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Tuesday, June 26, 2018, 17:07
Prince William starts Israel visit by honoring Holocaust victims
By Reuters
Tuesday, June 26, 2018, 17:07 By Reuters

Britain's Prince William arrives on a Royal Air Force plane to the Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv, Israel, June 25, 2018. William has arrived in Israel for the first-ever official visit by a member of the British royal family. His arrival on June 25, 2018 ends the monarchy's mostly hands-off approach to one of the world's most sensitive regions. For the 36-year-old William, second in line to the throne, it marks a high-profile visit that could brandish his international credentials. (SEBASTIAN SCHEINER / AP)

JERUSALEM - Britain's Prince William voiced his horror over the Nazi Holocaust in a solemn start on Tuesday to the first official visit by a British royal to Israel and the Palestinian territories. 

Terrifying. (I'm) trying to comprehend the scale

Prince William,

Duke of Cambridge

Wearing a black Jewish skullcap, William, second in line to the throne, laid a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem memorial, where an eternal flame flickers and the names of extermination and concentration camps are engraved in the floor. 

"Terrifying," William said, viewing a display at the memorial's museum of shoes taken by the Nazis from Jews at a death camp. "(I'm) trying to comprehend the scale." 

The prince also met two men who survived the Nazi genocide through British intervention. 

Henry Foner, 86, and Paul Alexander, 80, were among thousands of Jewish children taken in by Britain as part of the 1930s "Kindertransport" from a continental Europe that was falling to German conquest. 

Speaking before William's visit, Alexander, freshly back from a bicycle ride that retraced his life-saving voyage as a toddler, said he was chosen to meet the prince as the youngest member of the Kindertransport. 

"When I put my foot on English soil for the first time, it was like I had been reborn, because I left Nazi Germany and was received by the British people and I have an enormous debt of the thanks to the British people," Alexander told Reuters. 

Originally from Leipzig, Alexander was reunited with his mother, who reached Britain the day before World War Two erupted, and with his father, who survived Nazi internment at Buchenwald. Many other Kindertransport children were less lucky. 

Foner, whose original name was Heinz Lichtwitz, was taken from Berlin to the Welsh city of Swansea in 1939, two years after his mother committed suicide - a victim, he believes, of despair at the doom gathering around Europe's Jews. 

Foner received postcards from his father until the war cut off mail contact. In mid-1942, the elder Foner told his son in a final letter delivered through the Red Cross: "Our destiny is very uncertain." Months later, he was murdered at Auschwitz. 

The correspondence was included in Yad Vashem's Kindertransport exhibit, as well as in Foner's memoir, a copy of which he said he hoped to present to Prince William. 

"I was a six-year-old refugee kid, and here I am giving a book I wrote, to honour my father, basically, to a member of the royal family," he told Reuters. "It's great honour for me to be able to say thank you, symbolically, to the British people who saved my life." 

Later in the day, Prince William met Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the Israeli leader's Jerusalem residence. 

William was greeted at the residence, against the backdrop of the Union Jack and the Israeli flag, by Netanyahu and his wife, Sara.

Neither William nor Netanyahu made any comment to reporters. 

During the visit, which Britain has described as non-political, William is also scheduled to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian youngsters in the occupied West Bank. 

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