Wearing a black Jewish skullcap, William, second in line to the throne, laid a wreath in the Hall of Remembrance at the Yad Vashem memorial, where an eternal flame flickers and the names of extermination and concentration camps are engraved in the floor.
“Terrifying,” William said, viewing a display at the memorial’s museum of shoes taken by the Nazis from Jews at Majdanek death camp. “(I’m) trying to comprehend the scale.”
Tens of thousands of Jews and other victims were killed at the camp, near Lublin in what is now Poland.
After the tour, the prince was greeted by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, at their official residence in Jerusalem against the backdrop of the British and the Israeli flags.
“Welcome to Israel, a great historic visit. The whole people of Israel are excited,” Netanyahu told William, in a recording issued by the prime minister’s office.
At a meeting with Israeli President Reuven Rivlin, the prince, on a visit described by Britain as non-political, said he hoped “peace in the area can be achieved”. Israeli-Palestinian peace talks collapsed in 2014.
During the four-day visit, William is also scheduled to meet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian youngsters in the occupied West Bank.
At Yad Vashem, William signed a guest book in which he noted with pride that his great-grandmother, Princess Alice, had been honoured by the institution as one of “the righteous among the nations” for sheltering Jews in her home in Greece during the Holocaust.
“I had a very moving tour around Yad Vashem this morning, which really taught me quite a lot more than I thought I already knew about the true horrors of what happened to the Jews
over the war,” William said at the meeting with Rivlin.
He also spoke with two men who survived the Nazi genocide through British intervention.
Henry Foner, 86, and Paul Alexander, 80, were among thousands of Jewish children taken in by Britain as part of the 1930s “Kindertransport” from a continental Europe that was falling to German conquest.
“I said to his Royal Highness that this is a unique opportunity for me to express my thanks to the British people for opening their homes to me and to the other 10,000 children who came,” Alexander said.
“If you see anybody from that cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd,” Waters said.
“And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere. We’ve got to get the children connected to their parents.”
Trump fired back on Monday, calling Waters “an extraordinarily low IQ person.”
Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was confronted at a Mexican restaurant in Washington by protesters yelling: “Shame! Shame!”
House of Representatives Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi called for cooler heads on both sides.
“Trump’s daily lack of civility has provoked responses that are predictable but unacceptable,” she said. “As we go forward, we must conduct elections in a way that achieves unity from sea to shining sea.”
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