 The next item of business is a member's business debate on motion 3204 in the name of Jackson Carlaw on Holy Cross Memorial Day 2017. The debate will be concluded without any questions being put. Those members who wish to speak in the debate, please press the request-to-speak buttons now. The call on Jackson Carlaw to open the debate. Mr Carlaw, seven minutes please. Presiding Officer, I am advised that tomorrow there will be some 146 train journeys between Glasgow Central and Queen Street and Edinburgh Waverly. I usually travel by train and many colleagues do so also 146 journeys. Think then and reflect that in May 1944 it took just 147 train journeys, one more than the daily commute across the central belt, to transport around half a million Hungarian Jews to their murder at Auschwitz Birkenau in Poland. The ingrained image is one of a constant stream of trains over several years hurtling across the European landscape in some grotesque feet of organisation. The truth, far more prosaic, is that it took just 147 rail journeys and they were non-prioritised, slow and lumbering more often than not lasting days. They were among the most hellish rail journeys of any ever undertaken. The appalling truths of the traumas endured on those packed cattle wagons is so awful that those who survived them rarely allowed themselves to speak directly in detail of their experience ever again. Of the baseness, the collapse of dignity in person, the sheer awfulness confusion for boating and death. Trains arriving at Auschwitz Birkenau did so at all ours, some in darkness, some while the sun shone. All disembarking were disoriented and found that they were immediately segregated by gender and age without so much as a moment to gather their thoughts or say goodbye to loved ones. Those fit enough to work, deemed in Nazi terminology useful, were often marched straight across to the opposite platform and within hours transported to Nazi-forced labour work camps where many would ultimately be worked and starved to their graves. The rest, mothers, the elderly, the infirm and from the photographs now displayed in the site, young children holding hands, skipping with joy to be free of the trains, began their final short walk not much longer than a stroll down and back up the full length of either Glasgow Queen Street or Edinburgh Wavelies platforms to their murder in the Auschwitz gas chambers, 6,000 or so per train. In less time that we will be participating in this debate, Jews arrived by train at Auschwitz Birkenau, were processed, marched to their execution, then gassed their bodies roughly stacked before cremation, from arrival to death in less time than this debate. This was industrialised murder on a scale hitherto never seen. The origins of the Holocaust began in Hitler's pre-war Germany. As a term the Holocaust came into being after the events, no one person ever saw the Holocaust in its entirety. It was over the years in different ways in multiple countries a series of outrages which led to the murder of some 6 million Jews. It began with the persecution of the Jewish minority in Nazi Germany itself and they were a minority. Only one in 100 pre-war Germans were Jews. There were for instance more Jews in the city of Warsaw alone than the whole of pre-war Germany. Of the pre-war German Jewish population, some 60 per cent emigrated before the war, some as far as China to a world away from Hitler, others to the United States, too many sadly to the temporary sanctuary of Germany's pre-war neighbours. So when Poland fell to Hitler, so too did a population where one in 10 were Jewish some 3 million. It was at this point that persecution and prejudice or talk of resettlement and far off lands turned instead to mass murder. In 1941 and early 1942 the genocide began as Nazi butchers went to their victims. Some one and a half million Eastern European Jews were shot in woodlands often just yards from their homes, children, their mothers, grandparents and fathers. There was no journey for them across Europe, just a forced march to the edge of a hastily prepared pit in an all too familiar neighbourhood and a bullet in the back of the head. Sickningly the record shows that the only concern of Nazi commanders in the face of this atrocity was for the spiritual wellbeing of the SS fanatics carrying out the executions. Hundreds of thousands of other Polish Jews were confined to the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, half a million in accommodation barely suitable for half that number. At the notorious Vansi conference in January 20, 1942 in Berlin, where the final solution was conceived and approved, it was determined that, instead of progressing a genocide where the killers went to their victims, the Nazis would now transport the victims to their killers. Between July and September 42, the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated, its population transported to the new so-called Reinhard camps, named after Hydrich, the architect. The first extermination camps at Belzac, Treblinka and Sobobor, names that live on an infany. With brutal efficiency these death camps did their job and job done. They were destroyed and all obvious traces concealed. Only two people are thought to have survived Belzac alone. Auschwitz was different in that it was a labour camp first and then with Auschwitz-Werkenau, both a labour and an extermination camp. Standing in its silent ruins today, you sense the scale, a scale not apparent to anyone there at the time. Those incarcerated Auschwitz were not free to wander around as visitors are now, most not only the barracks in which they were contained and the area on which they worked. In the intervening years since, many who did survive and who could face what they saw as an obligation to return were themselves stunned to see the industrialised scale of the camp. Today, extraordinarily, as many as 1 million visit Berkenau annually to see and learn, ironically, as many as were murdered there during the war. Just as the two school students who addressed us at time for reflection on Tuesday did last November as part of the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust. The final months of the war saw the long death marches of those who had survived the camps back to Germany itself