King Charles and Queen Consort pay respects and meet survivors to mark Holocaust Memorial Day

THE King and Queen Consort light candles to mark Holocaust Memorial Day.

They were joined yesterday by Nazi concentration camp survivor Dr Martin Stern and Sudan genocide survivor Amouna Adam at Buckingham Palace.

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Charles, 75, said: “I hope this will be one way to remember all those poor people who had to suffer such horrors.”

Meanwhile, actress Dame Joanna Lumley, 76, was helped by Holocaust survivor Joan Salter, 82, among others to hand out candles at London’s Piccadilly Circus.

The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution in November 2005 establishing the annual International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and chose January 27 - the day that Auschwitz-Birkenau was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945.

It commemorates the lives of the six million Jewish people murdered during the Holocaust, alongside the millions of others killed under Nazi persecution and during subsequent genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur.

Genocide is defined as an act which is committed with intent to destroy, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.

It is the worst crime against humanity.

The term was coined in 1944 by a Jewish-Polish lawyer Raphael Lemkin and combines the Greek word "genos" (race or tribe) and the Latin word ";cide" (to kill).