King Charles to attend Auschwitz commemoration

King Charles will attend a commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz

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, Buckingham Palace has confirmed.

The commemoration in Poland on 27 January will be the King's first overseas trip this year.

On Monday afternoon, the King hosted an event at Buckingham Palace for education projects teaching about the Holocaust, which was inflicted on Jewish people by the Nazis.

He met Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg, aged 94, who has recorded his experiences of concentration camps for interactive lessons for schools.

Mr Goldberg praised the King's efforts to "ensure that the Holocaust is never forgotten - as an antidote against it ever possibly happening again".

However, he spoke of his concerns about how young people could be adversely influenced by social media and that it seemed "wishful thinking" to imagine that antisemitism had been consigned to the past.

Mr Goldberg, born into a Jewish family in Germany in 1930, 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 with younger generations.

The King saw how Mr Goldberg's memories had been recorded for an interactive teaching aid, where pupils could ask questions about his experiences.

King Charles met Holocaust survivor Manfred Goldberg and his wife Shary

The events that King Charles will attend 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. A symbolic freight carriage will stand in front of the gate to remember the many victims who had arrived there in cattle cars.

About 7,000 prisoners were in the camp when it was liberated, says the Auschwitz museum. There had been 1.1 million people, mostly Jewish, killed there.

The focus of commemorations will be on those remaining elderly Auschwitz survivors - but it is expected that 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.

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.