EXCLUSIVE: Starmers take children to Poland for emotional search into Jewish family roots

Sir Keir Starmer has travelled with his wife, Victoria, and their two children to Poland to find the house where her grandparents once lived before fleeing to England after the First World War, as antisemitism surged.

Jewish News understands the Prime Minister was determined to travel with his children to the small village just outside Warsaw to help them fully appreciate the roots of their mother’s Jewish heritage.

None of Lady Victoria’s extended family who remained in Poland survived the Nazis, making the visit particularly poignant and emotional.

Her Jewish father, Bernard, was born here in 1929 after his family had escaped Poland.

At a recent event at Downing Street with the Holocaust Educational Trust, Victoria became visibly moved as she recalled a visit to Auschwitz, where she viewed archival footage of life in Poland before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany.

The Starmers are believed to have made the trip last weekend, as the Prime Minister took a long weekend break with his closest family.

Although not Jewish himself, the PM has fully supported his wife’s efforts to ensure their two children, aged 18 and 16, maintain a strong connection to their Jewish heritage.

In his autobiography of the PM, the writer Tom Baldwin detailed how her father Bernard was born in England, from a family whose roots were found in the Polish village of Kolo.

The book revealed Victoria once travelled by herself to the village, where until the Shoah nearly half of all the residents were Jews, to meet and speak with people who had memories of her father’s family.

In January 2025, the Starmers also made an emotional visit to the Auschwitz death camp.

Sir Keir said that while it was his first time at Auschwitz, it was his wife’s second visit. “But [it was] no less harrowing than the first time she stepped through that gate and witnessed the depravity of what happened here,” he reflected.

The Prime Minister recalled feeling “a sickness” and “an air of desolation” as he tried to comprehend “the enormity of this barbarous, planned, industrialised murder” of six million Jews and others by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War Two.

That visit, Sir Keir said, made clear “more than ever before” that the Holocaust “took a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary people who each played their part in constructing this whole industry of death”.

Lady Starmer has also worked closely with HET in the UK and recently hosted an event with the charity at Downing Street, where a survivor addressed the charity’s young ambassadors.

She is also a member of a north London progressive synagogue.

An economics lecturer and accountant, her father Bernard attended Downing Street last December as Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis led the Chanukah celebrations, joined by other family members.

Bernard was married to his late wife Barbara, who also convered to Judaism.

In Baldwin’s book on the PM, Starmer who has spoken previously about the impact on him of the deaths of his own parents, told how he was similarly left devastated when his wife’s mother died in January 2020, following a car crash.

The tragedy came during the intense Labour leadership campaign, which Starmer decided to suspend for two weeks so he could be alongside his wife, a move Victoria herself told him he did not need to do.

Starmer told Baldwin:”To watch Vic lose her mum was even harder for me than losing my parents. I felt completely helpless because I couldn’t reach into the space to stop her hurting.

“All I could do was show her how much she mattered to me.”

Starmer has also spoken of his wish that his kids “recognise the faith of part of their grandfather’s family.”

“Just carving out that tradition, that bit of faith on Friday is incredibly important,” he has previously said.