I am advised that there will be 146 train journeys tomorrow between Glasgow Central or Glasgow Queen Street and Edinburgh Waverley stations. I usually travel by train, as many colleagues do. Think about those 146 journeys and reflect on the fact that, in May 1944, it took just 147 train journeys—one more than the number of daily commuter trains across the central belt—to transport around 500,000 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 a grotesque feat of organisation. The truth—far more prosaic—is that it took just 147 rail journeys, which were non-prioritised, slow and lumbering; more often than not, they lasted days. They were among the most hellish rail journeys of any that have ever been undertaken. The appalling truths of the traumas that were endured on those packed cattle wagons are so awful that those who survived them rarely allowed themselves to speak directly and in detail of their experience ever again—of the baseness; of the collapse of dignity and person; of the sheer awfulness, confusion, foreboding and death.
Trains arrived at Auschwitz-Birkenau at all hours—some in darkness and some while the sun shone. All who disembarked were disorientated and found that they were immediately segregated by gender and age without so much as a moment to gather their thoughts or to say goodbye to loved ones. Those who were fit enough to work—deemed, in Nazi terminology, “useful”—were often marched straight 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, as can be seen in the photographs that are now displayed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, young children who were holding hands and skipping with joy to be free of the trains—began their final short walk, which was not much longer than a stroll down and back up the full length of the platforms at either Glasgow Queen Street or Edinburgh Waverley, to their murder in the Auschwitz gas chambers. There were 6,000 or so people per train. In less time than it will take us to participate in this debate, Jews arrived by train at Auschwitz-Birkenau, were processed, were marched to their execution and were gassed. Their bodies were then roughly stacked before cremation. From their arrival to their death in less time than the length of this debate—that was industrialised murder on a scale never hitherto seen.
The origins of the Holocaust began in Hitler’s pre-war Germany. The Holocaust, as a term, came into being after the events; no one person ever saw the Holocaust in its entirety. Over the years, in different ways and in multiple countries, it was a series of outrages that led to the murder of 6 million Jews.
It began with the persecution of the Jewish minority in Nazi Germany itself. They were a minority; only one in 100 pre-war Germans was Jewish. For example, there were more Jews in the city of Warsaw than in pre-war Germany as a whole. Of the pre-war German Jewish population, 60 per cent emigrated before the war. Some went as far as China—a world away from Hitler—while others went to the United States. Too many, sadly, emigrated to the temporary sanctuary of Germany’s pre-war neighbours. When Poland fell to Hitler, so did a population where one in 10 was Jewish—3 million people. It was at that point that persecution and prejudice—or talk of resettlement in far-off lands—turned to mass murder.
In 1941 and early 1942, the genocide began as Nazi butchers went to their victims. Some 1.5 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. Sickeningly, the record shows that the only concern of Nazi commanders in the face of that atrocity was for the spiritual wellbeing of the SS fanatics who carried 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.
On 20 January 1942, at the notorious Wannsee conference in Berlin, where the final solution was conceived and approved, it was determined that, instead of progressing a genocide in which the killers went to their victims, the Nazis would now transport the victims to their killers. Between July and September 1942, the Warsaw ghetto was liquidated and its population transported to the new Reinhard camps, named after Reinhard Heydrich, their architect. The first extermination camps were at Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibór—names that live on in infamy. With brutal efficiency, those death camps did their job and, job done, were destroyed and all obvious traces concealed. Only two people are thought to have survived Belzec.
Auschwitz was different, in that it was a labour camp first and then, with Auschwitz-Birkenau, both a labour camp and an extermination camp. Standing in its silent ruins today, one senses the scale—a scale not apparent to anyone there at the time. Those incarcerated in Auschwitz were not free to wander around, as visitors are now. Most saw only the barracks in which they were contained and the area in which they worked. In the intervening years since, many who survived and who could face what they saw as an obligation to return were themselves stunned to see the industrial scale of the camp.
Today, extraordinarily, as many as 1 million visit Auschwitz-Birkenau annually to see and learn—ironically, as many as were murdered there during the war. The two school students who addressed us at time for reflection on Tuesday visited Auschwitz last November as part of the work of the Holocaust Educational Trust.
The final months of the war saw the long death marches back to Germany of those who had survived the camps as the Nazi machine began to collapse. Many were shot at the side of the road if they so much as 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 were shot on the banks of the Danube and dumped in its waters. Often, several were bound together, with one victim shot and the rest dragged into the icy waters and drowned.
That chaotic collapse also led to the final horrors of Ravensbrück, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, where, between December 1944 and March 1945, the camp population increased to 45,000. There were 17,000 deaths in one month alone. Starvation, dysentery and the freezing cold replaced the gas chambers as the method of killing.
A Holocaust that began in Berlin progressed to Poland and the east, and worked its way back westwards, as Nazi Germany collapsed. Finally, it ended, back where it began, in Berlin. Six million had been murdered.
In my contribution to last year’s debate, I spoke of the events of 1946. 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 wearing their pre-war clothes. They 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 that is a convenient truth. Anti-Semitism existed long before the Nazis. Although, in many cases, the populations of countries throughout Europe 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”, the genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda and Darfur stand as evidence of our collective failure to match that ideal.
On the street in my Eastwood constituency where I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, every second home was a Jewish one. When the community commemorates Yom Hashoah in May, the names of those murdered by the Nazis are honoured on screen at the Giffnock synagogue. All too often, they are the familiar names of the grandparents, uncles, aunts and sometimes cousins of those I played with as a child and grew up among.
All this happened when my parents were teenagers, in a world run by my grandparents’ generation, at death camps on sites that any one of us could stand on later this afternoon, in countries to which we now go on holiday, among peoples 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 that started all this can be heard again.
On 22 November last year, Rabbi Yossi Bodenheim proudly addressed the Scottish Parliament at our weekly time for reflection. Later that afternoon, as he walked back to Waverley 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. That happened in Scotland, in Edinburgh, in our time.
Last Sunday, at a Jewish Burns 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, Gavriel, 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.
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