Holocaust survivors recall horrors of Auschwitz as Prince William and Kate attend London memorial – BBC.com

Katya Adler and Kathy Long
Reporting from Auschwitz

One of the survivors who attended today’s commemorations is Mala Tribich, now in her 90s, who was nine when she was forced into a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Poland.

She was moved to the Ravensbrück concentration camp at the start of the war and later liberated from the Bergen-Belsen camp in 1945.

Speaking earlier today to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Tribich says she’s honoured to be representing all the remaining British Holocaust survivors at the commemorations.

“I’m privileged because I feel that it is so important to be here and to remember the victims,” she says, adding the site serves as a warning “to act when you see that there is an injustice”.

“The message is to try and change the world to a better place, so there should be no discrimination against people who happen to have a different religion or a different colour of skin or whatever. There should be more tolerance of one another”.

Tribich recalls the “process of dehumanisation” at the Ravensbrück concentration camp, where everyone was ordered to strip naked, had their heads shaved and were given a uniform.

“When we looked at one another, we really couldn’t recognise each other,” she says, “It’s so different when one hasn’t got one’s hair. It really did something to our soul.”

After she was liberated from Bergen-Belsen, Tribich moved to the UK where she was reunited with her brother.

She now spends her time sharing her story with young people across the UK through the Holocaust Educational Trust’s outreach programme.

Marta Newman
BBC News

On this day five years ago, BBC Breakfast told the story of Zigi Shipper – who was just 14 when he was brought to Auschwitz simply because he was Jewish.

He was one of the very few who managed to survive. For many years, he didn’t say a word about the unbelievable horrors he had witnessed here. It was just too painful.

But later in life, Zigi decided that he must speak out, so that the Holocaust is never forgotten.

Zigi died two years ago at the age of 93. But on this anniversary we wanted to return to his story.

Jon Kay travelled to Poland with Zigi’s two daughters Lu and Michelle to find out more about their father’s early life before retracing his time at Auschwitz.

Standing underneath the Arbeit macht frei (‘Work sets you free’) sign which her father would have walked through all those years ago Lu says: “nothing can prepare you for this.

“There are eighteen descendants now of Zigi’s family. From Zigi’s life being saved there are now eighteen of us.”

This is including baby Zigi, Zigi’s great grandson.

“In a place of no hope we are that hope.”

Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer also spoke at the memorial service in London this afternoon.

He talked about meeting survivors, of feeling repulsion at the stories they told, and of one moment during a tour of Auschwitz.

He said he saw a photograph of Nazi guards standing with Jewish prisoners, bearing looks of indifference, and in one case even smiling.

“It showed more powerfully than ever how the Holocaust was a collective endeavour by thousands of ordinary individuals utterly consumed by the hatred of difference,” he said.

“And that is the hatred we stand against today, and it is a collective endeavour for all of us to defeat it.”

Starmer announced that a National Holocaust Memorial and Learning Centre is being established to remember the six million Jewish victims and that Holocaust education will be made a “truly national endeavour”.

People around the UK are being asked to light a candle in their windows this evening to remember those who were killed and to stand against prejudice and hatred.

Landmarks, buildings and monuments are lighting up purple as part of the Light the Darkness national moment, including, the London Eye and the Liver Building in Liverpool.

A candle is also being lit at Number 10 Downing Street, which is also being lit up.

As guests entered Guildhall in central London for the memorial earlier today, the London youth chamber choir sang a rendition of Even When he is Silent, which is based on lines scratched on a wall in Auschwitz believed to have been written by an inmate there.

Rob Rinder, chair of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust advisory board, then read an excerpt of the memoirs of George Saltan, a young polish boy. It recounts his experience of antisemitism in the playground and watching as his neighbours cheered and danced as German troops made a bonfire with the Torah scrolls and prayer books.

“Day by day our lives were changing and all we had accumulated and accomplished was slipping away,” he said.

Nadia Ragozhina
Reporting from Auschwitz

Tova Friedman, who was one of the speakers at today’s event, is one of the youngest Holocaust survivors. She was brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau at the age of just five and a half years old, with her parents.