as the Nazi machine began to collapse. Many were shot on the sides of the road if they so much just paused. In Budapest, in the winter of 1944-45, the killers again returned to their victims with the first city-based exterminations of the war. Tens of thousands of Jews shot in the banks of the Danube and dumped in its waters. Several were often bound together with one shot in one victim, the rest dragged into the icy waters and drowned. This chaotic collapse also led to the final horrors of Ravensbruck, Dachau and Bergen Belsen, where between December 1944 and March 1945, the camp population increased to 45,000, with 17 deaths in that month alone. Starvation, dysentery and the freezing cold had replaced the gas chambers as the method of killing. A holocaust that began in Berlin, progressed to Poland in the east, worked its way back westwards as Nazi Germany collapsed and finally it ended back where it began in Berlin, 6 million murdered. My contribution to last year's debate, I spoke of the events of 1946 when more Jews were murdered across Europe in that year than in the 13 years prior to the war. As they returned to their former homes, they found others in them. Often people they had known and trusted before the war, now wading their pre-war clothes, were not welcome back, many were murdered on the spot. We all ask now why, how, who. The easiest answer is Hitler and Nazi Germany, but it is a convenient truth. Long before the Nazis anti-Semitism existed, while populations of countries across Europe in many cases made efforts to defy and thwart the Nazi persecution of Jews, others all too readily conspired to make it possible. The stain of anti-Semitism remains, and for all that we say never again, genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Darfur stand as evidence of our collective failure to match that ideal. In my issued constituency on the street where I grew up in the 60s and 70s, every second home was a Jewish one. When today the community commemorates Yom Shoa in May, the names of those murdered by the Nazis are honoured on screen at the Gifnick synagogue. They are all too often familiar as the grandparents, uncles, aunts and sometimes cousins of those with whom I played as a child and grew up among. All that happened when my parents were teenagers, in a world run by my grandparents generation. At death camps and sites, any one of us here could be standing on later this afternoon, in countries to which we now go on holiday, among people who are now our friends. We can surely all be proud that, apparently alone in Europe, Scotland remains the one country where no Jew has ever been killed because of their religion, but we cannot be complacent. The whispers of anti-Semitism which started all this can be heard again. On 22 November last year, Rabbi Yossi Bodenheim proudly addressed this Scottish Parliament at our weekly time for reflection. As he walked back later that afternoon to Waverly station along the Royal Mile, he was astonishingly the victim of a minor anti-Semitic assault in front of his young son and heavily pregnant wife, who were left distressed and naturally horrified in Scotland, in Edinburgh, in our time. Last Sunday, at a Jewish burned supper in my constituency, the First Minister cradled in her arms the two-week-old infant son of Yossi and Sarah Bodenheim, a tiny infant, Gabriel, dressed proudly by his parents in Scottish tartan. Embracing our Jewish friends, neighbours and fellow Scots should be the response of us all. Today, we remember the Holocaust and all the evil that it represents, but the fires, prejudices and ignorance that made it possible remain and probably truthfully always will. It falls to us and then to others after us to ensure that anti-Semitism is confronted and defeated, to be optimistic and hopeful and to celebrate the life of Scotland to which our Jewish community has contributed so vitally ever since and in which it will always be welcome. I have got eight speakers wanting to speak in this debate. I call Kenneth Gibson, followed by Adam Tomkins. Four minutes, please, Mr Gibson. I thank Jackson Callough for securing debating time on the importance of which it continues to resonate. How can life go on? Even before the war, there was hostility to Jewish emigration with internment camps across Europe from Romania to the Netherlands. I want to focus on anti-Semitism since the Holocaust. The Kiehl's programme was an outbreak of violence against Jewish refugees in that Polish city in July 1946 and the deadly slaughter of Jews in the world's aftermath. Only 200 Kiehl's Jews remained of a pre-war 30,000 that survived us having returned from either concentration camps or hiding. A young Polish boy disappeared for several days and returned, falsely claiming that he had been kidnapped and held hostage in a cellar by Jews. Policemen broke into the building, finding no trace of kidnapped children. The residents were ordered to hand over their valuables and the police started shooting. While some Jews were killed inside, others fled onto the street and were attacked with rocks and steel rods by civilians and members of the ruling Polish Workers Party. Around 20 Jews were beaten to death. Others injured were robbed and beaten by soldiers on route to hospital and assaulted by other patients on arrival. 40 Jews were killed and 40 wounded. The sheer brutality and tragedy of this event shook the Jewish population so deeply that it shattered hopes that it could resettle in Poland after the Nazi era. Within a year, Poland's Jewish population had shrunk from 240,000 to just 90,000 due to immigration, most to a nascent Israel. There were 3.3 million Polish Jews before the Holocaust. The Kiehl's horror is just one example of widespread anti-Jewish violence prevalent across Europe and beyond after World War 2. In some countries, due hating was superficially disguised such as Stalin's campaign against ruthless cosmopolitanism, linked to the so-called doctor's plot of the early 1950s, whereby his paranoia led him to wrongly believe his mostly Jewish doctors planned to kill him. Indeed, prior to his death, Stalin planned to deport the Soviet Union's entire Jewish population to Siberia. In the late 1960s, more Jews were scapegoated and expelled from Poland following Israel's victory