Holocaust memorial: Horrors of the past could so easily happen again

Throughout the UK more than 32,000 students have taken part in this remarkable scheme and in 2013, as education secretary, I went on one of the trips to Auschwitz with the young people. It was a profoundly moving experience and the culmination of it came as night fell over the cold, empty space that is the former concentration camp.

We had all been given a small tealight as we gathered together at the end of the railway beside the ruins of the largest gas chambers. A place of unimaginable brutality and despair where more than a million people were murdered, where a young Rabbi talked to us of the losses his family had suffered at this place, the ways in which they had sought to rebuild their lives and – most importantly of all – about why this place of horror was also a place of hope.

The railway tracks at Auschwitz Birkenau

Then each of us lit our candle, placed it on the tracks and walked away through the darkness back towards our own lives, leaving those little flickering points of light to signify our belief that in the end evil would not triumph – no matter how vast and gross it was.

Humanity would find a way through.

That paradoxical message was also in evidence at Potocari Cemetery near Srebrenica in Bosnia which I visited with the Remembering Srebrenica charity in September 2015.

There in the warm later summer sunshine a group of us including fellow MSP Jenny Marra and the then solicitor general Lesley Thomson listened, at times in tears, as Nura Begovic, one of the Mothers of Srebrenica, told her story and survivor Nedzad Advic describe how he had been forced to dig his own grave, escaping death only because – as he fell into it – he was shielded from a fatal wound by a dead body.

There we were surrounded not by the grim ruins of the mechanisation of death but by a sparkling sea of white headstones in a verdant landscape. It marked the resting place of 6377 victims, with another 2000 graves ready to be filled when the mammoth painstaking task of identifying their remains was complete – a task made much more difficult because the Serbian military and paramilitary forces had constantly moved bodies and bits of bodies to and from different sites in an effort to hide the evidence of genocide.

READ MORE: Remembering Jane Haining's remarkable story on Holocaust Memorial Day

The hope at Potocari was for justice as well as reconciliation, in order that the promise made at the end of the Holocaust – never again – would mean something in international law. Some of those responsible, like Radovan Karadzic, the former Serbian president and the Serbian army commander Ratko Mladic are now serving life prison terms, but many others are still living in their communities where, almost without warning, they once turned on their neighbours with deadly cruelty and intent.

When we confront the Holocaust and subsequent genocides – in Rwanda, in Cambodia, in Bosnia – we often wonder how life is able to continue when an individual is placed in such extreme conditions.

The accounts by survivors themselves however do not exclusively dwell on that hugely distressing subject. Like Martin Stern, who was only a child of five when he was taken to a camp in the Netherlands – simply because he was half Jewish – they also focus on what he called in a Sky TV interview “the most scary thought” he had to confront, namely if he had not been a victim would he have been a perpetrator?

For, as he pointed out, the perpetrators start out as normal people.

It is that fact that lies behind the famous words of another holocaust survivor, the Italian writer Primo Levi, when he observed that the world had experienced “a fundamental unexpected event – fundamental precisely because unexpected, not foreseen by anyone. It happened, therefore it can happen again” and he went on to emphasise that point, adding “ this is the core of what we have to say. It can happen, and it can happen everywhere”.

Martin Stern’s story – which can be found in transcript on the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust website – includes good people who tried to shelter the persecuted, and others who would not take the risk. It features the bureaucracy of genocide too, what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil” because the barbarous Nazi machine ran, as much scholarship has shown, on the fuel of clipboards and meticulous record-keeping.

The systems were devised and operated by ordinary people and it was, as Levi points out, utterly unexpected that those people would or could become part of a pitiless, cruel, organised machine of terror against their own neighbours.

Utterly unexpected in Germany in the 1930s, utterly unexpected in Bosnia in the 1980s and utterly unexpected wherever it may try to erupt next.

The exact reasons may vary, but they will all lurk within what is worst in us and in our society.

​READ MORE: Refugee trail launched in city centre reveals Holocaust-era Jewish history

What is common to them is the essential remedy, which is to witness – loudly, clearly and frequently – the triumph of hope and to be eternally vigilant so that we always recognise the danger, guard against it and refuse to allow it to recur.

That word, witness, is crucial to what we do on Holocaust Memorial Day and when we Remember Srebrenica. It means not avoiding but confronting the awful reality of

what took place, learning about it and then talking about it everywhere we can and to everyone we can make listen.

It is about accepting that if it happened then, it can happen now, it can happen there, it can happen here and – most importantly of all – if it happened to them, it can happen to us and be made to happen by people like us too.