Hansard

Thank you, Presiding Officer.

“Man’s inhumanity to man
Makes countless thousands mourn!”

So said Robert Burns, and that was never truer than in the Holocaust.

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, at least 1.1 million people, including tens of thousands of Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and others were murdered. However, 90 per cent of the slain were Jews, killed only because they were Jews. Because a few thousand inmates survived it, more people died there than elsewhere and much of it remains intact, Auschwitz evokes our greatest understanding of the Holocaust and its horrors. Nevertheless, we cannot forget the almost 2 million Jewish people murdered in the extermination centres at Belzec, Chelmno, Maly Trostenets, Sobibor and Treblinka, from which, in total, only 110 prisoners survived the war. Nor can we forget other hundreds of concentration camps, from Belsen to Majdanek, where people died in ghettos of disease, starvation and exhaustion; or killing sites, such as Babi Yar, where entire communities were annihilated, amid great terror, despair and bewilderment. In total, 6 million Jews were murdered.

Sadly, antisemitism remains with us. At last month’s general election, here in Scotland, the only European nation never to have imposed laws directly against Jewish people, the Conservatives, Labour and the Scottish National Party each suspended candidates for antisemitic comments.

Paradoxically, the more time that passes, the greater the risk of future generations perceiving the Holocaust as an abstract and almost mythical concept, dissociated from reality. The almost unimaginable scale and scope of the atrocities contribute to that risk. After all, how could it have happened?

A common misconception is that the Holocaust was perpetrated by a small group of odious political and military fanatics. That could not be further from the truth. Doctors conducted medical experiments, involving surgery, on Jewish children and others without anaesthetic; the legal system helped isolate Jews as a precursor to genocide; railway workers transported them across Europe; and architects designed the death camps. At Auschwitz alone, 6,161 men and 174 women served in the SS garrison. Pre-war Germany, despite its Nazi regime, was seen as one of the most civilised and cultured societies in the world, and yet the Holocaust happened. So when information about it came out, it was not believed by many in the western allied states. The Holocaust happened with, it must be said, the often active participation of many others from a host of nationalities and political traditions across Europe.

Of course, we must not forget the righteous gentiles, those who often paid with their lives to save Jews whom they might not even have known but felt compelled to save because of their common humanity.

Just because the people are watching, that does not mean that genocide cannot and will not happen. From April 1994, the world looked on as atrocities unfolded in Rwanda during a three-month frenzied campaign of genocide. An estimated 800,000 men, women and children of the Tutsi minority were brutally slaughtered by Hutu extremists. United Nations soldiers were there and did nothing.

Barely a year had passed when, in July 1995, the world again watched as Bosniak men and boys were massacred near Srebrenica at the hands of Bosnian Serb forces. Again, UN forces were there, wasting time with bureaucracy, failing to intervene and turning people away from their base to near-certain death. Within 72 hours, 8,732 Muslim men and boys were murdered in Srebrenica alone.

All but a handful of Holocaust survivors who lived to tell their personal experiences have now passed away. It is up to us, not them, to make sure that we understand. Doing so allows us to recognise that antisemitism did not just rear its head again recently; it did not end with the second world war.

In 1946, 42 Jews, including a newborn baby and a woman who was six months pregnant, were brutally murdered during the Kielce pogrom in Poland. Police, civilians and soldiers attacked Jews with clubs and iron bars after an eight-year-old boy who had not come home one night claimed, according to his father, to have been held in a Jewish-owned building. It was nonsense, of course, but a town that had lost all but 200 of its 30,000 pre-war Jewish community believed it. For the Jewish-Polish community, who had just survived the Holocaust and returned home, the continuation of antisemitic violence was a massive blow.

As eastern Europe disappeared behind the iron curtain, from Czechoslovakia to Hungary to Romania, ruling Communist parties purged and executed hundreds of Jewish comrades who had survived the Holocaust. That occurred in parallel in Stalin’s Soviet Union, with the ludicrous doctors’ plot leading to the arrest and execution of eminent Jewish doctors who supposedly plotted against Stalin. State-sponsored antisemitism intensified to such a degree that it effectively descended into a co-ordinated campaign vilifying Soviet Jews as rootless cosmopolitans, and a plan to deport the 2 million who had not fallen into Nazi hands to Siberia and, for many, to their likely death. Only Stalin’s demise before its implementation saved them.

Jews were often called parasites for living in other societies. Now, they are vilified if they support Zionism and Israel—a nation held to higher standards of behaviour than probably any other, despite the intolerant, undemocratic, sectarian and homophobic nature of the societies that surround it. It is the Jew among nations.

That antisemitism is still an issue 75 years on is indicative of problems in our society today; it must be rooted out.

Last year, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights published a poll of Jewish perceptions and experiences of antisemitism in the EU. It found that 75 per cent of British Jews think that antisemitism is a “very big” or “fairly big” problem in the UK, compared to the 48 per cent who thought so in 2012. Shockingly, 84 per cent said that antisemitism was present in political life—the highest figure in Europe.

Sticking our heads in the sand is not an option, when the reality is that not only can antisemitism rise again; it has done so. Awareness does not make it stop, and action is needed.

I conclude by asking everyone who remembers the millions who died to also remember those who survived the Holocaust and other genocides. Many spent the rest of their lives with the trauma of being degraded, injured and deprived of their loved ones and homes. From Nobel prize winner and Auschwitz survivor, Primo Levi, to Richard Glazar, survivor of the Treblinka prisoners revolt, many subsequently took their own lives, often decades later.

The Holocaust must never be allowed to happen again and must never be forgotten.