Prince Charles joins leaders and survivors at Auschwitz commemoration

On January 23, Prince Charles attended a commemoration in memory of the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation at Yad Vashem in Israel.

The memorial took place during the Prince of Wales’s two day trip to Israel and Palestine. He is due to visit Jerusalem and the occupied Palestinian territories, as his first official visit to the area. Princes Charles’s own grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece and Denmark, hid a Jewish family in Nazi occupied Greece and is recognised as a member of the Righteous Amongst the Nations by Israel.

40 international leaders joined Prince Charles, with a controversy over Andrzej Duda, Poland’s president, who pulled out as he wasn’t permitted to speak at the event.

Charles said during his speech “the lessons of the Holocaust are searingly relevant to this day. Seventy-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, hatred and intolerance still lurk in the human heart, still tell new lies, adopt new disguises, and still seek new victims”.

Auschwitz I was built in 1940 and Auschwitz II and III followed in 1941 and 1942 respectively. The camp is the most notorious and well known out of all the Nazi concentration camps that operated during the Holocaust. Most of Auschwitz’s victims were Jewish, though other ethnic minorities were also murdered in the camp. Famously, Anne Frank and her family were prisoners at Auschwitz – her mother Edith died at the camp, and she and her sister Margot were transported to Bergen-Belsen were they later died. Elie Wiesel, a famous writer and political activist, also survived Auschwitz.

Read The Prince of Wales's speech delivered today at the World Holocaust Forum to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz and International Holocaust Remembrance Day ⬇️https://t.co/FkxzV96Scz@yadvashem #WHF2020JLM pic.twitter.com/2AgJcfX51X

— Clarence House (@ClarenceHouse) January 23, 2020

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Tagged Holocaust, Israel, The Prince of Wales.

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