Sir Keir Starmer said his trip to Auschwitz would stay with him “for the rest of my life”, following a visit to the Nazi concentration camp with his wife, Lady Victoria Starmer.
The Prime Minister issued a heartfelt statement after attending the site in Poland on Friday, January 17.
He said: “As I stood by the train tracks at Birkenau, looking across that cold, vast expanse, I felt a sickness, an air of desolation, as I tried to comprehend the enormity of this barbarous, planned, industrialised murder: a million people killed here for one reason, simply because they were Jewish.”
Sir Keir added that his visit had shown him “more clearly than ever before, how this was not the evil deeds of a few bad individuals.”
He added: “It took a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary people who each played their part in constructing this whole industry of death.”
The Starmers’ joint visit comes after Lady Victoria, who is Jewish, headed to the site without her husband on Thursday. An estimated 1.3 million people were sent to the camp complex, including nearly 1.1 million Jewish people. Of them, 960,000 died in the camp.
Sir Keir said: “My wife was equally moved by what she saw today. It was her second visit, but no less harrowing than the first time she stepped through that gate and witnessed the depravity of what happened here.
“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?”
The couple’s trip comes in the wake of a Gaza ceasefire agreement reached between Israel and Hamas this week, over a year after the terror group’s assault on an Israeli music festival and several kibbutzim in southern Israel saw over 1,000 civilians killed and more than 200 taken hostage.
The Prime Minister said: “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.
“The truth that I have seen here today will say with me for the rest of my life. So too, will my determination to defend that truth, to fight the poison of antisemitism and hatred in all its forms, and to do everything I can to make ‘never again’ mean what it says, and what it must truly mean: never again.”
