TOMORROW afternoon, Parliament will hold a debate to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, which takes place on January 27 and this year commemorates the 72nd anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps created by Nazi Germany.

More than seven decades ago this month, Soviet troops arrived at the Auschwitz death camp in the south-west of occupied Poland, where hundreds of thousands of Poles, as well as Jewish people from all over Europe met their deaths. Up to six thousand people were murdered each day in the gas chambers of this, the largest of all the camps.

As the Nazis retreated towards Berlin, Allied forces converging from the east and west uncovered the vast infrastructure of mass murder, from Dachau in the south to Bergen-Belsen in the north. British Army troops found 60,000 prisoners still alive in Bergen-Belsen, although most were in serious ill-health because of a typhus epidemic. Of these, more than 10,000 subsequently died from the effects of malnutrition or disease.

The horror of what they found stayed with many of those troops for decades afterwards.

The ripple effect of this tragedy, the trauma shared by victims and those who witnessed it, and the questions it raises for all of us today, are deep and they are profound.

That’s why the theme of this year’s commemoration, “How can life go on?” is so important. In the face of such fundamental evil, it would be human to feel a sense of hopelessness. But life must go on.

Elie Wiesel, the author and Holocaust survivor, said: “For the survivor death is not the problem. Death was an everyday occurrence. We learned to live with death. The problem is to adjust to life, to living. You must teach us about living.”

We must use this opportunity to reflect to help us find ways of coming to terms with the unthinkable, and to ensure that reconciliation and rebuilding take place wherever they are needed in the world today. We must learn from the experiences and remember, taking care that our response to contemporary genocide in Srebrenica, Rwanda and Cambodia is guided by the need to ensure that those who make it through the darkness can eventually emerge into the light.

But most of all if we are to guarantee that life goes on, we shouldn’t try to counteract hate with more hate of our own.

This week, I listened to the words of that great American civil rights campaigner John Lewis, who spoke so movingly on how we must instead meet hate with love. “The way of love is the better way,” he said.

He went on to invoke the words of Dr Martin Luther King Jr who said “hate is too heavy a burden to bear”.

Holocaust Memorial Day takes place at a time when we should be seeking to learn the lessons of the past. We must understand that genocide is often the evil culmination of a gradual process which begins with unchecked discrimination, racism and hatred.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election victory in November, and the Brexit vote in June, we have witnessed a deeply worrying increase in intolerance across western democracies.

Scotland is not immune. Despite our relative success to date in preventing and tackling hate crime. Last week it emerged that one of the keynote speakers from the infamous alt-right conference in Washington DC in November where delegates ominously chanted “Hail Trump! Hail our people! Hail victory!” while making prolonged Nazi salutes, lives in Linlithgow.

We must be vigilant and continue to provide positive leadership if we are to address hate effectively at its root. The Holocaust did not begin with the murder of millions, it began with what we now call hate speech, perpetuated by a small minority and tolerated by the vast majority.

But as Lewis so eloquently stated, we must face this reaction with tolerance, respect and understanding. As we commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day, it’s only through employing this kind of positive approach that we’ll ensure that life goes on, and that decent humanity continues to prosper in the face of unspeakable evil.