As the world looked back at the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Aushwitz yesterday, the Duchess of Cambridge attended a commemorative event and told one guest that she has already discussed the atrocity with her children.
Speaking to Mala Tribich, who survived the Holocaust, Kate told her that she and husband William were ‘talking to the children’ about the Holocaust earlier that day. She added her difficulties with finding the right way to tell a child: ‘But we have to be, you know, for a six-year-old… the interpretation.;
The revelation follows Kate's most recent project: photographing Holocaust survivors in moving family portraits. Steven Frank and Yvonne Bernstein - who both settled in Britain after the war - have been photographed by the Duchess of Cambridge at Kensington Palace for an upcoming exhibition. The first picture features Steven alongside his granddaughters, Maggie and Trixie Fleet, meanwhile the other image is of 82-year-old Yvonne with her granddaughter Chloe Wright.
'It is vital that their memories are preserved and passed on to future generations, so that what they went through will never be forgotten,’ the Duchess, who is the patron Royal Photographic Society, said. 'One of the most moving accounts I read as a young girl was The Diary of Anne Frank which tells a very personal reflection of life under Nazi occupation from a child's perspective. Her sensitive and intimate interpretation of the horrors of the time was one of the underlying inspirations behind the images.'
As both Yvonne and Steven had ties to the Netherlands, Kate reportedly looked to the work of the Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer for inspiration.
The Duchess added, 'I wanted to make the portraits deeply personal to Yvonne and Steven – a celebration of family and the life that they have built since they both arrived in Britain in the 1940s. The families brought items of personal significance with them which are included in the photographs. It was a true honour to have been asked to participate in this project and I hope in some way Yvonne and Steven's memories will be kept alive as they pass the baton to the next generation.'
Kate has always been interested in photography, and she regularly takes photos of her children for the Kensington Royal Instagram account. When she studied history of art at St Andrews, she produced her undergraduate thesis on the era of photography.
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