The king will make today what someone calls a 'moving, personal and profound' visit to Poland to join world leaders and survivors of the Holocaust in the most notorious concentration camp of all.
Eighty years after the day of the day Soviet troops, Auschwitz, the king will join four fellow people and 19 presidents (including those of Israel, Germany and France) to mark the Holocaust Memorial Day.
More than a million people, most of them Jewish, were killed here. Its liberation is now recognized by the United Nations as the fixed date for the worldwide commemoration of all victims of the Holocaust.
Although the King Poland visited several times as Prince of Wales, it will be his first trip to Auschwitz and the first time a British monarch has been here. “Everyone is aware that this anniversary is probably the last great occasion where those who witness can share their stories personally,” says a senior official of the palace. 'The lighting of the flames of the memory will therefore bear an even greater symbolism than ever – a visible vow for the few who survive that their experiences will never be forgotten. That is a duty that the king feels the deepest, both as a man and monarch '.
For Mala Tribich, 94, the only British survivor of the Holocaust who is present today, this has been a place of painful pilgrimage for many years. “I come in the same way when you go to a cemetery – to show your respect to you,” she tells me and throw her mind back to all her family members killed here and elsewhere by the Nazis.
Meeting on the eve of today's ceremony, under the hateful 'Arbeit Macht Frei' board above the gate to Auschwitz, I think Mala is ready and resolutely cheerful in her capacity as ambassador for the Holocaust Memorial Trust, for whom she regularly gives conversations.
As always, in the middle of a Polish winter, it seems incredible that someone could tolerate this in pajamas and clogs. Winters were even worse at the time. The winter was death itself, “Mala remembers, although the inner strength seems to be in the family. Her deceased brother, Sir Ben Helfgott, also survived the Holocaust, was a British weightlifting Olympian in two games (he wore the Union flag in Rome in 1960), devoted much of his life to the charity and was addressed in 2018.
Born in 1930 in the Polish city of Piotrkow, Mala 11 was when the Nazis marched the 25,000-member Jewish population of the city in a ghetto and from there to the dead camps. The father of Mala, however, had succeeded in spreading the family around the countryside and she went hiding with a Christian family, jumped into a wardrobe when visitors came to call.
Mala Tribich MBE One of the survivors of the Holocaust at the Auschwitz
World leaders will gather today on the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz
Robert Hardman at Birkenau Auschwitz for the 80th birthday
As soon as the deportations were over, the family risked a return to Piotrkow, but was re -established in 1942. Her mother and eight -year -old sister were locked up in the local synagogue before she was led to the forest in the morning, stripped and executed. (Mala can discuss most things, but still finds it impossible to talk about this).
Mala was to work as a 12-year-old slave worker and was also a surrogate mother of a five-year-old cousin, Ann, whose parents without her had been taken.
In 1944, with the Russians who rose from the east, Mala and Ann were deported to Germany and the women's concentration camp in Ravensbruck. She remembers flashing of humanity in the midst of cruelty, such as the aunt who smuggled a root back from the fields for them. “She was shot when she was caught,” notes Mala.
By 1945 the girls were on their way again, this time to Hell van Bergen-Belsen. “There were these skeletons that just shuffled around and piles of dead bodies.”
Mala succeeded in finding them both a space in the improvised children's wing. “That saved our lives because we would not have survived in the main camp,” says Mala, who soon sustained Typhus, the disease that killed tens of thousands in Belsen, including the teenage representative, Anne Frank.
Mala remembers that he was in her sickbed and saw the bizarre sight of a shoe -free little boy who ran excitedly. They had just been freed by the British.
“They were beautiful, real heroes – and some caught up themselves,” says Mala, still smiling with one memory. 'Later they had this beautiful picnic for us in a forest with a band and dancing and eating. It was just magical. '
She had been brought back to Sweden for two years when she reported that her brother lived and in Great Britain. So Mala followed Ben, who made a life, a home and a great family in what she calls 'the best country in the world', one who has recognized her with a MBE.
Who better, together with the king, to represent us on the world stage today?
