Kate and William to join Prime Minister in London for 80th anniversary of Holocaust
27 January 2025, 14:05 | Updated: 27 January 2025, 15:09
Princess Kate is set to join husband William as the royal couple attend official commemorations to mark Holocaust Memorial Day, the palace has revealed.
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William and Kate will pay their respects at a service in London on the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz on Monday.
Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is also expected to attend and speak at the service, along with faith and civic leaders and survivors of the Holocaust and more recent genocides.
The annual event remembers the six million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust, as well as the millions of other people killed under Nazi persecution and those who died in subsequent genocides.
Both the prince and princess, then the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, attended a service marking the 75th anniversary in 2020, while Kate also took photographs of Holocaust survivors at Kensington Palace.
Kate, 43, made a surprise return to public appearances earlier this month when she gave thanks to medical teams at The Royal Marsden hospital in London, where she received her cancer treatment.
She later said it was "a relief to now be in remission" and that she was "looking forward to a fulfilling year ahead". The Holocaust.
Memorial Day Trust has encouraged people across the UK to join in a 'national moment' by lighting candles and placing them in their windows at 8pm on Monday.
Famous buildings and landmarks will also be lit purple as a show of solidarity.
The King has travelled to Auschwitz in Poland for the anniversary, where he will join survivors and other dignitaries at the site of the former concentration camp for his own service.
It comes as David Lammy said the next generation must not be allowed to focus on online "clickbait" and ignore the grim lessons of the Holocaust.
The Foreign Secretary said youngsters needed to understand "how the seeds of such a catastrophe are still around us".
Speaking at a reception co-hosted by the Israeli embassy in the UK, Mr Lammy said: "'Never again' is a solemn promise which we owe to the victims, but also which we must uphold for our own sake, and for the sake of future generations.
"We need Holocaust remembrance. Holocaust education. Action against antisemitism - it is how we build a better future for us all together."
At the event in the Foreign Office he highlighted a digital exhibition featuring 80 objects from filmed testimonies of British Holocaust survivors and refugees, presented as 80 individual social media posts.
He said: "Eighty years on from the defeat of Nazism, the number of survivors still with us is inevitably dwindling.
"The world of the 1930s and '40s can feel ever more distant from our high-tech world of today.
The next generation risks being distracted, clickbait making it all too easy not to grasp the full horror of the Holocaust.
"We therefore need to find new ways to tell the story, to capture people's imagination, young people's most of all, and prompt real reflection.
"We need them to understand what a catastrophic moral failure for humanity Auschwitz was, and how the seeds of such a catastrophe are still around us."
Tottenham MP Mr Lammy said: "As a black man descended from the Windrush generation, as MP for the most diverse constituency in Britain - including, I am proud to say, a thriving Jewish community - and now, as Foreign Secretary, I see all too many signs of that lingering infection.
"Auschwitz did not start in its gas chambers. Genocide does not start with genocide.