in the Six-Day War over the Soviet Union's client Arab states. In 1980, fabricated attempts were made to link the rise of the solidarity movement with so-called Jewish agitators from Poland's by-then-miniscule Jewish community. In Western Europe, the re-emergence and rise of far-right hate groups and Islamic fundamentalism has led to increased attacks against Jews, and we all know of allegations of anti-Semitism, sadly, in Jeremy Corbyn's Labour Party, disguised as anti-Zionism. Continued tensions between Israel and the Palestinians feed anti-Semitic rhetoric, and some Arab states do not allow Jews to live there, are ordinarily strengthening Zionism. Of course, Israel itself is measured differently and to a higher standard of probity than its neighbours. The Jew among nations, Alan Dershavitz, calls Israel. Just with this number of motions in this place relating to the last Gaza conflict compared to ISIS or the Syrian bloodbath. In Scotland, we celebrate Holocaust survivors and our vibrant Jewish community as part of a rich diversity. Last year, pupils from Largs Academy and my constituency visited Auschwitz and Dachau understood the brutality of Nazism experiences that led many to tears in which I am sure they will never forget. The visit to Auschwitz by two pupils, Amy Coulshaw and Imogen Harvey, was arranged through the Holocaust Educational Trust's lessons from Auschwitz project. Upon the return, many girls were soon moved by their experience at the arrange for a survivor of Bergen-Belsen, Hungarian-born Professor Ladislaub Lobb, to visit Largs Academy and the school-raised funds to pay for his flight and accommodation. To have captivated audience of 300, the Professor shared his experiences as an 11-year-old living life in the Colossal Var of Ghetto in 1944 before his internment in Bergen-Belsen until liberation. The Professor shared his experiences in dealing with Satan, racial castlers during rescue mission for which he was awarded the Austrian Holocaust and Memorial Award. The education of future generations about the Holocaust must be combined with confronting those who died as Iranian former president Ahmad Jenedad famously did. We must oppose anti-Semitism while striving to be tolerant and a humane society, never forgetting the lessons from the darkest period of man's inhumanity to man. I remind the chamber that my wife and our four children are Jewish. In 1951 Hannah Arendt published her groundbreaking work on the origins of totalitarianism. Part one of the book concerns anti-Semitism and in a famous section entitled Between Pariah and Parvenu, this is what she says. In the 150 years when the Jews truly lived amidst and not just in the neighbourhood of Western European peoples, they always had to pay with political misery for social glory and with social insult for political success. Society confronted with political, economic and legal equality for Jews made it quite clear that none of its classes was prepared to grant them social equality and that only exceptions from the Jewish people would be received. Jews who heard the strange compliment that they were exceptions, exceptional Jews, knew quite well that it was this very ambiguity that they were Jews and yet presumably not like Jews which opened the doors of society to them. That's the end of the quotation. The pariah has no country. The pariah in Hannah Arendt's account is one for whom human rights do not exist. Hence her argument later in the origins of totalitarianism that at the heart of human rights lies the right to have rights, the most important right of them all, the right to belong. This is how she puts it. The calamity of the rightness is not that they are deprived of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion, formulas that were designed to solve problems within given communities but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever. I visit Israel frequently, the only country in the world founded to give the Jewish people that which everyone else takes for granted, a community of our own, a home. A couple of years ago I went for the first time to Yad Vashem, Israel's holocaust museum on the western slopes of Mount Herzl in Jerusalem. Yad Vashem is a phrase taken from the book of Isaiah, meaning a place and a name. It is a place of remembrance where the names of those who were murdered by the Nazis are recorded and where their memories are honoured. It is at once a place of calm dignity and outraged defiance. No matter how much you think you know about the holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people, you realise within a few minutes at Yad Vashem that you will only ever be able to scratch the surface of its unimaginable pain. One resolution burns through you as you walk through the museum, aghast, appalled at what European evil did to the Jews. Never again. And as you leave Yad Vashem you see carved into a huge stone archway in the words of Ezekiel 3714, I will put my breath into you and you shall live again and I will set you upon your own soil. Well, I'm into that. Closer to home I took two of my children last weekend to Colvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow where there is a series of exhibits about the holocaust and some of these record the testimony of survivors. This extract caught my eye. Why I survived liberation in Bergen-Belsen. After liberation we got 10s. One had beans and meat, one sugar and biscuits. Anyone who ate the beans and meat didn't make it because their system could not cope. I changed my 10. I survived and I'm here to tell you the tale. But just, I survived just. Presiding officer, we will remember the past. We will honour the memory and by that remembrance and by that honouring will we shape our future. