 Rwy'n gweinio'n wahanol, mae'n dweud i nhw'n hanffes eich tydd o'r eich cychwyn byw That's a business debate on motion 747. In the name of Fergus Ewing, on Holocaust Memorial Day 2023, the debate will be concluded without any questions being puted. I invite members to participate to press their requests to the beat-buttons now or as soon as possible. I invite Mr Ewing to open the debate for around seven minutes. Y theme for the Holocaust Memorial day this year is ordinary people. We know that Hitler and his henchmen, Himmler, Heidrich and Eichmann, and others were the very personification of evil, but leaders need followers. Their leadership only succeeded in visiting the horrors of the Holocaust because of the complicity of their followers, and sadly their followers were ordinary people. It was ordinary people, Presiding Officer, who facilitated the chilling final solution. Devised at the Wansi conference with its despicable memorial to which Mr Carlaw referred last year in his remarks. It was ordinary people who stood by and did nothing in the early years of the Nazi regime from Kristallnacht right through to Auschwitz, Belfast and the Sobibor and the rest. It's the harsh and uncontrovertible truth that the killing of 6 million people took place because ordinary people permitted it, they perpetrated it or they didn't prevent it. However, we remember, too, the ordinary people who were the rescuers, the famous, such as Oscar Schindler and Raoul Vandenberg, through to the anonymous, the thousands of ordinary people in Poland who lived in the areas surrounding the Auschwitz camps, who helped to harbour and make good the escape of those very few people fortunate to get out of that ghastly place, putting their own lives at risk harboring prisoners and helping them to make their escape to liberty. We remember, too, the genocides that have taken place since the Second World War throughout the world, sadly, in Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda and many other places. Each genocide starts with the abandonment and disregard of human rights. They start with people being punished for who they are or what their identity is. They are punished for being Jewish, for being disabled or sinty or Romani or gay. It starts in that way, but it ends up in the gas chambers because ordinary people have allowed, enabled it or, in fact, helped to carry it out. I want to use my remarks today, however, to remember one person in Scotland, one rescuer who I believe made an extraordinary contribution that has not yet been sufficiently recognised, a contribution in the cause of humanity and human rights through helping to secure the release of prisoners from hideous Russian gulags, Russian prison camps. That person is my boss, Leslie Wolffson, and in the days of Solzhenitsyn, the Russian regime detained many people simply for the crimes of expressing their views, the so-called prisoners of conscience. They were sentenced to many years in the labour camps and many, Presiding Officer, died there. In the late 70s and 80s, Leslie Wolffson decided to use his considerable expertise as a lawyer and successful businessman to help to extract those prisoners from Russia. He set himself a task that, at the time, looked utterly impossible or even absurd. After a while of trying to work in a committee to secure the release, which committee Leslie described as a hurdle, not a help, he simply decided to do it himself and to act on his own. His method was unique. He sought to hire lawyers in Russia to help act in the defence of those who were incarcerated or who faced incarceration. That is much, much easier said than put into practice. He made numerous visits to Moscow. Some of them were almost entirely useless. Many a meeting took place where Leslie, not Presiding Officer, a drinker, was required, forced to match shot by shot a consumption of vodka, consumed by his putative legal helpers. Never, Presiding Officer, in the history of human rights campaigning has so much vodka been consumed with so little enthusiasm by a Glasgow's listener. He persevered. He invited 20 Russian lawyers to visit his Glasgow home. He established many relationships with lawyers who could help. He hired them, met them, consoled them and persuaded them. Through Sir FitzRoy McLean, he made contact with other lawyers, perhaps of more influence. In his first case, he succeeded in enabling a carpenter from the Caspian area called Pinhasoff to be freed several years early by helping to secure a remission of sentence from five years to two. His crime had been allegedly overcharging for his services as a carpenter. Leslie was eventually advised that Mr Pinhasoff was freed and seen in Moscow, but Israeli authorities in the UK were a bit skeptical about that. Leslie phoned the solicitor that he had madeealing with the case, the lawyer in Russia. In that call, the two of them tried to communicate in various languages because Leslie had no Russian and his counterpart had no English. He tried French, didn't work, tried Italian. Eventually, they found that they