Starmer visits Auschwitz and vows to fight the antisemitism he sees growing in the UK

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — U.K. 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 Jan. 27, 1945. King Charles III will be among the dignitaries attending a somber ceremony where the spotlight will be on the dwindling number of survivors of the Nazi atrocities.

From 1940-45, 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 labor and disease at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the complex of concentration, forced labor and death camps that has become the most notorious of Germany’s sites of mass killing in wartime occupied Europe. About 90% of the victims were Jewish.

Starmer said in his statement that the visit made him see more clear than ever before how the industrial-level killing didn’t result from the evil deeds of a few individuals, but from “a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary people who each played their part in constructing this whole industry of death.”

He noted the antisemitism that has been growing since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, which triggered the war in Gaza.

“Time and again we condemn this hatred, and we boldly say ‘never again.’ But where is never again, when we see the poison of antisemitism rising around the world in aftermath of October 7th? Where is never again, when the pulse of fear is beating in our own Jewish community, as people are despicably targeted once again for the very same reason, because they are Jewish,” he said.