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Presiding Officer, and thanks to Jackson Carlaw for securing this debate. Tomorrow sees the release of the film Denial, coinciding with Holocaust Memorial Day. We know that there are Holocaust deniers and maybe we can see why for some people. Who would want to believe that they have seen cruel degrading treatment, the torture, the maiming and the murder was done by their relatives? For some who stood by and let it happen, maybe it was easier to try and pretend that it didn't, but the fact is that it did. It is difficult to comprehend that any human could commit atrocities that we now know happened. One survivor, Joseph Perrill, told of what he saw on arrival on a train to Auschwitz, and I will quote him. Then I saw a baby being born as its mother was pushed onto the ground. An SS guard grabbed the baby, cut the cord and threw it unceremoniously to one side like so much rubbish. How, Presiding Officer, can we even begin to comprehend the extermination carried out in the gas chambers and crematoria and how anybody could design and build these absolute abominations? Kitty Hacks-Moxon remembers arriving at Auschwitz Birknau at Dawn as a teenager with her mother, and she said, a reddish glow through the mist was flickering in the weirdest way and there was a sickly, fatty, clawing smell. Mother and I glanced at each other baffled, who could be roasting me great quantities of it at this hour of the morning? Six million Jews, as we've heard from Jackson Carlaw in his opening, were murdered by the Nazis in the Holocaust, and remembering atrocities is necessary to try and stop them happening again and ensuring that the facts cannot be denied is absolutely vital. That's why Holocaust Memorial Day, survivor testimonies, the lessons from Auschwitz project and voices speaking out everywhere, including in this Parliament, are so important. I visited Auschwitz Birknau as the deputy Presiding Officer with the Holocaust Educational Trust project for schools a couple of years ago. The slaughter there that was carried out on an industrial scale was horrendous, and despite Nazi efforts to destroy them, there is obviously clear evidence of the crematoria and the gas chambers. I don't know how people live through that, and I then found the strength to carry on living how life goes on. Hearing our reading about the Holocaust is hugely important, but seeing that hellish place for yourself affects you in a way that's difficult to describe. The first shock seeing the sign saying, Arbott McFrey, work brings freedom, knowing how many people were worked and staffed to death and how few were freed. Then there's the harrowing photographs of many of those people, but it's the rooms of belongings that I find most difficult. Shoes, cases, eyeglasses, prosthetic limbs are all deeply disturbing, and the room with human hair is devastating, and is rightly treated with due respect because it contains human remains. However, for me, it was the room with household items that reduced me to tears, perhaps because they were so ordinary, wooden spoons, favourite pots and pans, cutlery had all been brought on the journey to that despicable hellhole. Did the owners really believe that they were being resettled? Were they hoping or was it to calm their children? Some people even had to buy their own train tickets to the extermination camp. At the end of our visit, we took out one or two photos from those found in belongings to identify with. I chose a wedding one. It was just like my gran and grandpa's, and then I chose a baby one. The pose that the baby was in was exactly the same as the one that I have of my son, who also has a Jewish ancestry, if I might just say. I think that members must be encouraged to go to Auschwitz as part of the project, and I think that they should be supported by this Parliament to do so. Perhaps the Presiding Officer can take that forward to consider as a practical outcome from the debate. For various reasons, I didn't get debriefing, and I think that anyone who goes should get it. I went back a year later with my husband, and it was still harrowing, but it helped to be able to talk to each other about it. I want to just give some more words from Kitty Hartmock, since she said, I live through Birkenau without ever understanding how any members of a great nation could indulge in such wickedness. I don't think that any of us can understand that, but we ought to survivors to read the testimonies, to talk about it and to see the death camps for ourselves, and that way we can try to stop such atrocities happening again. I apologise, Presiding Officer, but at the end, I don't think that there should be room in this debate for partisan comment. Anti-semitism, sadly, occurs across political parties, and it is unacceptable wherever it occurs. I congratulate Jackson Carlaw again for bringing this matter to the chamber. I thank Jackson Carlaw for giving us all the opportunity to mark the Holocaust Memorial Day here in the Scottish Parliament. On the Holocaust Memorial Day, we mark the worst atrocity in human history, a crime beyond comprehension, as other members have already said, involved the industrial, political and military capacity of a world superpower being directed towards the annihilation of the Jewish people, as well as its other perceived enemies and those who did not fit its horrifying plans for a master race. It is estimated that over 1 million people were killed in Auschwitz alone before it was liberated 72 years ago tomorrow. Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust, alongside a further five million people—polls, homosexuals, those with disabilities, communists, trade unionists and enemies of the Nazi regime. Despite the vows to never allow such a crime against humanity to occur again, other genocides have happened since the Holocaust, in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. On the Holocaust Memorial Day, we remember not just the victims of the Third Reich but all the victims of genocide. We have to grapple with the question of how such events could ever have happened. Reading the testimony of the Soviet commander who liberated Auschwitz, he said that, in the midst of the 20th century, I cannot comprehend this as he stood beside the ovens. In the 21st century, can we comprehend it now? Can we prevent genocide from occurring again? Those questions have taken on a renewed importance in recent years. The actual mass murders of the Holocaust took place between 1941 and 1945. Before that could happen, there was years—over a decade—long process of dehumanisation of propaganda targeted against the Jewish people in Germany in order to set the political context that would permit mass murder, that would give it passive, if not active, acceptance. The propaganda was not rational. It was not