Lady Starmer hosts HET ambassadors at Downing Street in poignant meeting
HET chief exec Karen Pollock expresses gratitude to PM's wife for inviting "ambassadors that will protect the memory of the Holocaust' to No.10
Tears began welling up in Lady Victoria Starmer’s eyes as she recalled last year’s visit with her husband to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi extermination camp.
Seated inside the immaculately furnished Downing Street meeting room usually used for bilateral meetings, the Prime Minister’s wife was hosting a visiting delegation of young ambassadors from the Holocaust Educational Trust charity on Thursday morning.
As the group of impressive young students shared personal accounts of how they came to be involved with the HET organisation at school, Lady Starmer recalled her own visit in January last year to the death camp with Karen Pollock CBE, chief executive of the charity, who is also present at the No.10 meeting, taking place days before Holocaust Memorial Day next week.
Having previously been there 30 years earlier, it was a newer exhibit at Auschwitz, one that featured such poignant images of flourishing Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Shoah, which got to Lady Starmer, in the same way it made her tearful again today.
It is not the first time I’d seen the Prime Minister’s wife overcome with emotion as she discussed the Holocaust.
Last September, at another HET event at the Labour party conference, she was again visibly moved, having listened to the extraordinary story of survival told by Annick Lever BEM, whose mother and other family members were arrested and deported to Auschwitz on 10 February 1944, where they were later killed.
It seemed fitting that Lever has also been invited to Downing Street to meet with the young ambassadors and share insight and advice with those who will pass the lessons and story on to the next generation, in the hope that they then do the same.
Tom Green, HET’s regional ambassador, Scotland, later said: “This has been a truly unforgettable experience and is definitely a highlight of my time as a Regional Ambassador.
“It was amazing to represent the Holocaust Educational Trust Ambassadors at No 10 Downing Street and to meet Lady Starmer. We ambassadors, are well aware of our responsibility as the next generation to ensure the Holocaust is never forgotten and we could not be more grateful for this opportunity.”
Daisy Davies, regional ambassador, Wales, added: “It was a privilege to be invited to speak to Mrs Starmer at No.10 Downing Street about our role as Holocaust Educational Trust ambassadors to honour the memory of the victims and survivors of the Holocaust, and defend those subject to antisemitism today.
“As we continue to lose survivors, conversations like the one we had today ensure that the lessons from the Holocaust are never forgotten.”
This was also the first time that Lady Starmer has hosted such a poignant event inside No.10 with nine ambassadors seated around the table.
They also included Daniel Bentley, Emma Buckthorpe, Misha Burrell, Anika Garg, Joseph Knowles, Taja Kwatia and Charley Sands.
Watching the meeting, which took place over tea and biscuits in the White room, it is clear that the Prime Minister’s wife is both a gracious and down-to-earth host.
Her guests are all encouraged to share their own accounts on why the horror of the Shoah has impacted their own non-Jewish lives, but without any undue pressure to do so from the host.
The importance of Lady Starmer’s place in work involving Holocaust charities such as HET is also apparent.
HET chief executive Pollock later praised the PM’s wife, saying:”We are enormously grateful to Mrs Starmer for inviting young Holocaust Educational Trust Ambassadors to 10 Downing Street to mark Holocaust Memorial Day and for taking the time to listen as these inspirational young people shared their determination to keep the legacy of the Holocaust alive.
“Mrs Starmer reuniting with Holocaust survivor Annick Lever BEM was especially moving, as was witnessing the hope that this young generation of Ambassadors give survivors like Annick for the future.
“These Ambassadors are the generation that will protect the memory of the Holocaust.
“They have travelled to Auschwitz- Birkenau and stood at the site where around one million Jewish men, women and children were murdered.
“They return determined to share what they have learned and to challenge antisemitism today.
“More than 80 years on, as the Holocaust moves from living memory to history and the voices of survivors sadly fade, the responsibility to carry forward their legacy passes firmly to the next generation.
“Our Ambassadors are that next generation and Victoria’s encouragement has given them extra confidence to continue this vital work.”: ”
While the PM’s wife has made a conscious and understandable decision not to do interviews with the media, to protect the privacy of herself and her children, she agreed to allow Jewish News to attend the young ambassadors meeting as an observer.
Looking into the history of Lady Starmer’s Jewish father’s family, they had been forced to flee Poland before the Second World War.
With Nazism on the rise in neighbouring Germany in the 1920s, they fled the central Polish village of Kolo, where almost half the residents at the time were Jewish.
They headed to Britain, and Bernard was born in Hackney, east London, in 1929. A decade later, German tanks were rolling into Kolo on their way to Warsaw.
Bernard, aged 97, had attended a Chanukah event put on by the Prime Minister last month, looking on proudly as Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis led those in attendance through a rendition of Maoz Tzur–Rock of Ages.
Other members of the family, including Lady Starmer’s children were also at the Chanukah event.
While at Auschwitz last year, the Prime Minister recalled feeling “a sickness” and “an air of desolation” as he tried to make sense of “the enormity of this barbarous, planned, industrialised murder”.
Lady Starmer was equally moved, the prime minister said, adding: “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.”
The visit, Sir Keir said, showed “more clearly 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”.
Since 1999, HET’s Lessons from Auschwitz Project has allowed tens of thousands of students and teachers to visit the Nazi concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, as part of a four-part educational programme.
The Outreach Programme allows students and teachers the opportunity to hear survivor testimony firsthand and take part in focused workshops designed and delivered by our trained educators.
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