PHOTOGRAPHS of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge on any kind of public engagement go around the world immediately.

But at Stutthof Nazi concentration camp in Poland, it was their guides who took centre stage, not the royal couple.

Manfred Goldberg and Zigi Shipper, both 87 and born to Orthodox Jewish families, survived Stutthof, where 65,000 people died, including 28,000 Jews. They returned to the camp for the first time yesterday to tell William and Kate what they experienced.

Mr Shipper and his grandparents were forced into a ghetto in Lodz, Poland in 1940 as Nazi persecution of Jews intensified. In 1944 all occupants were sent to Auschwitz. Within an hour of Mr Shipper’s arrival, most of those from his transport had been murdered.

Judged as fit to work, he was transferred to Stutthof, but with the Soviets advancing, Mr Shipper and friends were sent on a death march. British troops liberated them on May 3, 1945 and in 1947, Mr Shipper arrived in the UK, where he married and had a family.

He now works with the Holocaust Educational Trust giving talks in schools, and is still friends with Mr Goldberg, who spent two years in Riga ghetto, Latvia and a year in a nearby labour camp laying railway tracks before being transported to Stutthof, where the pair met.

“It is so important that young people know what happened,” Mr Shipper told reporters yesterday. “It’s all to do with stopping racism and hatred.”

During a period of often vicious debate about Britain’s place in the world, and after recent horrifying terror attacks, these words, and the stories of what can happen to ordinary people when hate is fostered, are more important than ever.