My friend Debbie and I played in the Christmas Concert at Bradford Music Club in aid of Amnesty International. Our set included the theme from Schindler’s List which might seem an unusual choice for Christmas. When we first got the music for Schindler’s List we were not planning a Christmas performance but shortly after we started to look at the piece the body of a small Kurdish child, Alan Kardi, was washed up on a beach in Turkey. The film Schindler’s List is mainly in black and white with the only colour provided by a little girl wearing a red coat. Whenever I played Schindler’s List I could only think of little Alan Kardi in his red t-shirt.

Amnesty International fights for human rights across the world. The organisation does a lot of work to safeguard refugees from Syria and elsewhere but refugees are not the only, or even the main, focus. Amnesty conducts research to make sure that the facts of human rights abuse are known (and verifiable), and campaigns on human rights issues. Schindler’s List and Alan Kardi both remind us where lack of regard for human rights can lead, so today I am supporting Amnesty International. Please join me.

Simply because it is sublime, here is the theme from Schindler’s List played, as it should be, by Itzhak Perlman.