did have a little German in common. Leslie then heard the words uttered that he said that it remained with him for the rest of his life. Alice Goethe met Pinhasoff. He and his wife, Alma, later met Pinhas in Israel, where he had been reunited with his family. Leslie's success spread success, and he was then showered with cases and doggedly pursued them. He also helped to set up an annual legal seminar in Leningrad. He attended burn suppers in Moscow. He joined associations with Russian lawyers and the international bar association. Although it was often difficult to discern the precise reason for the release of prisoners and whose cases he took up, his aim was accomplished. He was quite remarkable and instrumental in securing the release of prisoners who regained their liberty as a result. Leslie also worked with my mother when she was an MEP, and together they raised the case of Wolf Zammonson, who had been in prison for seven years in a Labour camp. She raised the case in the European Parliament and she also got children from Melbourne Academy to write letters to Mr Zammonson. Eventually, they succeeded with Leslie and she met Wolf Zammonson in Tel Aviv. She said that it was the happiest meeting of her life. She recounted a story told by Wolf of when he was in the Russian prison camp and he was learning Hebrew and the prison guard said to him, why are you bothering learning Hebrew? You're stuck here in Russia. You're not getting out. You're in the camp. He said, when I go to heaven, I want to be able to converse with Jacob and Isaiah and the prisoner guard said, what about if you go to hell? And Wolf said, I already speak Russian. When he is still with us at the age of 93, Leslie sadly is no longer with us, but his wife Alma may be watching this today. Leslie was a man of indomitable optimism. He was hugely warm, intelligent and civilised, but above all, thron, determined to take on a seemingly impossible task. It was his extraordinary determination and his unique idea carried through by him in person that helped many people escape tyranny and retain their liberty. In conclusion, the theme this year is ordinary people, including rescuers who did extraordinary things. Leslie Wolfson was a leading member of the Jewish community in Scotland, a community who are so greatly valued and who have achieved so very much. I hope that I have today in this speech done justice to an extraordinary man whose work deserves to be remembered and respected. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Ewing. We now move to the open debate. I call first Alexander Stewart to be followed by Paul O'Kane around four minutes, Mr Stewart. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. I am very pleased to be speaking in support of this important debate and I thank Fergus Ewing for bringing it to the chamber today. As the motion quite rightly says, it is vital to continue imparting the lessons of the Holocaust to each and every future generation. We know that over 6 million individuals were annihilated. The true horrors of the Holocaust with subsequent genocide and persecution across the world must never be erased from the public psyche. This year's Holocaust Memorial Day theme of ordinary people is a huge opportunity, as it recognises that ordinary day-to-day people will become involved in many facets of the Holocaust. That is in addition to later well-documented genocide that happened in Cambodia, Rwanda, Duphar and Bosnia. As the Holocaust Memorial Trust itself explains, genocide is facilitated by ordinary people. Those individuals who are also persecuted, oppressed and murdered in genocide often are persecuted because of crimes that they did not commit. It is because of their individual opportunity and the individuals that they are. It is simply because they are ordinary people who belong to a particular group. As we approach Holocaust Memorial Day tomorrow, I feel that it is also important to mention the immensely important part of Gypsy Roma and the travelling history. Every year in June, as part of Gypsy Roma travelling history month, the Holocaust Memorial Day also remembers and commemorates the richness of Gypsy and Roma traveller communities that bring to everyday lives through the many and varied academic, artistic and achievements that they have. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust also reminds us that it is throughout the truly heridious and hideous circumstances and the period during the 1930s and 40s, tragically that Jewish people were not the only ones to be under this unhumane rate of the Ronatzi regime. For over a decade from the 1930s, five onwards, European, Roma and Sinktay people were often labelled as Gypsies historically, they were targeted for annihilation by the Nazi regime. Deputy Presiding Officer, last week I was delighted to host in this parliament a group of young Gypsy travellers along with their parents, grandparents and charity workers who came to this Parliament to visit as a project within my own region of young Gypsy travellers who are not attending