At today’s ceremony she said she has celebrated 27 January, the day the Soviet army liberated the camp, as her birthday since she was liberated as a child.

I’ve been speaking to her and her family over the last few weeks, as they prepared to travel to Poland for this event.

As she arrived for the ceremony, she sent me a video, explaining why she chose to come back to Auschwitz.

She says that five years ago there were 120 survivors, and now there are just 17.

“Who knows how many there will be in five years from now,” she says, adding that she “will be doing the witnessing as long as I can”.

Sean Coughlan
Royal correspondent

In his speech in London marking Holocaust Memorial Day, Prince William spoke of one of his own relatives who helped to protect Jewish people during the Second World War.

His great-grandmother Princess Alice, Prince Philip’s mother, had helped to protect a Jewish widow and her family, when the princess was living in Greece during the Nazi occupation.

She had saved the Cohen family by hiding them in her Athens home, until the liberation of Greece.

Alice has been born deaf and Prince William said she had used it to her advantage to frustrate the questions of suspicious Nazis.

For her efforts in 1993 Princess Alice was given the title Righteous Among the Nations by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Israel.

“I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress,” Prince Philip has said about his mother.

Princess Alice, who founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns, died in 1969. Her remains were reinterred in 1988 at a convent on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.

Eighty years after the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, survivors and VIPs including members of the Royal Family and the prime minister attended a commemoration to mark Holocaust Memorial Day in London

The broadcast of this ceremony is beginning now. You can tune in by pressing watch live at the top of this page.

Following the ceremony in Auschwitz, King Charles III took a tour of the concentration camp’s memorial site.

He has also laid a wreath at what is known as the Death Wall.

Here are some pictures from the King’s visit:

Sean Coughlan
Royal correspondent

The Princess of Wales hugged and held hands with the elderly survivors at the poignant London Holocaust memorial event, which was also attended by Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer.

The Prince of Wales thanked those present for their “bravery in sharing with us the most harrowing moments of their lives”.

“We remember the survivors who live with the scars, both mental and physical,” said Prince William.

There was a group photograph capturing the historic moment, recording the royal visitors and these increasingly frail men and women from the diminishing numbers of survivors.

Prince William and Catherine took part in a candle lighting ceremony, along with young representatives from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and the Anne Frank Trust.

Catherine spoke to survivor Steven Frank. They’d met before, as in 2020 Catherine photographed him for an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum.

Steven, who was in concentration camps as a child, has worked to keep alive the memory of what happened in the Holocaust, visiting schools and giving younger generations a first-hand knowledge of what happened to him and his family.

I met Steven on one of those visits, reporting on it for the BBC – and can still remember that he had a battered saucepan with him, which he’d had when a prisoner in the camps.

He was originally from the Netherlands and came to England after the war – and I remember how he said that he had gone many decades after the war without ever talking about what had happened to him.

As he grew older he realised it was important to act as a witness for what he’d experienced and as a warning to prevent it happening again.

The Princess of Wales embraced Holocaust survivors as she attended official commemorations to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

Kate joined her husband William, the Prince of Wales, who described their attendance as “so important and “a great honour”, at Guildhall in central London on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

She met with many of the 50 survivors at the event – including Yvonne Bernstein, 87, and Steven Frank, 89.

“It is great to be here today with my husband,” said Kate before the pair met survivors and their families.

In a short speech, William said: “Their bravery, in sharing with us the most harrowing moments of their lives, are extremely powerful and ensure that we never forget. I assure them we never will.”

As around 50 survivors gathered to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the Holocaust, as world leaders watched on in silence.

Here’s a recap of what was said at the poignant ceremony:

Marian Turski, 98: He says that “of those who lived to see freedom, now there is only a handful”, before going on to describe a “huge rise in antisemitism” across the world. He ends his speech, saying “let us not fear discussing the problems that torment the so-called last generation”.

