Holocaust Memorial Day — House of Commons, 2016-01-21
Topic: Civil Rights
Kirsten Frances Oswald (Scottish National Party, Centre-left): I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. I entirely agree with him. I am pleased that in Scotland our Government have made a clear commitment to understanding and protecting faith through education, and to the importance of holocaust education. Our young people must have the opportunity to really understand what happened. We have heard about Scottish students and teachers participating in the Holocaust Educational Trust’s valuable Lessons from Auschwitz project. I have met some of those young people, and their commitment to understanding and sharing the story of the holocaust is very important Our First Minster, Nicola Sturgeon, reflecting on our annual Scottish interfaith week, described Scotland as a country where all people can live together in harmony, follow their religion or belief and achieve their potential. Our diversity is a strength, as the First Minister emphasised when she recently came to speak to the Scottish Jewish community at the Giffnock and Newlands synagogue. She said that with that strength comes the responsibility on us all not to stand by but to speak up against anti-Semitism and discrimination in all its forms Holocaust Memorial Day allows schools, colleges, faith groups and communities all over Scotland to consider that, and to remember the 6 million men, women and children who were murdered by the Nazi regime in occupied Europe. Six million people. That is more than the entire population of Denmark. But even when I make comparisons such as these, it is still impossible to comprehend the numbers. As the hon. Member for Ilford North pointed out, however, we really need to try to do so, so that we can understand the terror and magnitude of that genocide, and its repercussions and impact on all of us, on those who survived and on the generations who came after, such as the family of the hon. Member for Newark (Robert Jenrick) This time last year, I was fortunate enough to be at a holocaust memorial service at the Giffnock reform synagogue, where I heard the son of a holocaust survivor speak movingly about the impact of his father’s experience on him as a person. It was an incredibly moving testimony, and it illustrated very well the broad effects of the holocaust, which extend much further than even the terrible magnitude of the number of victims would suggest Yesterday, I visited the Kindertransport statue at Liverpool Street station. There is no doubt that the Kindertransport saved many thousands of young Jewish lives, and those children and their families have added greatly to our society and made huge contributions to our understanding. But it was heart-breaking to learn that at the end of the war, when the British Government committed to taking in another 1,000 unaccompanied children, they could not do so because only 732 orphaned children remained The plight of children at that time also exercised the mind of Jane Haining, a farmer’s daughter from Dunscore in rural Dumfriesshire. A devout Christian, she was inspired by a job advert she saw in Queen’s Park church for the post of matron in a Budapest school run by the Church of Scotland’s Mission to the Jews. The school was popular with Jewish parents because of the quality of education that all children, particularly girls, received. As the political situation in Hungary became increasingly precarious, with the Jewish population steadily stripped of its freedoms, the Church of Scotland sent her repeated letters urging her to return home to Scotland for her own safety. Jane refused, and wrote back saying: "If these children needed me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in these days of darkness?". As Hitler’s troops marched into Hungary, Jane Haining is said to have wept as she sewed yellow stars on to her charges’ clothes. This sympathy was known, and very soon she was informed upon, arrested and held in a local prison. She was soon moved to Auschwitz and taken to the labour camps. The treatment being so brutal, she survived for just two months before dying at the age of 47. Many years afterwards, after a 10-year investigation and an initiative by Queen’s Park church, Jane was named as Righteous Among Nations in Jerusalem’s sacred Yad Vashem, recognising her quiet sacrifice for her Jewish children Like my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Patricia Gibson), I want to talk briefly about the late Rev. Ernest Levy, previously the cantor of the Giffnock and Newlands synagogue in my constituency. In 1938, when he was a child, he and his family had to flee to Hungary from their home in Bratislava. When Germany invaded Hungary, they were deported to the concentration camps. Ernest was held in seven concentration camps in all, including Auschwitz. His brothers had to dig their own graves. His sister was gassed to death. Ernest only just survived and he was found lying in the dust in Bergen-Belsen. He ultimately returned to Budapest, before making his home in Scotland, marrying Kathy Freeman, a fellow concentration camp survivor, in 1965 Rev. Levy worked with the Holocaust Educational Trust to launch his holocaust testimony, "The Single Light", in the Scottish Parliament. He brought a sardine tin with him. This tin had literally been his guiding light. During a forced march to Belsen, towards the end of the war, he picked up the tin, discarded by a German guard, made it into a wick and lit a flame. He and his fellow inmates gathered round the flame to sing a hymn. In Holyrood, he again lit the wick in the sardine tin, telling assembled MSPs and guests: "We sang, and it gave us hope. This tin gave us light."