Our patron

We are privileged that His Majesty The King has continued as our Patron, having taken on the Patronage when Prince of Wales in 2015.

When the former Prince of Wales, he succeeded Queen Elizabeth II, who was Patron of Holocaust Memorial Day Trust from our inception in 2005 until 2015. Accompanied by the then Duchess of Cornwall, he attended the official Holocaust Memorial Day (HMD) UK Commemorative Ceremony in 2015, marking the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

For HMD 2017, the former Prince of Wales hosted a reception at St James’s Palace to honour survivors of the Holocaust, Nazi persecution of other groups and more recent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. You can read more about this special event here.

More recently, in January 2022, as Prince of Wales he commissioned seven leading artists to paint portraits of seven survivors of the Holocaust, for display in the Royal Collections in London and then Edinburgh.

He reflected on the project:

As the number of Holocaust survivors sadly, but inevitably, declines, my abiding hope is that this special collection will act as a further guiding light for our society, reminding us not only of history’s darkest days but of humanity’s interconnectedness as we strive to create a better world for our children, grandchildren, and generations as yet unborn; one where hope is victorious over despair and love triumphs over hate.

The following year in March 2023, His Majesty met members of the Sudanese community at an event we organised with sister charity, Waging Peace. The event was held to mark ‘Darfur20’, the 20th anniversary of the start of Sudan’s genocide in Darfur and countrywide persecution and atrocities.

Earlier in the year, The King and Queen had met with Amouna Adam, a survivor of the genocide in Darfur and Dr Martin Stern MBE, a survivor of the Holocaust, to light candles for HMD 2023.