true. It was lies. Lies about the Jews being responsible for losing the First World War, lies about Jews plotting world domination. The fact that they were lies did not halt the advance of fascism. While we must be careful and it is rarely appropriate to do so, there are comparisons to be drawn with events happening today. Across Europe and America, we once again see lies and propaganda dominating news coverage, and that has fuelled the rise of the neo-Nazi movement of the far-right. Views that were once unacceptable have come back. Here in the UK, we have columnists in a national newspaper describing refugees as cockroaches who should be met with gunboats. The UN's Commissioner for Human Rights described that as pro-genocide propaganda. Too often, the media has served to legitimise the far-right by giving them coverage. One of the final opposition speeches that were given in the Reichstag before it was suspended included an uncomfortably relevant section today. It would be easier to stand up to such exaggerations if the kind of reporting that separates truth from falsehood were possible at home. The SPD politician who said that did not survive the weeks after he made those comments. One US media outlet, though, in recent weeks, in recent months, ran the headline Meet the Dapper White Supremacist Riding the Trump Wave—a dapper white supremacist. I wonder if dapper was the word that sprung to mind of African Americans as that individual discussed the merits of the genocide of black people. When you treat fascism as simply another political point of view, you have conceded legitimacy to that point of view. It becomes acceptable to discuss it in the mainstream. However, genocide is not an acceptable point of view. Believing that you can win the argument by giving those people a platform for debate misunderstands the problem. Fascism is not rational. Antisemitism is not rational. Fascists and others, advancing dangerous lethal agendas, are not and never have been interested in winning the debate. They just want to win. We cannot ever allow that to happen again. Today, we must remember the victims of humanity's worst crime and we must think seriously about how we can turn our determination to never allow it again into a practical reality. I thank Jackson Carlaw for securing the debate. As Jackson Carlaw and other members will know, I have spoken in those debates in the chamber in the past, indicating my support for the Holocaust Educational Trust and the lessons from Auschwitz programme. I visited Auschwitz in 2000 and any member of the chamber or anyone who has actually been there will tell you of the harrowing construction that it is. I certainly will never forget what I saw that day and how it has affected me at that time of life and also since then and how it sticks with me to this day. The 27th of January is an important and crucial day for me. One of the aspects in the Holocaust Educational Trust card that we get from just outside of the chamber today is that one of the parts of it is that we believe that the Holocaust must have a permanent place in our nation's collective memory. The word happy is probably the wrong word to use but I am happy that we have this day every single year so that we can remember about what happened in the past. On the rest of the contribution, I want to quote from a blog, a young lady called Kirsten Irvine. Kirsten Irvine is from Port Glasgow. She attends my old high school, Port Glasgow High School, and Kirsten took part in the Holocaust Educational Trust lessons from Auschwitz project. That is quoting directly from our blog. On the 27th of January marks the liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp. It is a time when we seek to learn the lessons of the past and to recognise that genocide does not take place on its own. It is a steady process that can begin with discrimination, racism and hatred are not checked and prevented. The Nazis created an abyss where racism and politics pulled together towards nihilism. In this dark chasm, Jews were murdered and when Jews were saved it was often thanks to people who could act on behalf of a state or by institutions that could function like a state. When none of the moral illumination of institutions was present, kindness was all that remained and the pure light of the individual rescuers shone. Thankfully Scotland is a long history of welcoming people of all nationalities and faiths and of supporting their integration into the Scottish way of life and recognising the vibrancy they bring to our society and culture. The work that the Holocaust Educational Trust does through the lessons from Auschwitz project and from listening to the testimony of Holocaust survivors has allowed dozens of young people in my constituency in Inverclyde to share what they have learned with their peers and has helped to reveal the role that their community played in showing tolerance and understanding. Kirsten talks about the history of Jewish people coming to Greenock and just a couple of parts that she highlights. Between 1881 and the beginning of the First World War, nearly 3 million Jews left Eastern Europe. Jews poured into Greenock by the thousands. A third of all passenger ships crossed Atlantic from the Baltic ports to New York and stopped off there. As a result, Jewish boarding houses were established at Jewish soup kitchens and were set up at the dockside at Custom House Key to cater for the thousands of homeless. Some Jews remained long enough only to catch the next ship out. Gradually, by the 1930s, the Jewish population in Inverclyde began to dwindle, yet the appalling social policies perpetrated by the Nazis in Germany and across Eastern Europe would once again see Jewish refugees at Greenock's shores. One of which was Leo Metchstein. Leo was born in 1933. He was one of five children born to Jewish parents in Berlin. As you can imagine, life was incredibly tough for Leo growing up. He had to run to and from school to say that he had been recognised as a Jew. His school was burnt down during Kristallnacht. His father, as well as my Jewish, was also rumored to be a communist. He was found dead in a field in 1935, with no explanation from the German authorities as to the cause of death. Eventually, Leo's mother took the incredibly