Hansard

It is, indeed, a privilege to have been called to speak in this most impressive debate. I am proud that our Scottish Parliament is marking the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau in this way. We have heard many members rightly offering their recollections of visits to the Nazi death camps; I will record my own recollections of such a visit.

I was 21 years old when I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. I had been studying in Bologna at Johns Hopkins University’s school of advanced international studies and took up the opportunity of a summer-school exchange at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. Part of the programme there involved a visit to Auschwitz. Some of my fellow students declined to go because they felt that it would be too upsetting, but I considered it my duty to go and to bear witness.

It was not just the hugely cynical message at the camp’s entrance gate—“Arbeit Macht Frei”—that saddened me and caught at my soul so, nor was it the mountain of shoes, or the countless photographs of young twins that adorned an entire wall, with their faces full of hope because they had yet to meet the butcher, Mengele. What broke my heart was standing at the end of the rail track in Birkenau as a young European woman in the early 1980s, trying to get my head around how it could be that only 40 short years previously people could get on a train in Paris, Brussels or any other modern civilised European city and end up in hell.

That experience has stayed with me all my life and has informed my approach to my fellow man and my choice of the law as a career, to ensure that people’s rights are respected. It has also informed the objectives of my political life. For, as has been said by Scotland’s First Minister and others, the industrial killing machine that Germany became did not start at the end of that train track in Birkenau. It started with the othering of the Jews, with the incremental denuding of Jews of their rights, with the normalisation of antisemitism and bigotry and hatred, and—it has to be said—with non-Jews and the international community failing, in the main, to speak out when all that was happening.

That is why it is vital that we all remain vigilant, that we challenge antisemitism, that we challenge bigotry and that we challenge hatred, wherever they are promoted. That is our duty as parliamentarians and as citizens: we must discharge that duty and we must encourage the generations to come always to bear witness.

While I was working on my speech, I was struck by an historic moment last week when German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier became the first German President ever to give a speech at Yad Vashem at an event to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. In a very moving speech, the President said:

“The Eternal Flame at Yad Vashem does not go out. Germany’s responsibility does not expire.”

He went on to say, with considerable candour and honesty:

“I wish I could say that we Germans have learned from history once and for all. But I cannot say that when hatred is spreading.”

We should all be prepared to exercise the same candour because, of course, as has been recognised in this debate, hatred is spreading, and it is up to each of us to do what we can in the face of such developments in our society, here in Europe and across the world.

In the past few days, we have heard stories of such bravery and endurance in the face of barbarism and obscenity; such stories of individual survivors who were determined, following their liberation, not to be victims, but to live their lives to the full and to make their contribution. It is perhaps fitting, given our imminent—and, I say, sad—departure from the European Union, to reference a remarkable woman called Simone Veil. She was the first President of the first directly elected European Parliament, for which elections were held in 1979. Simone Veil bore the stamp of her Auschwitz number on her arm, but she was determined to make her mark on the life of her country, France, and was very attuned to the founding purpose of the European project.

I bear witness, Presiding Officer.