Prince Charles’ plea over Holocaust
The Prince of Wales became the most senior member of the royal family to visit Israel yesterday, only to be told that they would still like to see the Queen.
‘‘We are still expecting your mother to come,’’ Reuven Rivlin, the president, told him. However, she is no longer making official overseas visits.
Prince Charles told the nearly 50 world leaders marking 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz: ‘‘The Holocaust must never be allowed to become simply a fact of history.’’
He also spent nearly half an hour in conversation with two survivors.
At the Israel Museum in Jerusalem he met Marta Wise, who was sent to Auschwitz aged ten and became the victim of experiments by the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
Charles also met George Shefi, who just before the war came to England on the Kindertransport, which saved thousands of Jewish children from Germany.
Wise, 85, spent 25 minutes with the prince, far longer than most one-to-one encounters on a royal visit. She said: ‘‘He was very interested in how it was in Auschwitz and how we managed to survive. He was very sympathetic.’’
Born Marta Weiss in Czechoslovakia, she and her elder sister were sent by their parents to live with a non-Jewish family. In October 1944 they were betrayed to the Nazis.
She said: ‘‘Twenty-seven fully armed soldiers came to pick up two little girls.
‘‘We were sent to AuschwitzBirkenau and into Mengele’s experimental barracks.
‘‘By a miracle we survived. It was hell on earth. Mengele was a particular devil. Our blood was taken.He used to inject us with things.’’
After the war she moved to Australia, and to Israel in 1998.
Shefi, 88, born George Spiegelglas in Berlin, was sent to Britain by his mother in July 1939 at the age of seven, unable to speak English. Later in the war he joined relatives in America. Afterwards he moved to Israel, where he became an engineer. Shefi welcomed the presence of Prince Charles and other leaders but said it was meaningless without more action.
Charles also praised the ‘‘selfless actions’’ of his grandmother, Princess Alice, who in 1943 sheltered a Jewish family in Nazi-occupied Greece. In 1993 Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial, bestowed the title of Righteous Among the Nations on her. She is buried in Jerusalem. Charles said that the title was ‘‘a fact which gives me and my family immense pride’’.