Page 15 - TORCH Magazine #15 - February 2020

Steven Frank BEM, alongside his granddaughters Maggie and Trixie Fleet. © The Duchess of Cambridge
A ROYAL REMEMBRANCE
The Royal Family led the UK’s commemoration of the Holocaust, which this year
marked 75 years since the liberation of Auschwitz.
To honour Holocaust victims and celebrate the lives of survivors who rebuilt their lives in the UK, the Duchess of Cambridge took part in a special portrait photography project.
Revealing a hidden talent behind the lens, Kate took pictures of survivors and younger generations of their families, who over the years will carry the legacy of their grandparents.
Two of the survivors that Kate photographed were Steve Frank and Yvonne Bernstein, who both settled in Britain after the war.
In one of the pictures, Steven is seen holding a cooking pan that his mother had used during their time at Westerbork transit camp. He was later sent to Theresienstadt with his brothers and mother.
Whilst at the camp his mother would do laundry for prisoners in exchange for a small
amount of
bread. She
would put
crumbs into
the pan, adding
hot water to
make a paste.
She would give
each child a
spoonful to
keep them
alive, denying herself of the food.
It was this act of sacrificial kindness from his mother and her use of the pan that ultimately saved his life. Steven and his brothers were three of only 93 children who survived the camp, out of 15,000 children sent there.
The Duchess said,
“The harrowing atrocities of the Holocaust, which were caused by the most unthinkable evil, will forever lay heavy in our hearts. Yet it is so often through the most unimaginable adversity that the most remarkable people flourish.
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