difficult decision to flee Germany with her five children through the Kindertransport, the rescue efforts that brought thousands of refugee Jewish children to the UK from Nazi Germany between 1938 and 1940. Leo and his family were brought up in Scotland. There, the evidence of solidarity and support for vulnerable refugees across communities is evident. Leo lived the duration of the war in Skelmarly, in Kenneth Gibson's constituency, in a large house rented by the refugee community with 30 other Jewish children. The 27th of January is a vital day to remember the past, but it is also certainly for the future. With the theme of this year of how can life go on, my recommendation to everyone in the chamber and anyone who watches this particular debate or reads the Fisher report. My recommendation would be that it is absolutely vital that we continue with education and the teaching of future generations so that we certainly can learn the lessons of the past and that, hopefully, we can certainly have a better future going forward. Before I call Annie Wells, can I say to children review the number of members remaining to speak in today's debate? I am minded to accept a motion under rule 8.14.3 to extend debate by up to 30 minutes. Thank you, Mr Carlaw. No members having indicated disagreement, I therefore extend this debate under standing order rule 8.14.3. I call Annie Wells, please. Tomorrow, as we all know, marks Holocaust Memorial Day, a day in which to remember the six million Jewish men, women and children murdered by the Nazi regime, as well as those in subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The significance of the day cannot be underestimated. Hundreds of thousands of lives were destroyed or changed beyond recognition because of our regime's intent on manifesting hatred and dividing societies along battle lines from which to kill. In testimonies made available online by the trust, we hear of those extraordinary people who defied the will of their regimes and survived to tell their story. On Sunday, I was humbled to attend a Holocaust interfaith peace service at Glasgow University and to hear from the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, Saskia Tepe. Now living in Scotland, Saskia spoke openly about her mother Bridget Langer, who gnarly escaped death at Auschwitz by jumping off a train into a snowdrift and evading detection by wearing a nurse's uniform and tending to German soldiers on the front. As well as honouring the survivor of the regimes, tomorrow also marks an opportunity to use the lessons of the past to inform our lives today. We are fortunate in this country. Britain was one of the few countries in the interwar period in which political extremism failed to take mass, a vital block in the path to genocide. However, it is not to say that we are immune from racism nor from the language of hatred and exclusion, and that should also be a focus for tomorrow. What is the logical end-point of racism and xenophobia if not to create permanent division within society? How do we tackle those discordant society, seeing their significance in the everyday, even if not reaching the frightening heights of genocide? I was pleased to see statistics from a survey of last year's participants that showed 66 per cent of participants reported the day has made them feel more sympathetic towards people from different backgrounds. Across Scotland, 20 events will have either taken place or will take place to mark the Holocaust Day tomorrow. In Glasgow to highlight a couple of events, pupils from St Rock's secondary school will be hosting an event to mark the day with school pupils from schools across the city to share and learn. Throughout this week, Glasgow City Council in partnership with the Glasgow Film Theatre has held screenings of inside Hannah's suitcase. The poignant story of two Jewish children in pre-World War 2, Czechoslovakia, in order to support the Holocaust education within the city's primary schools. To close, I thank my colleague Jackson Carlaw for raising awareness of Holocaust Memorial Day and for the opportunity to speak in the debate today. I thank the trust itself for its efforts that has made in organising the event, as to all those who have spoken honestly about their experience in some of the darkest periods of our history for the purposes of learning from the past. I thank Jackson Carlaw for giving us the important opportunity to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2017. As we know, tomorrow, 27 January, marks the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious death camp and symbol of the horrors of the Holocaust. The scale of the inhumanity that took place there is staggering all these years later, as Elaine Smith said, it is still hard for many to comprehend. The site of the largest mass murder in a single location in human history, over one million people died at Auschwitz, 90 per cent of them Jewish. Even in the horror of all their still powerful individual stories of strength, heroism and bravery, one such story is that of the late Reverend Ernest Levy, a Holocaust survivor whom I had the honour of meeting in East Renfisher a number of years ago through the Presiding Officer, Ken Macintosh. As a young man of 19 and 20, Ernest Levy survives seven Nazi concentration camps, losing half his family, including his father, a brother and a sister. He settled in the west of Scotland for the latter 48 years of his life. Recalling his experience of Auschwitz, Ernest Levy described it as a world of evilness beyond description, where he would cease to be a person but were reduced to a number, he was totally dehumanised. Ernest Levy was the first Holocaust survivor I had ever met and the time I spent listening to him will stay with me for the rest of my life. I will always remember what he told us about his experience, but I always remember too the humanity, his humanity and his enduring belief in the essential goodness of people. Such humanity from someone who had gone through so much is an example to his all. He shared his story with me and with others so that lessons of this dark period in history would not be forgotten. There are many others who work hard to ensure that those lessons stay with us, including some organisations that I would like to