Jerusalem: The Biography

* In Greece, a princess with a special link to Jerusalem was one of those brave gentiles who protected Jews. Princess Andrew of Greece, born Princess Alice of Battenberg, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, risked her life by hiding the Cohen family of three while 60,000 Greek Jews were murdered. In 1947, her son Prince Philip, a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, married Princess Elizabeth, who succeeded to the throne four years later. Princess Andrew became a nun and founded her own order, like her aunt Grand Duchess Ella. She lived in London but decided to be buried in Jerusalem. When her daughter grumbled that this was a long trip for visitors, the princess retorted, ‘Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service from Istanbul!’ She died in 1969, but not until 1988 was she buried in the Church of Mary Magdalene close to her aunt Ella. In 1994, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, attended the ceremony at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, that honoured his mother as one of the ‘Righteous among the nations’.