Hansard

Scottish Labour fully supports the motion and the cabinet secretary’s very powerful speech; and, if I may say, the stunning and brilliant speech by Ruth Davidson. It was one of those speeches that people should read afterwards.

I am proud to stand together with those from other parties in support of the motion, because this year marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. Only 7,000 of the 1.1 million prisoners who passed through its gates were still alive when the concentration camp was liberated. Six million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust—a third of the world’s Jewish population—and there were other victims too: Roma, ethnic Serbs, Poles and gay people were among those who were murdered. It was a genocide of the highest order.

Although the motion is on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, it will be appreciated, as Ruth Davidson said, that there were many other extermination and concentration camps, such as Treblinka in Poland, where 800,000 died and Belzec, where 600,000 died. Waiting to be sent to their death, many people starved, died of disease or were worked to death. I applaud the Government for using its debating time for this important debate. It is painful to read and learn about humanity’s worst period in history and the evil that humankind is capable of, but it is up to us to mark it in this way.

In Adam Tomkins’s members’ business debate last year—he, too, gave a brilliant speech then—I mentioned that I had visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland on the last day of 2018. When people arrive there, the guide will ask them not to take photographs in certain areas, and in one such area they will see—the cabinet secretary spoke about what she saw—people’s personal effects, including shoes and cases. Those are sharp and pointed messages that are not to be photographed, because each shoe and each personal belonging was from an individual person with their own story of how they arrived at that dreadful place.

Accounts from brave survivors who escaped to tell the world their stories are everything to us because, without them, we could not begin to get our heads around the horror of what happened. How it could happen at all is the imperative question for any person who is interested in truly ensuring that it could never happen again. That is why the Holocaust Memorial Trust is a vital organisation. Its purpose is to remind us not only of the six million Jews who were brutally murdered, but of how that could have been allowed to happen in the first place.

We must educate every child about those sad facts—no generation can be left out. We must have robust policies on tackling hatred of and prejudice against any group in society, and we must translate what those things mean in today’s world, whether it is demonising Gypsy Travellers or attacking synagogues, churches, temples or mosques. Tackling antisemitism, Islamophobia and other such hatred must be central to the Government’s work—I believe that it is. As political leaders, we must stand together and unite against hatred in order to build a better society.

As the cabinet secretary and Ruth Davidson said, there are fewer Holocaust survivors every year and, in the not too distant future, there will be none. The generations that live on will therefore be the ones who carry the responsibility of relaying those survivors’ accounts to future generations, so that they are never forgotten. Even that is not enough, though, because the Holocaust must be as strong a feature in our minds in the future, as leaders and politicians, as it is now. Its message cannot fade and cannot be allowed to fade. John Stuart Mill, the British philosopher, said:

“Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”

Among the many heroes of the Holocaust was Irena Sendler. She was a Polish social worker who saved 2,500 Jewish babies and children from the Warsaw ghetto and placed them with Polish families. The ghetto had been set up to segregate the city’s 380,000 Jews, who were then sent to the death camps. She worked in the Warsaw health department and had permission to enter the ghetto. Irena and a small team of social workers smuggled the children out by hiding them in ambulances, taking them through the sewer pipes or other underground passageways, and wheeling them out on a trolley, or in suitcases or boxes. She noted the names of all the children on cigarette papers and sealed their names in two glass bottles, which she buried in a colleague’s garden. After the war, the bottles were dug up and the lists were handed to Jewish representatives. Attempts were made to reunite the children with their families, but most families had, unfortunately, perished in concentration camps.

The Kindertransport was organised shortly before the war to rescue Jewish children living in Germany and other parts of occupied Europe. The United Kingdom took nearly 10,000 children—nowhere near enough—who were placed in British foster homes. One of those children is well known to all and certainly well known to me: the wonderful Alf Dubs. He was a refugee and has done amazing work in the UK on the question of refugees. The British Government supported and publicised that programme.

We know that in times of crisis and war, there are innocent civilians whose lives are threatened. We should always assess our role as a country in providing safe passage for refugees, as we have done and have argued for. Through no fault of their own, they have been caught up in conflict that we may well have made a decision to participate in. Britain and Scotland should play a positive role in today’s refugee crisis. We should live up to our responsibilities and create a humane society by doing our part to make the world a better place, if for no other reason than the memory of the Holocaust.