UK premier visits Poland with family to trace wife’s Jewish roots
Victoria Starmer's grandparents fled rising antisemitism before WWI; decades later, the family members who stayed were killed by the Nazis
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer made a personal trip to Poland with his wife, Victoria, and children to further trace her family’s Jewish roots, the Jewish News reported Tuesday.
The family traveled last weekend to Kolo, outside Warsaw, the village that Victoria’s grandparents fled as antisemitism surged before World War I, the report said. Her father, Bernard, was born in the UK in 1929 after his family escaped Poland, and the report said the couple sought to find the house where her grandparents lived.
Poland’s Jews faced mounting persecution in the decades before the war, as the territory fell under the control of the increasingly antisemitic Russian Empire. A wave of pogroms — including in Warsaw in 1881 — drove some two million Jews to emigrate.
None of Starmer’s relatives who remained in the region survived the Nazis.
It was her second visit and the first for her husband. Though he is not Jewish, the premier said in a 2020 interview that it was important to him to raise the couple’s two children, aged 18 and 16, so that they could “recognize the faith of part of their grandfather’s family,” adding “that bit of faith on Friday is incredibly important.”
In January 2025, the Starmers visited Auschwitz together, where Victoria said it was “no less harrowing than the first time she stepped through that gate.”
The prime minister recalled feeling “a sickness” as he tried to comprehend what he called “the enormity of this barbarous, planned, industrialized murder” of 6 million Jews. “The mounds of hair, the shoes, the suitcases, the names and details, everything that was so meticulously kept, except for human life.”
The Auschwitz visit was a follow-through on Starmer’s 2024 promise, made during a speech in which he also pledged to build a Holocaust memorial next to Parliament, a project that had been promised for a decade. Plans had been met with objections ranging from concerns about landscaping issues to concerns about overplaying Britain’s role in the rescue of Europe’s Jews during the Holocaust.
He also said his government would continue to fund the Holocaust Educational Trust’s Lessons from Auschwitz program, which sends students to Poland to visit the concentration camp, to the tune of nearly $3 million next year.
Starmer’s center-left Labour Party has struggled with past accusations of antisemitism. In 2020, the UK equality watchdog found that Labour officials failed to stamp out antisemitism and committed “unlawful acts of harassment and discrimination” under Starmer’s predecessor Jeremy Corbyn.