education in contemporary Scottish schools. I will return to that at the end of my speech, but I will open with some reflections on my time in school in England in the 1980s. I went to an ordinary state comprehensive school in Dorset, which was at that time led by an extraordinary teacher, whose name was John Webster. At my school, history was compulsory for all students, alongside maths and English. We knew that that was unusual; we did not know why history was compulsory in our school, but we knew it had something to do with Mr Webster, the headteacher. It was only when I read his obituaries, about three years ago, that I began to understand why.

In 1945, on His Majesty’s service, my headteacher Mr Webster was a young man in uniform at the end of a long war, like those young men who Edward Mountain described a few moments ago. He was one of the very first allied soldiers to walk into the death camp that his unit had discovered. He saw with his own eyes the horrors that we all think we understand. He resolved, there and then, that he would do all that he could to ensure that those he met thereafter would never forget.

At school, I was blessed with remarkable and brilliant history teachers, whose work was placed front and centre in our curriculum for reasons I never understood as a child, but for which I will always be grateful.

I have used this quotation before, but I make no apology for repeating it:

“With the absurd precision to which we later had to accustom ourselves, the Germans held the roll-call. At the end the officer asked ‘Wieviel Stück?’ ... The corporal saluted smartly and replied that there were six hundred and fifty ‘pieces’ and that all was in order. They then loaded us on to the buses and took us to the station ... Here the train was waiting for us ... Here we received the first blows: and it was so new and senseless that we felt no pain, neither in body nor in spirit. Only a profound amazement: how can one hit a man without anger?

There were twelve goods wagons for six hundred and fifty men; in mine we were only forty-five, but it was a small wagon. Here then, before our very eyes, under our very feet, was one of those notorious transport trains, those which never return, and of which, shuddering and always a little incredulous, we had so often heard speak. Exactly like this, detail for detail: goods wagons closed from the outside, with men, women and children pressed together without pity, like cheap merchandise, for a journey towards nothingness, a journey down there, towards the bottom. This time it is us who are inside.”

Those words are from the opening chapter of Primo Levi’s autobiographical account of the Holocaust, “If This Is A Man”. In the middle of that passage Primo Levi asks a hauntingly simple question:

“how can one hit a man without anger?”

The Holocaust happened because, not very long ago, in the heart of Europe, it was the policy of the Government of what had been a leading European civilisation to eliminate the Jewish people from the face of the earth. The Nazis were not angry with the Jews: the brutality, the beatings, the murder and the killing did not happen because anyone had cause to be angry; they happened because of cold, calculated hatred—“baseless hatred”, as Bill Kidd called it a few moments ago.

That is what must be remembered. That is what my headteacher, Mr Webster, wanted us to learn through the study of history: that hatred is such a venal emotion that it can cause, as Alex Cole-Hamilton reflected, perfectly ordinary people to commit vast and extraordinary crimes on an industrial scale. The cabinet secretary reflected on that in her opening remarks, saying that we are “not born to hate”. Hatred is something that we learn, and we—all of us here now—cannot be complacent and must have the courage, as Mr Johnson has shown, to call out hatred and prejudice wherever we see it, because, as the cabinet secretary said:

“peace, progress and tolerance cannot be taken for granted”—

not here; not now; not anywhere.

Those who were sent to the death camps lost their possessions, their loved ones, their family members, their clothes, their shoes—even their hair. They were deformed by starvation. They were enslaved in hard labour. They were tattooed with a number. They lost their names, their identities. They were stripped naked in the snow and ice with nothing but their own arms to warm them, alone in huge numbers. This was mass, systematic, organised murder on an unprecedented scale. At Auschwitz, about which we have heard so much today, in August 1944, 24,000 people were murdered in a single day, and those people were not prisoners of war. The war had nothing to do with it. They were just people whom a Government wanted to annihilate because that Government hated Jews.

I have never been to Auschwitz, but I have been to Yad Vashem, which is Israel’s Holocaust museum on the western slopes of Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. “Yad Vashem” is a phrase taken from the book of Isaiah; it means “a place and a name”. It is a place of remembrance where the names of those who were murdered by the Nazis are recorded and where their memories are honoured. It is at once a place of calm dignity—which Ruth Davidson spoke about—and outraged defiance.

I have not been to Auschwitz because one day, when they are old enough, I am going to take my children there. My children are Jewish. They have all attended, and two of them still are attending, Scotland’s only Jewish primary school: the superb Calderwood Lodge, which now shares a campus with a Roman Catholic school. We think that it might be the only joint Jewish-Catholic primary school campus in the world. It is a very special place. Like St Roch’s in Glasgow, about which we heard at time for reflection, Calderwood Lodge takes Holocaust teaching seriously. Every year, primary 7 pupils from Calderwood Lodge go to Amsterdam for a few days, where they visit the Anne Frank museum and learn at first hand at the feet of Holocaust survivors.

No matter how much you think you know about the Holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people, you realise within a few minutes of being at a place such as Auschwitz or Yad Vashem that you will only ever be able to scratch the surface of the unimaginable pain that it caused. Of course, the resolution that burns throughout all of us as we walk through those places, as we bear witness, as we think and reflect, is: never again. As you leave Yad Vashem, you see carved into a huge stone archway the words of Ezekiel chapter 37, verse 14:

“I will put my breath into you and you shall live again, and I will set you upon your own soil”.

Amen to that.