high school, but they came and they get support to look at skills and qualifications to help them through their life. I was deeply inspired by those youngsters who to a person were immensely enthusiastic and possessed a healthy appetite for learning. During questioning when we had some discussion at the time, they talked about how they do still feel persecuted even today and we touched on the horrors of the Holocaust which affected previous generations of travellers in the 1930s and 40s. The reasons for me mentioning this, Deputy Presiding Officer, is that it is too easy for society to put labels on particular groups, whereas the reality is that its individuals have the right to learn, the right to be heard and the right to survive. Indeed, they are ordinary people who affect, are deserved and require acknowledgement. In conclusion, Deputy Presiding Officer, it is with this in mind that we should be committed to ensuring equality of opportunity for every single one of us who deserves in our communities and also to talk about the understanding of particular marginalised groups. We should also never forget the horrors that many groups had to endure to get to where they are today. Paul O'Kane, to be followed by Stephanie Callahan around four minutes. I begin by thanking Fergus Ewing for bringing this important debate to the chamber. As we mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which will be observed around the world tomorrow, 78 years since the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau. We remember the 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis alongside millions of others killed in Nazi persecution, Roma and Sinti people, disabled people, LGBT people, black people and political opponents of the regime, and we rededicate ourselves to saying never again. Yet, all too painfully, we know that in those intervening years since the Holocaust, genocide has happened again in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur, and in our world today, identity-based persecution continues against the Yazidi people, Rohingya Muslims and Uyghur Muslims. As we have heard already, the theme for this year's memorial day provided by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is ordinary people. Genocide is facilitated by ordinary people, people who turn a blind eye, who believe propaganda or who join murderous regimes. Genocide is perpetrated against ordinary people, people who are neighbours, colleagues, friends, and identity-based persecution can be challenged by ordinary people, by those who stand up and speak out, or those with great courage who hid or saved people in the darkest of times. Thus, the ordinary can become extraordinary. Colleagues will know that I come from East Renfrewshire and have represented communities there for over a decade. Home to Scotland's largest Jewish population, I have had the honour over many years of meeting Holocaust survivors and hearing firsthand their testimony. What always strikes me is the normality of people's lives before they were shattered by the events of the Nazis coming to power or invading their home lands. They lived lives that we would recognise. They had dreams and ambitions that we would recognise. They loved and were loved in a way that we would all recognise. And yet all this basic humanity was torn apart as the Nazis dehumanised and othered them. I want to take a moment to speak about Henry and Ingrid Wuga. Henry and his late-wife Ingrid survived the Holocaust by escaping Germany as teenagers. They had watched their ordinary life smashed on Kristallnacht. They had been abused at school and in the streets, and they had softened the increasing violence and brutality of the Nazis under the Nuremberg laws. Their parents made the courageous decision to send them to Britain on the Kindertransport, ordinary parents going to extraordinary lengths to save their children. They were sponsored by people in the UK and eventually here in Scotland, where they would come to settle and they would meet one another, Mary and Reza family. They were sponsored by ordinary people in this country who made a decision to open their homes and their hearts to people in the most desperate of circumstances, something that we can all recognise in current events. Henry and Ingrid dedicated years of their life in this country educating young people about the Holocaust through the Holocaust Educational Trust, in their gentle, encouraging way helping young people to see the Holocaust as relevant to them, their life and their everyday experience. We owe a debt of gratitude to them and other survivors for sharing their testimony. If time passes and the living survivor memory declines, it falls to each of us to tell their stories. We, ordinary people, must tell the story, must call out the hatred, must light the darkness. However, we do not do it alone. We stand together and with amazing organisations such as the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, the Holocaust Educational Trust, the Anne Frank Trust and the Gathering the Voices project and so many more who are the custodians of Holocaust remembrance. Enjoying to your clothes, Deputy Presiding Officer, Kamal Pervanic, a survivor of the Bosnian genocide who I have heard speak, said this. People may think that they have nothing to do with my story, but what happened to me could happen to them, to people like yourself. It may sound too hard to believe, but this does not happen to strangers who live far away. I am just an ordinary person. These terrible things can happen to people like us. So let us all remember today the ordinary people cruelly murdered in the Holocaust in subsequent genocide, and let us all again look inside ourselves to find the ability to make the ordinary extraordinary. