British PM Starmer visits Auschwitz, vows to fight antisemitism ahead of security talks in Poland

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This article was published 17/01/2025 (324 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer on Friday visited the Nazi German extermination camp at Auschwitz, voicing his “sheer horror” at what he saw there, before holding talks with Poland’s leaders on stepping up European defense and tightening Britain’s ties with the European Union.

Starmer visited the Auschwitz memorial in southern Poland — an area under German occupation during World War II — and vowed that he would fight the growing antisemitism which is causing fears to rise among Jews including in Britain. He made the stop after a visit to Ukraine on Thursday.

Starmer later traveled to Warsaw to meet with President Andrzej Duda and Prime Minister Donald Tusk for talks on strengthening cooperation in the area of European security and defense and countering illegal migration.

Poland, which borders war-stricken Ukraine, has made security the main focus as it currently holds the rotating presidency in the EU.

Starmer told a news conference after talks with Tusk that he was “determined to deepen our security collaboration. Both with the EU and of course bilaterally.”

He also said they “talked about how we can strengthen our economic ties, boosting a trade relationship that is already worth £30 billion, how can we do more together on energy security and climate, and how can we deepen our cooperation on migration” aiming to “smash the vile gangs that operate across Europe” illegally driving migrants across European borders.

Tusk said his dream was to see “Breturn” or Britain’s return to the 27-member EU and that Poland’s presidency will work to make the relations tighter. He said he had asked the decision making body, the European Council, to hold an informal summit with Britain.

Both vowed to work toward very close transatlantic ties with the U.S., where President-elect Donald Trump is to take office on Monday, and with Canada.

Earlier on Friday, a statement was released following Starmer’s visit to the Auschwitz memorial with his wife Victoria, who is Jewish.

“Nothing could prepare me for the sheer horror of what I have seen in this place. It is utterly harrowing,” Starmer’s statement said. “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 has become the most notorious of Germany’s sites of mass killing in wartime occupied Europe. About 90% of the victims were Jewish.

Starmer’s statement 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 Oct. 7? 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.

The Starmers laid a wreath at the Execution Wall at Auschwitz I, paying tribute to all the victims of the camp, and lit a candle at a monument at Birkenau, where most of the Jews were murdered.

Starmer’s center-left Labour Party has struggled with accusations of antisemitism. In 2020, the U.K. equalities watchdog in a scathing report found that Labour officials failed to stamp out antisemitism and committed “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” under Starmer’s predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn.

When Starmer became leader in 2020, he vowed to root out prejudice and restore relations between Labour and the Jewish community. Corbyn, who refused to accept the report’s findings of antisemitism, was barred from standing as a Labour candidate in the 2024 election and now sits in Parliament as an independent.

Reports of antisemitic incidents have risen sharply in the U.K., according to the Community Security Trust, a Jewish safety organization. It logged 1,978 self-reported incidents in the first half of 2024, an increase of 105% over the same period in 2023.