King Charles to attend Auschwitz commemoration

King Charles will travel to Auschwitz later this month to attend an event marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp.

The commemoration in Poland will take place on 27 January, with the King among the international visitors expected for memorial events.

On Monday afternoon at Buckingham Palace, the King will meet people involved in education projects designed to share the memories of the Holocaust, inflicted on Jewish people by the Nazis.

That will include meeting Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg, aged 94, who experienced concentration camps and a death march.

The events in Poland will mark the anniversary of the liberation of the camp by the Soviet army in January 1945.

According to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the commemoration will begin in a tent erected over the gate to the camp.

Many of the victims who were brought to the Nazi death camp had arrived by train – and a symbolic freight car will stand in front of the gate.

The Auschwitz memorial says that about 7,000 prisoners were in the camp at the time of its liberation – and that 1.1 million people, mostly Jewish, had been killed there.

The focus of commemorations will be on those remaining elderly Auschwitz survivors – but it is expected that many international leaders and heads of state will attend on what is also Holocaust Memorial Day.

King Charles will meet Polish President Andrzej Duda during his visit.

Ahead of the commemorations in Poland, the King is hosting an event at Buckingham Palace on Monday for education organisations dedicated to teaching about the Holocaust.

He will meet Mr Goldberg, born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1930, who had faced slave labour in Riga in Latvia and had been in the Stutthof concentration camp, near to what is now Gdansk in Poland.

After liberation and the end of World War Two, Mr Goldberg came to Britain, and in recent years has shared his first-hand story, as a way of teaching future generations about what had happened.

The King has had a long-standing commitment to building bridges between different faith groups – and has spoken out against religious intolerance and extremism.

He has supported efforts to remember the Holocaust – including in 2022 commissioning portraits of seven Holocaust survivors, including Mr Goldberg, in a tribute to the passing generation.

When they were unveiled, the then Prince Charles said: “These portraits represent something far greater than seven remarkable individuals. They stand as a living memorial to the six million innocent men, women and children whose stories will never be told, whose portraits will never be painted.”