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr O'Kane. I now call Stephanie Callahan to be followed by Maggie Chapman around four minutes, Ms Callahan. Thank you, Fergus Ewing, for today's debate and a touching speech earlier on, too, and other speeches have been fantastic, because Holocaust Memorial Day is a time to remember the millions of people murdered during the Holocaust under Nazi persecution. Our world is scarred by genocide, and we seek to lend the lessons of the past, recognising that genocide does not just take place on its own. It is a steady process that begins with discrimination, racism and hatred that grow and spread when left unchecked. So it is the responsibility of ordinary people, every individual, to challenge discrimination on their own doorsteps. That takes courage, and it is easier said than done on many occasions, but it is not good enough to just talk the talk. We must walk the walk too, because the limit of hatred and exclusion has not gone away. To quote Sir Nicholas Winton, who rescued 669 children from Nazi-occupied Europe, do not be content in your life just to do no wrong. Be prepared every day to try and do some good. Paul O'Kane has already mentioned young people, and today, Presiding Officer, I will focus with real pride on a few schools from towns and villages across my home constituency, Oddingston and Baleshill. First St Jerry's primary school in Baleshill. They have planned a school assembly to remember all those murdered during the Holocaust, and the primary seven class topic is already World War II. They will start studying the Holocaust on Memorial Day, linking that to racism, anti-Semitism and prejudice, and also celebrating the diversity and culture within their own school, North Lanarkshire, right the way across, and wider Scotland. Next, we have got Brannock High School out in Newark hill, and tomorrow their themed event is Ordinary Day. That will be led by senior pupils who visited Auschwitz, again through the Holocaust Education Trust, and the students will be playing three pieces of Jewish music, which I thought was lovely. Every pupil has taken part in Holocaust lessons and made a butterfly to represent hope, and put together they've made a touching visual display, and I'm really delighted to learn recently that they've been awarded level one vision school, and they will be attending this Parliament next month to receive their award, so you can be expecting a little motion to come out from me on the detail on how they won, and I hope you'll all sign up to it. Finally, Holy Cross High School in Hamilton, their students are considering ordinary people and talking about turning a blind eye, believing in propaganda, and that ordinary people join the murderous regimes that facilitate genocide, as Fergus Ewing pointed out earlier. As well as commemorating victims of the Holocaust, more recent genocides will be considered, and the relevance that these terrible events have in today's world. They'll be talking about persecution, oppression and how genocide seeks to absolutely destroy particular groups of people, and they'll be relating that to the challenges that Roma, Tutsi and other communities still face today. During today, there'll be a PowerPoint continually running in the main street area of the school highlighting Holocaust atrocities, where all pupils will pass by. I need to give a special mention to a couple of six-year pupils, Emma Murdoch and Eilish Donachey, who took part in the lessons from our speech programme. These young women have been delivering presentations, and tomorrows will be followed by a six-year ceremony, where students will receive a little padlock that they'll write a message on, and they'll fasten them to the fence in the outside classroom area. The long-term plan is to establish a memorial garden, a Holocaust memorial garden. The lessons from our speech programme is all-standing tradition at Holy Cross, and one of the current history teachers, Miss Lucy Ferguson, took part 10 years ago as a pupil, and she's now encouraging her own pupils and students to get involved and working with Emma and Eilish to find next-year students to take part. In closing, I am so proud of all the schools taking part in the Holocaust memorial day, the ones I've mentioned and all the others that I haven't. As I've said in this