thank today, as Annie Wells has just said. The Holocaust Memorial Day Trust is supporting a series of events across the country for people to come together to remember not only the millions of people killed in the Holocaust but also in subsequent erasides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Darfur and anywhere in the world where the act of killing people because of their religious beliefs or ethnicity continues. Like Stuart McMillan, I would also like to commend the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust, which works in partnership with schools, universities, local authorities and other institutions to educate children and young people about the Holocaust and its contemporary significance. Many will be familiar with the lessons from Auschwitz programme, which enables two pupils from every high school in Scotland to visit Auschwitz every year and go on to become young ambassadors for the trust. Marianne Allen and Ewan Boyle from Notre Dame High School in my region were among those pupils who chose to take part recently. Upon returning from Auschwitz, they spoke of the profound impact that the visit had on them and the human stories of real families devastated by what happened there and real lives that would never be the same again. The pupils said that seeing the camp in person gave them a much greater understanding of the terrible time that anything they could ever have learned from a text book, and we should fully support that initiative. Across the country, many of our local schools mark Holocaust Memorial Day every year in my own area. Renfisher and East Renfisher councils participate in a joint Holocaust memorial service with Paisley grammar reciting verses from birdsong by Gillian Clark this year. Given some of the parallels with today's child refugee crisis, Herriot primary will be hearing the life stories of kinder transport survivors, and pupils will also be reflecting on the number of child refugees we have welcomed into our own communities over the past few months. The theme, as has been mentioned, of this year's Holocaust Memorial Day is how can life go on, the question of how, in the wake of such unimaginable horror, humanity continues on this path. How, by learning lessons of the past, do we try to build a more accepting and tolerant society for the future? We know that genocide never just happens, there are always a set of circumstances that occur or that are created to build the climate in which genocide can take place. We need to provide future generations with the knowledge that they need to understand how these events came to pass and present them from happening again. Holocaust Memorial Day provides each of us in Scotland and across the world with an opportunity to reflect upon the values that we hold dear so that we continue to build a safer, more inclusive society without prejudice, without anti-semitism, where our differences are respected. Thank you. First, I would like to thank Jackson Carlaw for securing this Holocaust Memorial Day debate. Through years, there have been many religious peoples who have faced persecution in all parts of the world, none more than the Jews. Today, we remember the suffering that this proud people was subjected to by Adolf Hitler and his gang of Nazi thugs. At the end of World War 1, Hitler blamed the Bolsheviks and the Jews for Germany's defeat. His first written utterance on political questions emphasised what he called the anti-semitism of reason. His ultimate goal was the total removal of the Jews. The final solution was the Nazi plan for the extermination of the Jews during World War 2. The policy of deliberate and systematic genocide of Jews across Germany occupied Europe was formulated in procedural terms by the Nazi leadership in January 1942 at the Wansley Villa Conference near Berlin. That decision culminated in the Holocaust, which saw the killings of 90 per cent of Jewish Jewry and two-thirds of the Jewish population in Europe. Across Europe, there were over 60 camps. Some were prison and labour camps, concentration camps and extermination camps. Too many to name. Auschwitz, Birkenau, Belsik, Kiumno, Džaznovik, Džazbisti, Treblinka, Sobibor. Most people will remember Sobibor, when the inmates rose up and killed a number of their guards and then escaped from the camp through a minefield where a large number of the prisoners died but many had reached the safety of the forest. What the prisoners suffered in Sobibor was made into a film, along with other films, which showed what the Jewish people had suffered in those days of World War 2. There are two other films that I would recommend to anyone who wishes to see what terrible crimes were committed against the Jews. Those films are The Penist and, of course, Schindler's List. The Penist tells the story of Wadslaw Spillman in the Warsaw Ghetto, what he and his family had to suffer at the hands of the captors was outrageous and inhumane. He only managed to survive due to the kindness of a German officer who recognised him as a great Polish penis. The officer near the end of the war was captured by the Russians. No one knows what happened to the officer, but Spillman owes his life to him. The other film, Schindler's List, is the most powerful that I have ever seen, detailing what happened to Jews torn from their day-to-day lives and how Oscar Schindler helped them. In 1939, Schindler acquired a enamelware factory in Krakow, Poland, where he employed about 1,750 workers of whom 1,000 were Jews at the factory's peak in 1944. His Nazi connections helped Schindler to protect his Jewish workers from deportation and death in the concentration camps. As time went on, Schindler had to give Nazi officials even larger bribes and gifts of luxury items obtained only in the black market to keep his workers safe. By July 1944, Germany was losing the war, the SS were closing down the concentration camps. Many were killed in Auschwitz and other camps. Schindler convinced the SS Holmstonfuhrer Amon Gouth, commander of the nearby Krakow concentration camp, to allow him to move his factory to Brunlitz in Sudetenland, thus sparing his workers from almost certain death in the gas chambers. Using the names provided by the Jewish ghetto police officer Marcel Goebert, Schindler compared the