On a July 2017 royal tour of Germany and Poland, Kate Middleton met Zigi Shipper and Manfred Goldberg, two Holocaust survivors who met in the Stutthof concentration camp, found each other again after liberation, and have remained friends ever since. To mark this year’s Holocaust Remembrance Day despite the coronavirus lockdown, Kate did a video call with Shipper and Goldberg along with a few youth ambassadors from the Holocaust Educational Trust. On Wednesday, the palace released a documentary short featuring clips from the call and explaining the significance of the day.
In the moving call, Kate mostly let her interlocutors tell their harrowing stories. Goldberg recalled the story of losing his younger brother in the camps and of a man instructed him to lie and say he was 17 instead of 14, and most likely saved his life. Shipper credited Goldberg for saving his life during a death march to Auschwitz-Birkenau and spoke about the pain of losing his father during the war. Later, both men immigrated to the United Kingdom, saying they were thankful for the opportunities they had to raise their families in the country.
“When I arrived here in this country in 1946, I did not dream that in my lifetime I would have the privilege of seeing, never mind connecting, with royalty,” Goldberg said.
“Manfred and Zigi, I never forgot the first time we met, and your stories have stuck with me since then,” she said. “The stories that you have both shared with me and your dedication in educating the next generation, the younger generations, about your experiences and the horrors of the Holocaust shows extreme strength and such bravery. It’s so important and so inspirational.”
Ever since that 2017 trip, Kate has gotten more involved with institutions devoted to preserving the memory of the Holocaust, and last year, she took portraits of two survivors and displayed them in an exhibition. “I recognize not everyone in the future will be able to hear these stories firsthand,” she said in a statement that also mentioned her admiration for The Diary of Anne Frank. “It is vital that their memories are preserved and passed onto future generations, so that what they went through will never be forgotten.”
Prince Charles, who has been the patron of the Holocaust Memorial Trust since Queen Elizabeth passed on the duty in 2016, shared a filmed message to open the BBC’s virtual Holocaust Memorial Day event, which aired Wednesday night. In his remarks, he discussed the threat to our collective memory of the Holocaust as the last generation of living witnesses passes away. “The task of bearing witness falls to us,” he said. “This is our time when we can, each in our own way, be the light that ensures the darkness can never return.”
On Twitter, he shared memories from a January 2020 trip he made to the World Holocaust Forum to observe the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The trip to Yad Vashem marked his first official program of events in Israel, though he had traveled to the country in 1995 and 2016 for the funerals of former prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, respectively.
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