Holocaust Memorial Day 2025 Speech
Maggie Chapman MSP's speech at Holocaust

A memorial is an act of remembrance, and today we remember in two senses.
We remember who it was who bore this unutterable pain, each individual and precious human being, those now lost to the world and those who remain with us.
We remember them with love, with sorrow and with anger, reiterating the humanity that their oppressors tried so hard to deny.
And we remember how it happened, and for us as politicians and parliamentarians, that is perhaps a harder memory. For the Holocaust was not an act of insurgency, a violation of domestic law and order. It came about not in spite of political processes: elections, legislation, policy implementation, but through and because of them.
There were some bystanders who knew exactly what was going on. There were others who knew nothing. But in between, across Europe and beyond, was a wide spectrum of simultaneous knowledge and ignorance, of eyes that were closed, faces turned away. Reassurance that rhetoric was only that, that genocidal intent was the expression of legitimate concern, that there was no need to open doors or hearts, that reality was still represented by the diplomacy of gentlemen.
And the bodies of children lay uncovered.
We have learned the story of this deep, deep horror, but have we learned to recognise its narrative when it comes again, with different clothes, different names, different labels?
When the richest man in the world salutes the most powerful man in the world with a gesture that specifically recalls that older story, do we shrug and move on?
When that most powerful man uses the language of cleaning about the dispossession of already dispossessed people, already bereft of their children, do we pretend not to have heard?
Hannah Arendt wrote, in the context of the Holocaust, about the banality of evil. For evil can be banal, can be ridiculous, can come with buffoonery and bluster, without subtlety or nuance. But when it announces itself, we would do well to listen.
And we can listen, as well, to the voices of those with experience, those for whom that experience illuminates the realities of today. Suzanne Berliner Weiss writes:
I am a survivor of the Jewish Holocaust, and understand the system of hate first hand. Hitler’s war against the Jews aimed to eradicate our history and the Jewish people. Nazism Is hatred of the other – it is racism...
Judaism, the religion and its traditions, does not stand for racism.
Conflating Zionism and Judaism is an unforgivable crime against the Jewish people, a crime against the Palestinians, and a crime to humanity.
I was saved from Hitler by world solidarity. I was among the thousands of Jewish children in France who were saved by the solidarity of the Jewish resistance, communities of Christians in Southern France, and the peoples of the world united against Nazism....
To be against Israel’s policies is not anti-Jewish. It is not anti-Semitic. We claim the Palestinians as our sisters and brothers. We are all humanity.
We say: “Not in our name!”
For the victims of the Holocaust, the world closed its eyes, its hearts and its doors until it was too late. Today we remember and honour them, with respect, with love and with bitter regret. Let us not close our eyes, our hearts, our doors in the face of genocide and oppression happening today in Palestine.
Let us not make the same mistakes again.