THE words are still chilling even though they are describing events over 70 years ago.

The fact that they are spoken by a former Glasgow teacher, just grips at your heart. "When we got off the train, the men had to go one way straight away, and the women and children had to line up, and Dr Mengele, the Angel of Death, as he was nicknamed, was waiting at the head of the row.

"Not going straight to the gas chamber was extremely low, and going forward towards Mengele, I was on the left hand side. Mengele by this time was either tired of it all, or wanted to hurry. Because I was handy there on the left, I went one way, and my mother and my sister and about 90% of all the others went straight to the gas chambers."

The heart-wrenching words of Susan Singerman, a Hungarian Jew, taken to Auschwitz as a young girl with her family who were all killed. Susan survived, came to Scotland, trained initially as a nurse, and then went to university before becoming head of languages at Allan Glen's in Glasgow. She died four years ago, but her story was recorded before then by Glasgow Caledonian University's Gathering the Voices project, where Holocaust survivors talk of their lives.

The recordings are on-line, so you can still hear Susan's delightful mixture of Scottish and Eastern European cadences in her voice. Her nursing training was at Stobhill in a terrible winter when, only three months after arriving in Scotland, she was in an ambulance, stuck in the snow, with a woman whose waters had broken. Recalled Susan: "I think if I didn't wet my pants, I came very near it. The woman kept on saying 'Dinna fash, hen, dinna fash, hen'. I didn't know what she was saying. Eventually I asked her, and she said it means, 'Don't worry, dear'."

The plight of the Hungarian Jews, sent to the Auschwitz death camp in huge numbers in the last year of the war, was remembered last week at East Renfrewshire's Holocaust Memorial Day in St Ninian's High School where Dr David Kaufman from Edinburgh University explained the events leading up to the mass movement of Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. Amongst the stories was that of missionary Jane Haining from the Borders, believed to be the only Scot who died at the camp. She was a teacher at a Jewish school in Budapest, but refused to leave. As she memorably explained: "If these children needed me in days of sunshine, how much more do they need me in these days of darkness?"

The St Ninian's event was one of many across Scotland last week on the 70th anniversary of the Auschwitz camp being liberated by the Russian Army, designed to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive, especially as many of the survivors, like Susan Singerman, are now no longer with us. Senior pupils from East Renfrewshire's secondary schools spoke of what it meant to them. Said Melissa Mair of Mearns Castle High School: "We must make sure that future generations understand the causes of the Holocaust and reflect upon its consequences, We vow to remember the victims of Nazi persecution and of all genocide."

Stuart Cannel, a St Ninian's pupil, broadened the subject, and gave us all in the audience something to consider. "We recognise," said Stuart, "that humanity is still scarred by the belief that race, religion, disability or sexuality make some people's lives worth less than others. Genocide, anti-Semitism, racism, xenophobia and discrimination still continue. We have a shared responsibility to fight these evils."

Across the city I spend the following evening in the West End where artist Roy Petrie held an exhibition of his Holocaust canvasses in the Iota Gallery. Roy, not himself Jewish, had read much about the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish race, and even journeyed to death camps in Poland trying to make sense of it. He points at his paintings and tells me: "There is nothing on these walls that cannot happen again."

He was also involved in the illustrations for my former Herald colleague Mark S Smith's book Treblinka Survivor which recounted how a camp survivor who settled in Glasgow and became a successful businessman could not cope with his on-going depression, and who simply jumped into the Clyde and died 50 years later. George Parsonage of the Glasgow Humane Society recovered the body below a city bridge and cannot forget the poor man's camp number tattooed on his arm.

Roy also explains that some of his friends warned him not to get involved in his Holocaust project. He has thought long and hard about the reasons they gave him not to paint his canvasses. In most cases he thinks, no matter how they worded it, that it was simply anti-Semitism, still alive in Scotland today.

So I look for something positive from all of this, and a friend from Newton Mearns tells me that her late grandpa had survived the camps. As she put it: "It is impossible to attempt to put into words the suffering grandpa must have endured throughout his teenage years. From ghetto to slave labour camp, through concentration camps to a death march he escaped from. But his survival has allowed my mother, her sisters, her brother, my siblings, my cousins, their respective children and my beautiful niece and nephew to be here." So life can flourish after the most darkest events in recent years.

There are ageing women who still remember fondly Jane Haining, the Scots missionary who encouraged them through their bleakest days in Auschwitz. And the pupils of East Renfrewshire schools, and indeed schools throughout Scotland, will continue to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, and think of how civilised countries can slip into such tyranny, and to guard against it. So surely that is one good thing to come out of it all.