In Auschwitz, UK’s Starmer vows to fight antisemitism back home

The visit made the UK leader see more clearly than ever before how the industrial-level killing didn’t result from the evil deeds of a few individuals

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British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria place a candle and a stone from Downing Street at a memorial monument during their visit to the Memorial And Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau. Photo: AFP

Published: 11:52pm, 17 Jan 2025Updated: 12:30am, 18 Jan 2025

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday visited the site of Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz, voicing his “sheer horror” at what he saw and vowing that he would fight the growing antisemitism which is causing fears to rise among Jews including in Britain.

Starmer visited the site in southern Poland – an area under German occupation during World War II – after a visit to Ukraine on Thursday. He was also scheduled to meet with President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk in Warsaw, the Polish capital.

“Nothing could prepare me for the sheer horror of what I have seen in this place. It is utterly harrowing,” he said in a statement released after his morning visit to the memorial site with his wife, Victoria. “The mounds of hair, the shoes, the suitcases, the names and details, everything that was so meticulously kept, except for human life.”

His visit came before the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation on January 27, 1945. King Charles III will be among the dignitaries attending a sombre ceremony where the spotlight will be on the dwindling number of survivors of the Nazi atrocities.

Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer and his wife Victoria visit the memorial and museum at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau, a former Nazi German concentration and extermination camp in Poland. Photo: AP

From 1940-1945, around 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Roma and Sinti, Russian prisoners of war and others, were killed in the gas chambers or died of starvation, hard labour and disease at Auschwitz-Birkenau. The complex of concentration, forced labour and death camps has become the most notorious of Germany’s sites of mass killing in wartime occupied Europe. About 90 per cent of the victims were Jewish.