Prince Charles talks about his ‘amazing’ grandmother

The Prince of Wales has given a personal insight into his grandmother’s own experience during the Second World War.

Speaking with Holocaust survivors at the Jewish Museum in Vienna, during a nine-day tour of Europe with the Duchess of Cornwall, Prince Charles shared his stories over a cup of tea.

Reported by The Telegraph, Prince Charles said his grandmother saved the lives of a Jewish family by sheltering them from Nazis during the Second World War.

“My father’s mother took in a Jewish family during the war and hid them. She was amazing, my grandmother,” Prince Charles said.

“She took them in during the Nazi occupation. She never told anybody, she didn’t tell her family for many years.”

Princess Alice of Battenburg, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and mother of the Duke of Edinburgh, sheltered a Jewish family, the Cohens, in her home when Greece was occupied by Nazi forces.

Living opposite the Gestapo headquarters in Athens, she refused to give them away even when her home was threatened with being searched.

Princess Alice, who was given the honour of being buried in Israel’s Mount of Olives,  was later recognised by Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial as a Righteous Among the Nations, and was posthumously awarded the British Government’s Hero of the Holocaust medal.

“She’s buried in Jerusalem. In September last year I went to the funeral of President (Shimon) Peres and finally got to see her grave.”

Auschwitz survivor Freddie Knoller, now 95, Gerda Frei, 80, and Harry Bibring, 91, who escaped on the Kindertransport after his family shop was destroyed in Kristallnacht, were there for the conversation.

Gerda Frei, 80, said it was wonderful to have them there.

“The Prince told us how proud he was of his grandmother, Princess Alice of Greece, who hid a Jewish family from the Nazis,” Gerda Frei said.

Mrs Frei said the Prince of Wales told her he had laid flowers from his own garden at Birkhall at her grave.

Princess Alice’s remains are buried at the Church of St Mary Magdalene, above the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives.

What do you think of the Prince’s comments about Princess Alice?