chamber before, children and young people are everyone's future because our children are the leaders of tomorrow, and it's our children in turn who will seek to pass on the lessons of the Holocaust to future generations—ordinary children, thank you. Thank you, Presiding Officer. I'm grateful for the opportunity to take part in this debate today, and I thank Fergus Ewing for lodging his motion and securing this time this afternoon. As the decades pass and the generations of survivors and witnesses pass too, it becomes more important than ever to remember not only the scale of the horror, but that each person who suffered or died was a particular, unique and irreplaceable individual. So we remember specific people and we mourn their loss, not because those we can name are any more important than those whose names are lost to us, but because as humans we respond to human stories, to stories of specific people in specific places carrying out particular and often extraordinary acts of courage, truth and love. One such extraordinary and yet profoundly ordinary human was the writer and poet Gertrude Colmar. She was born in Berlin into an assimilated Jewish family, worked as a teacher and interpreter and had her first book of poems published in her very early 20s. In 1938 her book The Woman and the Beasts was ordered to be pulped and her family forced from their home. She had the opportunity to leave Germany, but in 1941 wrote to a relative who had reached safety. Believe me when I say that I come what may, I shall not be unhappy, I shall not despair because I know that I am going the way I have chosen in my heart to go. So many of us through the centuries have gone that way. Why should I wish a different one? Even now in these last moments my father thought of emigrating to Uruguay to join his brother. There is a question whether it is still possible to do that. He wanted to leave for my sake. His own life he regards as ended, but I said no. It would be something forced on me solely by external circumstances. I don't want to run away from what I feel in my heart I ought to undergo. In the past I never knew, as I now know how strong I am and knowing this makes me very happy. That year, 1941, she was ordered into forced labour at a munitions factory and the following year her father was deported and murdered. Gertrude herself was arrested at the factory in February 1943 and on 2 March she was transported probably to Auschwitz. She was 48 and never heard from again. But she is not forgotten, not in Germany where she is acclaimed as a great lyric poet, nor beyond. In 2021, community organisers in Chicago began a campaign to dedicate Colmar Park in a city, previously named for the German town in her honour. One of the insights underpinning that campaign was the realisation that a new generation of young adults knew little or nothing of the Holocaust, that this unique horror was fading into cultural oblivion. Last year their campaign bore fruit and in September the park was rededicated to Gertrude Colmar. I would like to finish with translated extracts from one of her last poems, We Jews, written in the stark knowledge of those dark days and the consequences of her choice to stay. Only the night listens, I love you, I love you my people, and I want to hold you warm and close in my arms as a woman embraces her husband bound to the whipping post as a mother at the pond side won't let her reviled son sink all alone. And if a gag stifles the bleeding shriek in your mouth, if your trembling arms are now cruelly bound, let mine be the cry that plummets into the pit of eternity, mine the hand that stretches to touch God's high heaven. Oh, if I could lift my voice like a flaring torch in the dark waste of the world, justice, justice, justice. Thank you very much, Mr Chapman, and I call Kenneth Gibson to be followed by Beatrice Wishart around four minutes, Mr Wishart. Thank you, Presiding Officer, and I too congratulate Fergus Ewing on securing this important debate. In the 12 months since the Parliament last debated the Holocaust, we have witnessed reports of ethnically motivated atrocities committed in Western Tigray, Ethiopia, the murder of Ukrainian civilians in prisons of war by Russian forces during the fight for and occupation of the Ukrainian city of Butcher and my other locations, and soldiers in the Myanmar military admitting to killing, torturing and raping civilians falling unarmed and uprising. These examples from three different continents show that mass atrocities continue to be committed across the world. That is why it is so important that every year on Holocaust Memorial Day, this Parliament plays its part in remembering and discussing the systematic bureaucratic state-sponsored persecution and murder of 6 million Jewish men, women and children by the Nazi regime and its collaborators. To put that into perspective, that would be equivalent to more than Scotland's entire population being murdered within a few short years. In addition, 11 million other people are murdered during the year of the