Hansard

I pay tribute, as others have done, to a remarkable woman who died in Auschwitz. Jane Haining, from the village of Dunscore in Dumfriesshire, died because she protected and loved the Jewish children in her care at the Church of Scotland missionary school in Budapest, where she was matron. I thank the cabinet secretary for praising Jane in her speech.

Reading her biography, “Jane Haining: A Life of Love and Courage”, by Jane Miller, which informed an excellent feature by Neil Mackay in the Sunday Herald this weekend, it is clear that Jane was that rare thing: a truly selfless person. A farmer’s daughter, born in 1909, by the time she was five she had lost her mother. However, she excelled at school, won a bursary to Dumfries academy and became dux. After working in Coats mill in Paisley, she decided to devote her life to others, and that path took her to Hungary, where she became a surrogate mother to the Christian and Jewish girls in her care, who were often poor and orphaned. As others have said, when war broke out, Jane had the opportunity to return to the safety of Scotland but she refused, saying,

“If these children needed me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in days of darkness?”

Soon, she was taking in refugee children from occupied countries. When Budapest fell under Nazi control, in 1944, Jane was arrested by the Gestapo and accused of consorting with Jews. One of her so-called crimes was being seen to weep when her girls were forced to sew yellow stars on their uniforms.

She arrived at Auschwitz on 15 May 1944, and documents show that, on 17 July, she was admitted to Birkenau, the extermination part of the vast complex. One million people died in Birkenau, 900,000 of them Jewish. In the summer of 1944, in just eight weeks, 424,000 people were transported to Auschwitz from Hungary, and that is in addition to the 80,000 people who were shot dead on the banks of the Danube that year and the 70,000 who starved or were murdered in the Budapest ghetto.

The near elimination of European Jewry was poignantly illustrated to the parishioners of Jane’s village church in Dunscore when, in 2016, they travelled to Budapest to pay their respects and visit the synagogue where Jane’s girls would have worshipped. The synagogue was built to seat 3,500; now it has around 200 worshippers at most on Fridays.

Jane’s sacrifice shows that non-Jews were also victims of the Nazis. As Aileen Campbell reminded us, Roma, disabled people, mentally ill people and gay people perished in the camps along with political opponents, particularly communists.

However, we must never forget that the Holocaust, which is also known as the Shoah, was the genocide of two thirds of Europe’s Jews—6 million people. The Shoah was a crime against Jewish people and the culmination of centuries of antisemitism in Europe. There have been other genocides, and it is absolutely correct that we remember them and learn lessons, but world war two’s Holocaust was exceptional in its scale and its approach. It was pre-meditated and meticulously planned by a modern state. It was mechanised mass murder in cold blood, deploying technology that Germany had perfected. Mary Miller notes in her book on Jane Haining that, in the month in which Jane died, the commandant in charge of the crematorium at Auschwitz ordered sophisticated sieving machinery so that larger pieces of bone could be separated from the cinders of human beings that were being dumped in nearby ponds.

The Shoah was not an outbreak of uncontrolled, frenzied violence such as we see in conflict zones across the world when society is brutalised and the rule of law collapses. The concentration camps were planned, built and managed by detached bureaucrats. The entire apparatus of the state, with its courts and legal processes, was designed to support the death factories.

Holocaust memorial day falls on the anniversary of the red army’s liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, which dwarfed the other death camps in scale. In fleeing the camp, the Nazis left evidence of their crimes, and, because Auschwitz was a forced labour camp, there were many surviving eye witnesses.

Our understandable focus on Auschwitz on this 75th anniversary must not be allowed to obscure the historical fact that the Holocaust stretched far beyond that vast extermination complex. It was a widespread programme of murder right across occupied Europe. In the Netherlands, France, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland and Germany, Jewish men, women and children were rounded up in plain sight and forced into cattle trucks that transported them east. The railway network itself was designed around the extermination programme.

As Pauline McNeill said, there were other death camps. Some 900,000 died at Treblinka, 500,000 at Belzec and a quarter of a million at Sobibór—and there were other camps. The first stage of the systematic killing of Jewish people was carried out by the Einsatzgruppen—the mobile killing units in the east, who gassed people in the backs of lorries.

As others have said, all those atrocities were witnessed by good men who did nothing. However, brave people, including Jane Haining, did not stand aside but instead stood up for others and paid the ultimate price. As members said, Jane is honoured in Israel as righteous among the nations. She has a memorial in Dunscore church, in her home village. I agree that the time has come for us to pay her a lot more attention in Scotland. The time has come for some sort of national memorial.

We are told that the Holocaust reminds us of the depths to which human beings can sink. The selflessness of Jane Haining and others reminds us that there is good in this world and that there are human beings who rose up against evil. That is something that we must never forget.