Linlithgow MSP joins Holocaust tributes

Feb 4 2010 by Marjorie Kerr, West Lothian Courier

A WEST Lothian MSP has paid her respects to the victims of the Holocaust.

Mary Mulligan, MSP for Linlithgow, marked Holocaust Memorial Day by paying a visit to a special exhibition honouring Anne Frank.

The MSP visited the exhibition in the Scottish Parliament on Wednesday, January 27, to coincide with the memorial day, which is held on the anniversary of Russian soldiers liberating the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1945.

The event was hosted by the Anne Frank Educational Trust, which is linked to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, where Anne and her the family hid from the Nazis for two years before being betrayed and arrested on August 4, 1944.

The Educational Trust was set up in the UK in 1991, and in 2008 Anne Frank Scotland was launched with a permanent office established in Falkirk.

The work of the Anne Frank Educational Trust provides an educational programme so that young people can learn not only about the horrors of the holocaust, but also promote the need for greater understanding of others, of tolerance and the need to ensure that different peoples co-exist peacefully together.

In 2003 the Trust introduced the Anne Frank Awards, which are given to young people, and educators whose values and moral courage have made a difference to the lives of others.

Commenting on her visit to the exhibition Mary Mulligan said: “It is impossible not to be touched by the story of Anne and her family and inspired by the courage of the family and those who did their best to protect them, and I want to congratulate the Anne Frank Educational Trust on their excellent work as educators and on keeping alive the memory of Anne as both an inspiration and a warning to each new generation.”

This year’s Holocaust Memorial Day had added poignancy as it came closely after the death of Miep Gies who was the last survivor of the small group of Dutch citizens who hid and fed the Frank family.

Miep Gies found Anne Frank’s diary after the family had been arrested and transported in 1944, and having kept it safe, she returned it to Anne’s father Otto Frank when he returned to Amsterdam in 1945.

She died aged 100 on January 11, 2010.

Mary Mulligan has added her support to a motion in the Scottish Parliament marking her death of Miep Gies and acknowledging the role that she had played in helping the Frank family and resisting the Nazi occupation laws.