By VANESSA GERA
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, who is Jewish. “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 clearly 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.
The museum said the Starmers were greeted by museum director, Piotr Cywiński, and were shown cans of the gas Cyclone B used for killing, as well as as well as the crematorium and gas chamber at Auschwitz I, the original camp. They also saw personal items stolen from victims, including shoes, glasses and Jewish prayer robes.
In the second part of their visit, they saw the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, including the railway ramp where German doctors carried out a selection of Jews deported to the camp, determining who would be killed immediately, as well as the ruins of a gas chamber and crematorium.
The Starmers laid a wreath at the Execution Wall at Auschwitz I, paying tribute to all the victims of the camp, and and lit a candle at a monument at Birkenau, where most of the Jews were murdered.
