3. Statement by the Minister for Social Justice: Holocaust Memorial Day 2023

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:39 pm on 24 January 2023.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Alun Davies Alun Davies Labour 3:39, 24 January 2023

I'm grateful to the Minister for her statement this afternoon, and I also welcome the cross-party unity that we see on this subject. I'm glad that she referenced the BBC programme last night, How the Holocaust Began, because I think it is an important aspect for us to understand—the way that ordinary people were both the victims and the perpetrators of the Holocaust. And I think that that programme did chart the development of the genocide in the second world war and before the second world war, and told again a story that we need to know and understand. I have borne witness to genocide twice in my life: in Rwanda and in the former Yugoslavia, and I think that creates a very real awareness that evil can always be there, that what happened in the 1940s wasn't a unique episode of evil, but it is something that can be just around the corner, even in today's world. 

Minister, we are losing the generation that bore witness to the Holocaust and the second world war; we're losing the human contact, the human link with the death camps in the second world war; and we're losing the testimony of those people, their voices speaking to us directly. And what I would like to ask you this afternoon is: how can we, in Wales today, ensure that young people growing up, particularly, understand the profound nature of what happened over 70 years ago? I would like to see us exploring ways in which young people can visit Auschwitz to understand the enormity of what happened there, but also that the Holocaust is a part of a curriculum, where people understand not simply the technicality and the numbers, but the human impact of a genocide against the Jewish and other peoples of Europe, so that we can hope that the people who are being educated today in Wales, although they will have lost the human connection, will have that human understanding of genocide and of what the Holocaust did to all of us today.