Janina Iwanska, 94: She spoke passionately of the “killing machine” the Nazis created at Birkenau, warning that “winters were brutal” because “all they would do was kill people”.

Tova Friedman, 86: Tova, one of the youngest survivors of Auschwitz, says she heard the heart-breaking cries of parents, which fell on deaf ears. She thought to herself: “Am I the only Jewish child left in the world?” She recalled the horror of watching girls being taken to the gas chambers, “crying and shivering” as they walked barefoot in the snow. “They too became ashes,” she says.

Leon Weintraub, 99: He says that upon his arrival to Auschwitz: “We were stripped of all our humanity.” He adds that “we the survivors, we understand the consequences”, cautioning people to be “sensitive to all expressions of intolerance and resentment to people who are different”.

Global leaders have formed a queue to place candles at the empty train car at the front of the Auschwitz II-Birkenau concentration camps.

King Charles, France’s President Emmanuel Macron, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau were some of the leaders to place candles at the site.

World leaders and heads of states are marking the end of the ceremony at Auschwitz by lighting candles at an empty train car, which was once used to carry people to the camp.

You can follow along by clicking Watch live at the top of this page.

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

The final act of this ceremony began with the blowing of the shofar, or ram’s horn.

It is a haunting and uniting sound for Jews – it usually heralds the start of the Jewish New Year and the end of Yom Kippur.

Here, beside the Death Gate at Birkenau where so many hundreds of thousands of people went to their deaths, it meant something especially powerful, a mournful but powerful wake-up call.

And it was followed by the Jewish mourners’ prayer, Kaddish, recited by Poland’s Chief Rabbi, Michael Joseph Schudrich.

A few years ago a single cattle truck was left on the ramp inside Birkenau as a memorial to the 430,000 Hungarian Jews deported here in 1944.

For this ceremony it has been brought outside the gate and into the tent for survivors and families to leave candles in memory of those who died.

Survivors and global leaders will be invited to light candles at the empty wooden train car, which sits on the tracks at Auschwitz.

The car carried people to the camps, and is regarded as a symbol of death.

Ronald S. Lauder, speaking on behalf of donors at the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalls a quote from Holocaust survivor Roman Kent, who died in 2021, who said: “We don’t want our past to be our children’s future.”

Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, says those words “haunt us today”, adding that if Roman Kent was still alive “he would cry”.

He addresses Hamas’ attacks on 7 October 2023 on eastern Israel, when about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages.

Lauder says the “common thread” with the horrors of Auschwitz is the “age-old hatred of Jews”.

He warns the Holocaust was caused by the “step by step” of antisemitism, adding there are “parallels across the world”.

“This is not 1933…this is 2025, the hatred of Jews has its willing supporters then and it has them now,” he says.

Lauder adds: “It was the world’s silence that led to Auschwitz” and calls on those to pledge to not remain silent in the face of antisemitism.

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

There have been several powerful speeches in this ceremony: graphic accounts of what the survivors endured, followed by appeals for tolerance and combating antisemitism.

What is extraordinary is the array of heads of state listening to every word.

King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands rubbing shoulders with Auschwitz survivors, most of them in their 90s. Other heads of state, including Emmanuel Macron of France and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, have all made passionate statements around today’s commemoration.

Steinmeier said that “memory has no closure, and responsibility does not either”.

But the words echoing in the shadow of Birkenau’s Death Gate belong to the dwindling number of survivors.

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

Tova Friedman, who we heard from a little earlier, was one of the youngest survivors when Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago – she was only six and a half, and yet saw horrors that no child should ever see.

She has lived much of her life in the US, and her powerful voice was the first in English in this ceremony.

Friedman was born only a year before the German invasion of Poland and yet remembers her mother’s advice never to look any of the Nazis in the eye.

“I wasn’t even sure what Jewish was,” she said.

She was only five when she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in her words a “very terrified” girl in a dark cattle car holding on to her mother’s hand.

Friedman still has nightmares of what she lived through and she warns of dark forces and rampant antisemitism spreading across the world.