Breaking: King Charles Attends First Royal Event of the Year as His Cancer Treatment Continues……See More

King Charles is appearing at his first official royal event of the year as his ongoing treatment for an undisclosed form of cancer continues.

On Jan. 13, the King, 76, hosted a Holocaust memorial and education event at Buckingham Palace in London. King Charles welcomed three organizations dedicated to educating the next generation about the Holocaust for the event commemorating Holocaust Memorial Day, which is observed annually on Jan. 27.

The outing came on the same day it was announced that the King will travel to Poland on Holocaust Memorial Day later this month, visiting the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp for the 80th anniversary of its liberation.

It was a poignant engagement for the King, and his first public-facing engagement of the new year as his treatment for cancer continues.

The palace announced in February 2024 that King was diagnosed with cancer and began treatment, which forced him to postpone public duties for three months on doctors’ advice. He resumed forward work in late April and has packed his schedule since.

Holocaust Memorial Day honors the lives of the six million Jewish people who were murdered during the Holocaust, as well as the millions killed under Nazi persecution and during genocides in Cambodia, Rwanda, Bosnia and Darfur. The Jan. 27 date is timed to the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi death camp, and this year marks a landmark anniversary of the historic day.

The King met Manfred Goldberg, a 94-year-old Holocaust survivor, on Jan. 13, and they explored the event together. King Charles and Goldberg learned more about the work of the organizations that gathered at the palace, and their respective initiatives endeavoring to ensure that the memory of the Holocaust lives on.

Goldberg, a survivor of concentration camps including Stutthof and a death march, previously met Prince William and Kate Middleton in Poland for a poignant tour of Stutthof in July 2017. He later told PEOPLE the royal couple’s involvement in helping to keep the story of the Holocaust relevant today is “priceless.”

King Charles saw a poignant display of candleholders created for the “80 Candles for 80 Years” project from the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust and a demonstration of the digital “Testimony 360: People and Places of the Holocaust” program from Holocaust Educational Trust for use in schools.

He also watched a performance from the “Echo Eternal” arts collaboration between CORE Education Trust and The National Youth Music Theatre, in which schools and youth groups create artistic responses to the stories of British Holocaust survivors.