Holocaust, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. As this year's Holocaust Memorial Day theme is ordinary people, it is vital to remember that both victims and perpetrators will open up one might call ordinary people before the war. It is 60 years since Hannah Ann published Aikman in Jerusalem, a report on the banality of evil after witnessing the trial of Adolf Aikman, a major figure in the implementation of the Holocaust. Ann found Aikman an ordinary, rather bland bureaucrat, who in her words was neither perverted nor sadistic but terrifyingly normal. Ann certainly did not mean that evil had become ordinary while Aikman had committed a normal crime, but rather being a sadistic monster, she concluded that he performed evil deeds due to the fact that he lacked the ability to empathise. He made orders and confirmed that any critical evaluation is concerned for the consequence of his actions. Indeed, Daniel Hull, a gold-hagin described in his book, Hitler's willing executioners, how an ordinary police battalion 101 carried out horrific murders with the same lack of any critical evaluation. That is exactly why Holocaust education remains of critical importance. It allows us to examine warning signs that indicate the potential for mass atrocity, while also raising questions about our own behaviour when faced with the situations of prejudice, discrimination and dehumanisation. According to UNESCO, the Holocaust reveals a full range of human responses, raising important considerations about societal and individual motivations and pressures that will lead people to act as they do or not act at all. What the Holocaust also teaches us is, as Fergus Ewing motion rightly states, is the capacity of ordinary people to take extraordinary risks to save others from being murdered. The righteous among the nations honoured at Yad Vashem, Israel's official memorial to the victims of the Holocaust, are non-Jews who protected Jews, including people sometimes unknown to them when hostility and indifference prevailed and the penalty for harboring Jews was the execution of one's entire family. Unlike others, they did not fall into a pattern of acquiescing to the escalating measures against Jews. The list of well-known righteous of the nations includes people such as Oscar Schindler, Prince Alice of Battenberg and Frank Foley among many. Church of Scotland missionary Jane Haining from Dumfrieshire was matron at the predominantly Jewish girls' home of the Scottish Mission in Budapest. In 1940, when Scottish missionaries were ordered to return home, Haining refused to leave, believing that her child charges needed her more than ever. This exposed her to great danger and she was eventually arrested for working among Jews and deported to Auschwitz, where she sadly succumbed to starvation and the terrible camp conditions. Teaching young people about the Holocaust enables them to develop an awareness not only of how violence and hatred can take hold but also of the power of solidarity and resistance. Many teachers and many Scottish schools already do vital work in providing a solid education on this difficult subject, as Stephanie Callaghan mentioned. Scottish Government grant funding to the Holocaust education trust for the lessons from Auschwitz programme goes a long way. However, I agree with Callaghan to make the Holocaust a statutory requirement on the Scottish curriculum, as is the case in England and much of Europe. The Holocaust lays bare the darkest recesses of human behaviour, and that should be recognised in our school curriculum. I believe that we must acknowledge that one of the most powerful weapons for the prevention of mass atrocities from happening over and over again is education. Helping us to understand the circumstances under which it becomes possible for ordinary people to commit an extra ordinary acts of evil and for enough people to be indifferent by standards to enable it to happen. By acquiring knowledge of the Holocaust, we learn about human weaknesses, possibilities and extremists, and can question our own behaviour if ever confronted by such evil. Thank you very much indeed, Mr Gibson. I call Beatrice Wishart, the final speaker in the open debate, around four minutes. Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and thank you to Fergus Ewing for bringing this debate to the chamber today. As I stated in the motion this year's theme for Holocaust Memorial Day is ordinary people, recognising how ordinary people were involved in all the elements of the Holocaust. Ordinary people have been broken down into five categories, perpetrators, bystanders, rescuers, witnesses and victims. Many of us in the chamber and listening today will be aware of the poem First They Came. First they came for the Communists, and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist. It concludes that they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me. Written by Pastor Martin Neimoller, a complicated figure, initially an anti-Semitic Nazi supporter, later imprisoned in a concentration camp for speaking