LONDON (Reuters) -Britain’s King Charles will visit Poland later this month to attend commemorations marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi death camp in World War Two.
Buckingham Palace said in a statement on Monday Charles would attend a commemoration service on Jan. 27 at Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial, which preserves the death camp set up on Polish soil by Nazi Germany.
More than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, perished in gas chambers at the camp or from starvation, cold and disease.
While in Poland, Charles will meet members of the local community in Krakow and President Andrzej Duda, Buckingham Palace said. It will be Charles’ fifth visit to the country.
Ahead of that trip, Charles was due to host at Buckingham Palace on Monday three organisations dedicated to educating future generations about the Holocaust and to meet a 94-year-old who survived concentration camps.
The king will light a candle in tribute to those killed in the Holocaust and more recent genocides, and will view a demonstration of a new AI-powered platform that allows students to ask Holocaust survivors about their experiences.
Monday’s event will end with a musical performance inspired by the testimony of British survivors of the Holocaust.
(Reporting by William James; Editing by Sachin Ravikumar, Emelia Sithole-Matarise and Gareth Jones)
