Holocaust Memorial Day

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2024 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

I am grateful to the Backbench Business Committee for granting the time for this debate. I was very happy to be a co-sponsor of it. I am very grateful to the right hon. Member for Barking (Dame Margaret Hodge) for the way in which she opened the debate. It is very important that we have this debate every year in the Chamber and this year it is all the more pressing. Like others, I would like to put on record my thanks to the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust for their year-round work, as well as their support at this time of year.

It is Burns Night tonight and his famous line:

“Man’s inhumanity to man

Makes countless thousands mourn!”

well stands the test of time when we look at the world today, and when we look to the holocaust and the continued impact down the generations. Like the hon. Member for Brigg and Goole (Andrew Percy), I am often frustrated by the increasing polarisation of politics and views. There are far more shades than black and white, and public discourse is always the better for appreciating that, and trying to at least understand the spectrum of views that are different from one’s own.

On this particular issue—perhaps it is the exception that proves the rule—the importance of holocaust remembrance and understanding why it matters is something black and white: there is one clear way in which to look at these issues. In an age of increased tension, global flux and the growing influence of those whose very purpose is to foster hatred for others, we need to be ever more clear about the need for “never again” to mean exactly that; but it will not happen without specific and concerted effort.

The theme of this year’s Holocaust Memorial Day is “fragility of freedom”. To me things seem that bit more fragile and that bit more strained, and I was struck by hearing the same point made earlier this week by Rabbi Rubin, the Senior Rabbi of Scotland. I often speak in this place about the importance of freedom to follow the religion of one’s choice or to follow no religion, and across the globe that freedom is increasingly under threat. We are witnessing eye-watering spikes in antisemitism and Islamophobia. We need to mean what we say and stand up against that hatred—against the misinformation and disinformation, the tropes and the trolls, and the plain holocaust deniers. The hon. Member for Hendon (Dr Offord) made a good point about the significant challenges in the online space.

We also need to be vigilant, and face hard truths. Intolerance and hatred are increasing, and those who peddle hatred, here and throughout the world, do feel empowered. The hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) spoke powerfully about the huge dangers posed by people spreading conspiracies, and the efforts to erode and deny democracy. We need to remember that genocides do not just suddenly happen in faraway places. They are always the product of the gradual and deliberate “othering”, demeaning, dehumanising and diminishing of people simply because of their identity. As was pointed out by the hon. Member for West Ham (Ms Brown), they are fuelled by ordinary people acting in extraordinarily awful ways, empowered by the encouraging and normalising of hatred. That leads to the industrial-scale evil described by the right hon. Member for Chipping Barnet (Theresa Villiers).

I was fortunate to attend my local holocaust memorial event at the start of the week, as I do every year. These events have been, without exception, profoundly moving, and this year’s was no different. I am grateful to East Renfrewshire Council and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, especially Kirsty Robson, for putting it together so effectively. Our young people were at the heart of that event, and I applaud them all for their efforts. Students from all our local schools were there, notably Christopher James and Sarah Bone from St Ninian’s High School, who spoke about their involvement as Holocaust Educational Trust ambassadors, and Lexie Davidson from Mearns Castle High School, who has been working with the Anne Frank Trust. Kaela-Kaliza Molina, a young woman whose mother was caught up in the Rwanda genocide, read us a poem that she had written about the experience of her mother and so many others. It was entitled “We all bleed the same”, and you could have heard a pin drop.

The point that that young woman made—that point about the fragility of freedom—is illustrated very effectively by individual histories. The right hon. Member for Barking talked about her own family’s journey, much of which seemed to have been highly dependent on chance: it struck me that it could have been a very different story. We need to remember that we are talking about people and families, not just about the unfathomable number that we think about so often when reflecting on the holocaust while neglecting the individuals who perished.

At the event we also heard from Geraldine Shenkin, who spoke powerfully about her lovely mum, Marianne Grant, whose story has been captured in materials used in Scottish schools thanks to the work of Vision Schools Scotland, as well as in a beautiful book of her mum’s art which is now on permanent display in Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. Geraldine was exceptionally brave in telling that story, and I know that in doing so she spared us some detail because she was aware of the number of schoolchildren who were in the audience. Suffice it to say that her mum endured the most terrifying, inhumane and shocking treatment as she survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz before her liberation from Bergen-Belsen.

Marianne Grant was an artist, and while in Auschwitz she was forced to draw for Dr Mengele, known as the Angel of Death, whom she recalled walking back and forth in front of her nose in his black uniform as she drew, “like a clock pendulum”. The horrors that she experienced are beyond our imaginings, but of course they would have been unimaginable to her too until her life was turned upside down in that most horrific way.

The same can be said of the lives of Henry and the late Ingrid Wuga, Kindertransport children who escaped and later met, married and made their home in my constituency. They have changed countless lives with their work telling our young people about the reality of the Holocaust, and we owe them both a huge debt of gratitude for that. Henry Wuga is about to turn 100, and I am sure that the whole House will want to join me in sending him our very best wishes.

The importance of that kind of work, sharing the truth about the Holocaust, is ever greater. I met Gathering the Voices again this week, and heard more about Martin Anson, whose story is so important. He talked about the growing anti-Jewish sentiment in his Bavarian home town in the early 1920s, his activities in the anti-Nazi movement, stormtroopers assaulting his family on Kristallnacht, and his imprisonment in Dachau before he managed to emigrate to Scotland just before the outbreak of the war. His son Steven told me about a trip that he made last year to his father’s former home, where a stone called a stolperstein had been laid down in the ground—unusually, to record that someone who had lived there had survived; usually the stones record those who have been lost. On that visit, Steven was struck by the warm welcome that he received from the family who were currently living in the house. It was an incredible story to hear, and the generosity of spirit of the current occupants is, I think, a ray of hope in a very harrowing history.

It would not be a Holocaust Memorial Day debate for me without my touching on another ray of hope, offered in the person of Jane Haining, the Scottish matron in a Budapest school who refused to leave her young Jewish charges despite knowing what the dangers were, and who paid for that decision with her life. She said:

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

That sentiment is one worth holding to at a time when everything seems a bit more fragile and less certain than the circumstances that we have, perhaps, become comfortably used to. Jane Haining is the only Scot to be named as Righteous Among the Nations at Yad Vashem.

It will take all of us—all of here, but all of us in our communities too—to say that we will not tolerate anti- semitism, we will not accept hatred, and we will not accept people’s being othered and demeaned because of their identity. Freedom really is fragile, and all of us together are the key to sustaining and strengthening it. Let us try to heed the terrible lessons of the past. Let us try to work hard together to keep alive the voices of those who survived, so that those who come after us can hear their testimony too, and can protect that fragile freedom.