out against Nazi control of churches. After the war, he went on to encourage Germans to take responsibility for Nazi atrocities. An ordinary person, a bystander, a witness, a victim. We should look back, remember, learn and change. We learn from the testimony of survivors like Lily Ebert, her quite remarkable book, Lily's Promise, How I Survived Auschwitz and Found the Strength to Live. It's co-written with her great-grandson, and it's an incredibly moving story about Lily's early life in Hungary and how she survived the concentration camp when so many others, including her own family members, were exterminated. She found the strength to live. An ordinary person, but she continues to inspire others today. My parents served king and country in the second world war. I will recall my mother's conversations when she would speak of that time. She was a young wren during the time of the Blitz. My father, an army film cameraman, was embedded with the 14th army in the Far East fighting the Japanese in Burma. He saw close up the horrors of war. My mother spoke of seeing the stark images that began to appear in cinema newsreels after the liberation of the camps. She described seeing those horrific images on the screen for the first time and how they were so shocking and vivid. Auschwitz, Bergen Belsen, Buchanwald, names forever associated with dehumanisation, never to be forgotten, generations since taught of the near destruction of a culture and images of horror, and taught through the important work of the Holocaust Education Trust and others that Paul O'Cain mentioned, we heard on Tuesday in this chamber at time for reflection from Holly and Aidan, Holocaust Educational Trust ambassadors who spoke so eloquently. And as Pastor Nemoller reminds us, it was not only Jewish people subjected to the worst treatment of fellow humans, but groups of different opinions, race, sexual orientation. The liberal democratic structures that we have built in the post-war era are vulnerable, fragile and need to be cherished. And since the Holocaust, we've witnessed genocides in the killing fields of Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. Today humanity is still inhumane to humanity. In Afghanistan, we see the unequal and oppressive treatment of young girls and women forbidden from learning. And in Ukraine, a nation fights for its survival in an unprovoked conflict. But the world has come together in an unprecedented way to unite to support Ukraine, recognising a will to avoid a war touching every corner of the globe and supporting free people backing a democratic government, even in humanity's darkest of times, the flame of the best in humanity flickers. Thank you. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer, and like other members, I wish to express my thanks to Fergus Ewing for tabling this important motion and for highlighting the significance of Holocaust Memorial Day. Maggie Chapman spoke about those whose names we remember and those who we don't. I commend my colleagues in the chamber and anyone listening that Auschwitz Memorial Twitter page, where every single day they remember all those names. It is important to be able to look across the chamber today and see us united in pain and respect to the millions who lost their lives as a result of Nazi persecution and those who perished in genocides, which took place in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. As Alexander Stewart and Fergus Ewing said, this year's theme of Holocaust Memorial Day is ordinary people. It's particularly poignant. It shines a light on the measurable and devastating impact the Holocaust and later genocides had on ordinary lives of ordinary people who were persecuted and murdered. As we are so painfully aware, the victims of genocide were singled out for no other reason than because of who they were or because of the group that they belonged to, Jews, disabled people, Gypsy travellers, Roma, Sinti, LGBT people, Black people and others. History has taught us that the Nazis and their collaborators targeted anyone they perceived to be different, thereby claiming the lives of millions and millions of people. It was ordinary people who facilitated those genocides. It was ordinary people who participated. It was ordinary people who turned a blind eye. Yet, in the darkest period of the atrocities, as Beatrice Wishart just said, it was ordinary people who, at great risk to their own lives, helped to rescue others, going to extraordinary lengths to provide safety to those most at risk. For those acts of immense courage, all of us should forever be indebted. I remember our own Jane Haining, who refused to leave her children. She looked after her, so she perished with them in the gas chambers. In Fergus Ewing gave us an insight into the work of Leslie Wilson in Russia, and we think of all of the human rights defenders, past, present and future, facing atrocities around the world. It is understandable for us who wish to contain those ordinary tragedies to the past and to think of them as something that could never