The King will today make what one aide calls a ‘poignant, personal and profound’ visit to Poland to join world leaders and survivors of the Holocaust at the most notorious concentration camp of them all.
Eighty years on from the day Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz, the King will join four fellow monarchs and 19 presidents (including those of Israel, Germany and France) to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.
More than a million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered here. Its liberation is now recognised by the United Nations as the fixed date for the global commemoration of all victims of the Holocaust.
Although the King visited Poland 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 mindful this anniversary is likely to be the last major occasion where those who bore witness can share their stories in person,’ says a senior Palace official.
‘The lighting of the flames of remembrance will therefore carry an even greater symbolism than ever – a visible vow in front of the few who survive that their experiences will never be forgotten. That is a duty the King feels most deeply, both as man and monarch’.
For Mala Tribich, 94, the one British Holocaust survivor attending today, this has been a place of painful pilgrimage for many years.
‘I come in the same way you go to a cemetery – to pay your respects to your loved ones,’ she tells me, casting her mind back to all her relatives killed here and elsewhere by the Nazis.
King Charles (pictured at Sandringham on Sunday) has visited Poland several times as Prince of Wales but it will be his first trip to Auschwitz and the first time a British monarch has been here
Mala Tribich MBE outside Auschwitz
World leaders will gather today to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz (pictured)
More than a million people, most of them Jewish, were murdered at Auschwitz (pictured)
Meeting on the eve of today’s ceremony, beneath the hateful ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ sign over the gate into Auschwitz, I find Mala poised and resolutely upbeat in her capacity as an ambassador for the Holocaust Educational Trust, for whom she regularly gives talks.
As ever, in the midst of a Polish winter, it seems incredible that anyone could endure this in pyjamas and clogs.
‘Winters were even worse then. Winter was death itself,’ Mala recalls, though inner strength would seem to run in the family.
Her late brother, Sir Ben Helfgott, also survived the Holocaust, was a British weightlifting Olympian at two Games (he carried the Union flag at Rome in 1960), devoted much of his life to charity and was knighted in 2018.
Born in 1930 in the Polish town of Piotrkow, Mala was 11 when the Nazis marched the town’s 25,000-strong Jewish population into a ghetto and thence to the death camps.
Mala’s father, however, had managed to disperse the family around the countryside and she went into hiding with a Christian family, jumping inside a wardrobe when visitors came calling.
Once the deportations were over, the family risked a return to Piotrkow, only to be rounded up once again in 1942.
Her mother and eight-year-old sister were incarcerated in the local synagogue, before being led out into the forest one freezing morning, stripped and executed. (Mala can discuss most things but still finds it impossible to talk about this).
Sent to work as a 12-year-old slave labourer, Mala was also a surrogate mother to a five-year-old cousin, Ann, whose parents had been taken without her.
Robert Hardman at Auschwitz for the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation
The camp was set up by Nazi German occupiers in southern Poland in 1940 and liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945
A giant tent covering the ‘Death Gate’ of the former German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz. It forms part of the preparations for the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation
In 1944, with the Russians advancing from the East, Mala and Ann were deported to Germany and the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbruck.
She remembers flashes of humanity amid the cruelty, like the aunt who smuggled a carrot back from the fields for them. ‘She’d have been shot if she was caught,’ Mala points out.
By 1945, the girls were on the move again, this time to the hell of Bergen-Belsen. ‘There were these skeletons just shuffling around and piles of dead bodies.’
Mala managed to find them both a space in the makeshift children’s wing. ‘That saved our lives as we would not have survived in the main camp,’ says Mala, who soon contracted typhus, the disease which killed tens of thousands at Belsen, including the teenage diarist, Anne Frank.
Mala remembers lying in her sickbed and seeing the bizarre sight of a shoeless little boy running past excitedly. They had just been liberated by the British.
‘They were wonderful, real heroes – and some caught typhus themselves,’ says Mala, still smiling at one memory. ‘Later on, they had this wonderful picnic for us in a forest with a band and dancing and food. It was just magical.’
She had been recuperating in Sweden for two years when word reached her that her brother was alive and in Britain.
So Mala followed Ben, going on to make a life, a home and a great family in what she calls ‘the best country in the world’, one which has gone on to recognise her with an MBE.
Who better, along with the King, to represent us on the world stage today?
