Hansard

It is my great privilege to speak for the Liberal Democrats in this important debate. Monsters are real. They might wear business suits or military uniforms, but they have walked among us. We see the evidence of their works in the bleaker chapters of human history. This week, we recognise, in the form of Holocaust memorial day, the darkest chapter of all.

We remember the persecution and mechanised slaughter of 17 million people, more than a third of whom were Jewish. Whole communities, huge segments of entire races, and people whom the Nazis found to be deviant, seditious and disabled were rounded up and shipped to camps such as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Belsen to be murdered.

The outrageous regime was made possible only through the total capitulation of thousands of otherwise normal people—among them the handful of decent people who, as Ruth Davidson reminded us, averted their eyes. Of this, the Italian writer and Holocaust survivor, Primo Levi, said:

“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”

The Nazis were successful in mass murder because they desensitised and normalised it. They inured every level of government and the military to atrocity with endless layers of bureaucracy that reduced millions of lives to lines in a ledger book or in a transport manifest, and to piles of unclaimed belongings.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt described that as “the banality of evil” when she covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Sitting in court, across from the little grey man who was the architect of the final solution, Arendt described what she called

“The dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them.”

He was, she said, “terribly and terrifyingly normal”. There are photographs of Eichmann at the trial—a gaunt and elderly man in a suit, straining to hear the translation of the case against him. Yet that same man was reported to have said in Argentina before his capture by agents of Mossad and Shin Bet that he would

“Leap into my grave laughing, because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction.”

Monsters are real. It is that realisation, that horrific acts can be committed by humdrum men, that represents the most powerful warning of the Holocaust. We must keep reminding ourselves of that.

As that period of history begins to move out of living memory—as has already been said—it is incumbent on all of us to keep that memory alive and to pass it on to our children and their children to come. To that end, I am proud to be a patron of vision schools Scotland, the award that we heard about in time for reflection. The initiative was devised by the school of education at the University of the West of Scotland. It is doing its best to educate Scottish children around the country.

Research shows how imperative that work is: according to a poll that was recently reported on by BBC News, 1 in 20 UK adults believes that the Holocaust did not happen, and a full eighth of the population believe that it has been exaggerated. I have told Parliament before about an incident last year when I spent some time in hospital. At one point, when the discussion on the ward had moved to the second world war, the man in the bed opposite me volunteered his belief that the Holocaust was all a hoax. In the argument that followed, he revealed that the basis for his position was rooted in some videos that he had seen on YouTube.

Challenging antisemitism and Holocaust denial falls to all of us. We have seen the grim evidence of its revival in the rise of casual antisemitism in the UK and in the two mass shootings in crowded synagogues last year alone. This is not going away: hate against the Jewish people and many of the others who were persecuted by the Nazis still blooms. It advances incrementally and if it goes unchecked it could blossom into atrocity once again. We must do everything that we can to stamp it out.

When we speak about the Holocaust, we speak too readily about the monsters. In the study of its gruesome history, we come to the names of its perpetrators before we come to the names of its victims and survivors. Perhaps that is because the names of those who perished are innumerable and their stories too heartbreaking. However, yesterday, in the coverage of the events at the memorial at Auschwitz, we were able to remedy that, to a degree. We heard the accounts of people including David Marks and Yvonne Engelman, who spoke with such courage of their first-hand witness to the cattle trucks, the marches and the deaths by starvation, firing squad, cold and gas chamber. Their words should be seared into the hearts of every person, and preservation of their memory should be an obligation for all humanity.

The fact that we are here, living among many of the communities that the Holocaust sought to extinguish, is evidence that the Nazis failed and that the human spirit prevailed over evil. I was reminded of that when, on a Parliamentary visit to Strasbourg in 2017, I stopped, with colleagues, at the Synagogue de Paix, which is built on the site of the old Gestapo headquarters of western Europe. Above the front door is a legend written in French and Hebrew. It reads:

“Stronger than the sword is my soul.”

Those words are steeped in hope and defiance—qualities that we have heard in the sentiment of this debate, and that we share as we collectively commemorate the legacy of that awful stain on human history.