Holocaust Memorial Day: Kate M

Photo: Royal Photographic Society/Kate Middleton

Holocaust Memorial Day: Kate Middleton shares photographs of Holocaust survivors [photos]

Four Holocaust survivors, alongside their children and grandchildren, feature in new photographs which have been released to mark Holocaust Memorial Day 2020.

Holocaust Memorial Day: Kate M

Photo: Royal Photographic Society/Kate Middleton

Kate Middleton shared a series of powerful images of Holocaust survivors to mark the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

According to the Royal Family, the images taken by the Duchess of Cambridge will feature in an exhibition marking 75 years since the end of the genocide and show survivors pictured alongside their children and grandchildren. It is further stated that each of the portraits depicts the special connection between a survivor and younger generations of their family.

Kate was among three people behind the lens for the project and described the survivors in her portraits as “two of the most life-affirming people that I have had the privilege to meet”.

Holocaust Memorial Day and the Royal Photographic Society (RPS)

Kate, who is a keen photographer and patron of the Royal Photographic Society (RPS), spent time with her two subjects, Yvonne Bernstein, 82, and Steven Frank, 84, before photographing them.

It is said that Frank, originally from Amsterdam, survived multiple concentration camps as a child and is pictured alongside his granddaughters Maggie and Trixie Fleet, aged 15 and 13.

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Photo: Royal Photographic Society/Kate Middleton

Kate’s other portrait features Bernstein, originally from Germany, who was hidden in France throughout most of the Holocaust. She is pictured with her granddaughter Chloe Wright, aged 11.

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Photo: Royal Photographic Society/Kate Middleton

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,” the Duchess said further. “Her sensitive and intimate interpretation of the horrors of the time was one of the underlying inspirations behind the images.

“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.

In total four photographs were released on Holocaust Memorial Day. Jillian Edelstein and Frederic Aranda worked on the other two photographs that will form part of the exhibition.