Holocaust Memorial Day

Kirsten Oswald Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Commons Chamber

[Kirsten Oswald (East Renfrewshire) (SNP)]

It is an honour to follow that excellent speech by the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon). It is a real honour to be a co-sponsor of this debate and to be able to sum up for my party on such an important issue.

I thank the Holocaust Educational Trust for the help, briefings and advice it has given to all Members, and for the excellent work that it does all year. I commend everyone who has made such excellent and thought-provoking contributions to the debate. I was particularly struck by the comments by the hon. Member for Hove (Peter Kyle) about the importance of language, which were particularly well made. Like him, I think it is hugely important that we do not ever normalise the language of hate but always challenge it loudly. We must also challenge those who would shamefully deny something so eloquently spoken about by the right hon. Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Sir Eric Pickles).

My right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) spoke about man’s inhumanity to man and the importance of learning the lessons from the distant past. I know that many people in my local area will be focused on what is said here today. I hope that the same is true for people around the UK and beyond, because it is vital. I agree with the hon. Member for Ealing Central and Acton (Dr Huq) that now more than at many other times in our life, we must be steadfast in our desire to make sure that everyone understands exactly what happened and that the lessons of this terrible stain on history are learned and understood as widely as possible. There is no place for anti-Semitism here or anywhere else. Where it exists, it is our responsibility to challenge it vigorously and to challenge discrimination in all its forms.

The holocaust saw more Jewish men, women and children perish in ghettos, mass-shootings and extermination camps than the entire population of Scotland. As the hon. Member for Hove said, it was an almost unbelievable scale of deliberate terror against ordinary people simply because of their identity as Jews. As time passes and memories fade, we must not lose our focus on this or on making sure that it cannot happen again. The right hon. Member for Enfield North (Joan Ryan) was entirely right in stressing the importance of testimony and education. There is no doubt about the impact on hon. Members who have visited the camps.

I am very fortunate to represent the majority of Scotland’s Jewish community. I live in a vibrant diverse place, where people from all religions, backgrounds and cultures live together harmoniously. That ability to live together and to appreciate the richness of our diversity and what it brings to society is hugely important. It was important, too, to the late Rev. Ernest Levy, who was Cantor of Giffnock and Newlands synagogue in my constituency. Rev. Levy, who died in 2009, survived seven Nazi concentration camps, having been taken from his home in Budapest to Auschwitz at the age of 19. Although it was understandably very hard for him to speak about his terrible experiences, he did just that, making it his mission to speak to young people in particular to make sure that they understood the terrors that people had faced, and the extraordinary level of cruelty inflicted on the Jewish community and others who incurred the wrath of the Nazis.

The things that Rev. Levy experienced are beyond our comprehension in many ways. He called them dehumanising and horrifying. He described how his family were forced to flee their home in Bratislava in 1938, after being persecuted by fascists. When we all go home tonight, feeling secure in our place in the world, let us reflect on that, because the Levy family was no different from the rest of us. They just found themselves in the eye of a hellish storm, simply because they were Jewish. That storm followed them, and he and his family were captured. He was sent to Auschwitz, which he described as a world of evilness beyond description. He experienced his brothers being compelled to dig their own graves, and he described the terrible stench that tore at his lungs.

We can probably never fully understand what happened, but we absolutely must try. I can easily empathise with how Rev. Levy must have felt when he tried to return to normality after he was released, by then from Belsen. He was very grateful to be alive, but, at the same time, he was beset by a loss of trust in people, in God, and in prayers. Who would be any different? It is testimony to his great strength of character that he did find that trust again, and that he dedicated his life to helping others. His belief in the light of humanity is a lesson to us all in the strength of the human spirit, and in the need to stand up and never let racism gain credence in society.

That is the sentiment that led me to make a trip this year that will stay with me for the rest of my life. I was very fortunate to be part of my party’s first official delegation to Israel and Palestine. The first place we visited was Yad Vashem, the memorial to those who died in the holocaust, which is a quite remarkable place. The impact that it had on me was immense, and it must be the same for anyone who visits. The stories of all those people were laid out so plainly. They were just ordinary people—like you and me, the man down the road, or the woman in the office. All of them were murdered so cruelly because they were different. The way that the Nazis targeted people and created hostility to those groups who did not fit into their idea of society was particularly frightening, because I could see only too well why we need always to be ready to stand up against those who foster hate.

Yad Vashem was a peaceful and thought-provoking place, for all the awful story it tells. It is a place that honours the dead and makes sure that we remember each one of them, individually, as a human being—a person to be valued and acknowledged. That focus on each person as a human—one of us—cannot be emphasised enough. In everything I saw, I was struck by its very personal nature. There were individual possessions—some red shoes, a comb, and a pair of broken glasses, painstakingly laid out in a display case. They had belonged to someone’s mum and they were all that was left when the Nazis murdered her. These glasses had been cherished for decades by a daughter who had hidden them during her time in a concentration camp, after her mother had been taken away. She had simply nothing else to remember her by, and she felt her mum was closer to her through these cherished old glasses.

In the garden of remembrance there commemorating the righteous among nations—those people from around the world who stood fast against the Nazis and protected their Jewish friends and neighbours, paying with their lives—I saw the memorial to Jane Haining, whom my right hon. Friend the Member for Gordon (Alex Salmond) mentioned, the only Scottish victim of the concentration camps. Jane’s selfless devotion to the children she looked after as a matron saw her sent to Auschwitz, where she died. The Church of Scotland, her employer, had repeatedly ordered her home, but she refused to leave the children and was sent to her death.

The heritage centre to be opened in her hometown of Dunscore will be a particularly important place where people can learn what she stood for as a beacon of hope against hate, which is so important now, as my hon. Friend the Member for Ochil and South Perthshire (Ms Ahmed-Sheikh) described. We could all do with thinking about Jane Haining and how she was not prepared to leave behind those who would be persecuted simply for being different.

That is a theme that the young people in my constituency demonstrate brilliantly at their holocaust memorial events every year. Their parents must be extremely proud of their children showing such maturity and insight and sharing the lessons we must all learn from the holocaust. These children, from my fantastically diverse community, represent the best of us. They are children from all religions and none, some with disabilities and some without, from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds, girls and boys. Just like the children who were sent to their deaths.

Our children often show us the way forward, and a number of Members have described that movingly today. That is why we cannot take it for granted that this cannot happen again. We must all commit to speaking out whenever we see anti-Semitism, racism or hate, and when we hear things we know are not right. We must never be afraid to call these things out for what they are, loudly and clearly. My hon. Friend the Member for East Kilbride, Strathaven and Lesmahagow (Dr Cameron) described all too clearly what can happen if we stand back and do not act.

I close with the words and sentiments of Jane Haining, who stood so fast against hatred and paid so dearly for her principles and compassion. She said:

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