King Charles to issue emotional statement as he prepares for historic moving visit
King Charles to issue emotional statement as he prepares for historic moving visit
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The King will today implore the world to "challenge prejudice and never to be a bystander in the face of violence and hate" as part of the 80th-anniversary commemorations of the liberation of Auschwitz. Charles will meet locals in Krakow at a Jewish charity event before joining world leaders and survivors returning to the former Nazi death camp. Royal sources said the King's visit will hope to "articulate how the testimony of survivors teaches us". In a moving speech, Charles will warn that the horrors of the Holocaust must act as a lesson for us all "to cherish our freedom, to challenge prejudice and never to be a bystander in the face of violence and hate".
He will say it is our collective duty, in a world filled with "turmoil and strife’ to learn the lessons of history. The act of remembering the evils of the past remains a vital task. In so doing, we inform our present and shape our future." The visit will be the King's fifth to Poland, but poignantly his first to Auschwitz, the site of some of the most unimaginable horrors of the Nazi regime during the Second World War.
More than a million people, mostly Jews but also Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and other nationalities, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, as part of the Holocaust in which six million Jewish men, women and children were killed. When soldiers opened the gates of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp complex, on January 27 1945, just 7,000 prisoners remained. Charles earlier this month said his upcoming visit to the concentration camp was "so important.".