conceivably happen again. However, as Stephanie Callaghan reminded us, regrettably the hateful attitudes that those involved drew upon in sowing the seeds of the Holocaust and subsequent genocides continue to blight our society. Kenny Gibson gave us a stark reminder of the continued violence in places around the world, including the massacre of Butcher in Ukraine. Beatrice Wishard reminded us about the women in Afghanistan and Iran. It is for this reason that we remain absolutely resolute in our commitment for tackling hatred and prejudice in all its form and whenever it may arise. That is why we will shortly be publishing our new hate crime strategy, setting out priorities for tackling hatred and prejudice in Scotland. Lived experience has been and will continue to be at the heart of our approach to tackling hate crime. We are grateful to those who have shared their experiences of prejudice and hate crime in order to help to inform the development of our strategy. Our vision is for a safe, resilient and inclusive Scotland where everyone lives free from hatred and prejudice, and our new strategy will set out how we will collectively work towards that goal. Many speakers today have highlighted the role of education, the brilliant work in our schools, and we have heard immense work going on across all of the schools in many of our constituencies. However, I know that we will all agree that the importance of education to ensure that we can effectively tackle hatred and prejudice in Scotland is incredibly important. Paul O'Kane reminded us of the work of Henry and Ingrid Wuga. I had the great honour to meet them here in this Parliament many years ago now, but we will never forget their story because they told us their story and they continue to tell their story. This week, we had the privilege of hearing from the two Holocaust education trust lessons from Auschwitz project ambassadors in this place, and their reflections demonstrate the power of Holocaust education to support our children and young people, to develop as compassionate, confident individuals and responsible members of society. The Scottish Government funded a few years ago young Gypsy Traveller community members to go to Auschwitz to learn about the Sinti uprising and the work that they are doing. I know Alexander Stewart, who is smiling away here, has written to me on the issues around the group that he spoke about, and I am working on a response. I will get that to you as soon as I can. This evening, alongside the First Minister, I will be attending an event organised by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust here in the Scottish Parliament, hosted by Paul O'Kane. I very much look forward to this valuable opportunity to commemorate the Holocaust and subsequent genocides, as well as to demonstrate our commitment to tackling present-day hatred and prejudice. I thank the organisers for their tireless dedication in ensuring that the victims continue to be honoured. Paul O'Kane and I yesterday were reflecting on the immense work of Kirsty, and I think that we should give her a shout out for the immense work that she does. This event tonight provides an opportunity to hear directly from survivors of both the Holocaust and the Bosnian genocide. Those are ordinary people, like Gertrude, Cullmer and Jane Henning, and others who have experienced tremendous suffering but displayed remarkable resilience in the face of dire circumstances. We remember in so many ways, and poetry for me has always been a powerful learning tool, and Beatrice Wishart reminded us very clearly of the poem First Day Came. I would like to draw the chamber to a poem that I look at now and again, and it just reminds me about how ordinary things can happen in ordinary ways. It is a poem by Michael Rosen. Michael Rosen has written a book that has been used in skills across the land now for the last couple of years, the missing, the true story of my family in World War I, that Michael Rosen says, fascism, sometimes I fear. I sometimes fear that people think that fascism arises in fancy dress worn by grotesques and monsters, as played out in endless rerun of the Nazis. Fascism arrives as your friend. It will restore your honour, make you feel proud, protect your house, give you a job, clean up your neighbourhood, remind you of how great you once were, clear out the vino and the corrupt, remove anything you feel is unlike you. It doesn't work in saying, our programme means militias, mass imprisonments, transportations, war and persecution. As I conclude, I would like to offer a final reflection. Genocide doesn't come out of nowhere, as Michael Rosen demonstrates in his poem. It is a result of years of unchallenged prejudice and hatred, and as we reflect on this year's theme, if you take away only one thing, it should be to recognise the responsibility that we all have to challenge prejudice and hatred wherever and whenever it occurs. Let the Holocaust and other genocides be stark warnings that what can happen before can happen again, and let's make sure it doesn't.