list of 1,200 Jews who travelled in October 1944. Schindler continued to bribe SS officials to prevent the execution of his workers until the end of the war. Schindler at first was only out to make money, but when he saw what was being done to the Jews, he saved the lives of 1,200 of those Jews. The film was very powerful and showed the world the truth of the barbaric methods that people can use. Today, let us not forget the Holocaust, let us ensure that this can never happen again. I am very happy to support today's motion in detail and ask everyone to ensure that anti-seminatism in all its forms is opposed. I thank Jackson Carlaw for tabling that motion, which highlights Holocaust memorial day. I thank all members who have taken part. It is essential that we come together each year to commemorate what is, of course, one of the darkest periods in human history. When we look back to this time, the scale of the atrocities and the depth of, if I might use Robert Burns's phrase, man's inhumanity to man, remain difficult to truly comprehend. Many of us in this chamber, including myself, have had the privilege to visit Auschwitz and will have come away from that experience lost for words at both the individual acts of immense cruelty and the scarcely imaginable scale of the crime. During the Holocaust, 11 million lives were extinguished, the equivalent of the population of Scotland twice over. The tragedy and the crime that occurred provides us with the opportunity to reflect that those lives were lost due to the denial of basic human rights and freedoms. The right that each one of us has to our own culture and heritage, our right to freedom of expression and thought, and our right to peaceful coexistence as part of a multicultural society. Since then, as Ross Greer and others have pointed out, fundamental human rights have continued to be denied in atrocities all over the world from the massacre in Srebrenica to the atrocities in Darfur. Reflections like that provide us with an opportunity to grow and prosper for a better tomorrow. We must use this period of reflection to renew our collective commitment to tackling all forms of discrimination and to promoting a multi-faith and multicultural society that is based on mutual trust, respect and understanding. It is right, as a number of members have done, that we confront the reality of events, events from which we would often prefer to avert our eyes. It is right that we confront any who would deny or belittle the reality of those events. Many people have mentioned their visits to Auschwitz and things that made an impression on them. There are, of course, many things that I could mention in my own case, but I want to focus on one thing when I talk about people averting their eyes. That is, I am sure, other members who have been there. I have had the experience of learning about the camp common dance house seeing it and learning that he lived there apparently quite happily, ostensibly, with his family and wrote home to his friends and extended family, as did they, about where they were going on their holidays and what they were having for dinner that night. It is a chilling lesson in what happens if we turn our eyes away from the reality and the horror of the events that we commemorate today and commemorate this week. I want to say about looking to Scotland and what we are doing in Scotland. The Scottish Government works in partnership with the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, along with our intermediary partner, Interfaith Scotland, to deliver Scotland's national Holocaust Memorial Day event each year. This year's events, hosted by East Renfrewshire, are underway on Sunday 22 January, as we heard, there was an interfaith service that was attended by almost 400 people with representation from the different faith communities. LoMOS Prison will host an event to raise awareness and educate prisoners. Guest speakers include Umitsetze Stewart, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide, who now resides in Scotland, and Saskia Tepe, whose mother, Brigitte Langer, suffered the tribulations of war and its aftermath some three times. We are actively engaging with our communities. The First Minister and the Cabinet Secretary for Communities, Social Security and Equalities hosted the second interfaith summit in November 2016, discussing shared ambitions and challenges of Scotland's diverse faith communities. One of the issues that we must talk about, of course, is faith-based prejudice. Let me be very clear that anti-semitism in any form has absolutely no place in Scotland. Again, as Ross Greer indicated, we should take on those who suggest that intolerance is just as valid a point of view as tolerance. We appreciate the significant contribution that our Jewish communities make to this country. Scotland is and long has been their home. We are committed to working with those communities who experience hate crime to ensure that a zero-tolerance approach is taken and that the ignorance and inequalities that create the conditions of hatred are robustly tackled. That is why the Government is, for instance, very willing to support and does support the work of the Holocaust Education Trust to take Scottish senior school pupils to visit Auschwitz on a regular basis. We undertake trips of that kind, and I think that they are valued by those school communities. Can memory think the Holocaust and acts of remembrance like this mean that we will never forget, I hope, and never allow such atrocities to take place again? The obligation is on each of us to confront that history and to dignify the story and the people who suffered, and to pass on the obligation to future generations through a legacy of hope. We want a Scotland where everyone, regardless of background, is able to live and raise their family in peace. Perhaps if we can aim to do that in Scotland, if we can aim for a Scotland where everyone is able to live as part of a modern, forward-looking society that is built on respect and mutual trust, then perhaps in our modest way we will at least be able to respond to the terrifying accusation at which the Holocaust represents against humans and human history. I thank all members for their contributions, and I suspend this meeting of Parliament until 2.30.