Warsaw, Poland – Royal Couple Visit Concentration Camp, Meet Holocaust Survivors On Poland Trip

Warsaw, Poland – Britain’s Prince William and his wife Kate were led by two Jewish survivors on a visit to the World War II Nazi German concentration camp of Stutthof on Tuesday, at the start of the second day of their trip to Poland.

The royal couple are on a goodwill trip to Poland and Germany that is aimed at underscoring Britain’s intention to maintain friendly relations with the European Union after it leaves the bloc.

They flew to northern Poland in the morning from Warsaw, where and their children are staying at the Belvedere Palace.

At the Stutthof museum they were guided by two survivors of the camp, Manfred Goldberg and Zigi Shipper, both 87, from north London. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were shown discarded shoes, clothing and other personal items that were seized from the inmates on arrival at Stutthof. They were also shown the gas chamber where those too sick to work were killed.

They paid their respect to the victims by placing remembrance stones at the Jewish memorial. Their visit was to draw attention to the need for remembering and teaching young generations about tragic moments from the past.

The German Nazis set up the Stutthof camp right after invading Poland in September 1939. Out of some 110,000 inmates of various nationalities as many as 65,000 died in the gas chambers or from disease, hunger, very hard labor or during evacuations. Some 28,000 of the victims were Jewish.

Later, the royal couple traveled to nearby Gdansk, on the Baltic coast, to see its Gothic and Renaissance architecture and taste traditional Polish food made from British ingredients. They were also to visit a replica of a Shakespearean theater and meet former president and democracy champion Lech Walesa, whose office is housed in the new European Center of Solidarity that documents Poland’s peaceful struggle in the 1980s to shed communism.

On Wednesday they fly to Berlin.