King Charles to visit Poland to mark 80th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation

By Henry Moore

The King is to visit Poland to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the former Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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Charles will travel to Poland to join other dignitaries and Holocaust survivors invited to a service, held at the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum and memorial, commemorating the milestone.

Ahead of the event next Monday, Charles will meet members of the local community in Krakow, Buckingham Palace has said.

The King will also meet Poland's President Andrzej Duda during his brief visit.

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The trip will be the King's fifth to Poland. More recent visits included one in 2008 with his wife the Queen, and in 2010 as part of a wider European tour which also took in Hungary and the Czech Republic.

The announcement comes ahead of a Buckingham Palace reception Charles is hosting later to mark Holocaust Memorial Day on January 27.

The event will showcase projects aimed at educating future generations about the Holocaust and the King will meet 94-year-old Manfred Goldberg, who survived concentration camps, including Stutthof, and a death march.

More than a million people, mostly Jews but also Poles, Soviet prisoners of war and other nationalities, were murdered by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Second World War as part of the Holocaust in which six million Jewish men, women and children were killed.

The camp was liberated by soldiers of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front who opened the gates on January 27 1945.